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wco81

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Just want to confirm, because I don't see it in the DJI specs page,, that built-in hyperlapse movies are 1080p max but to get 4K you have to stitch the individual photos in post-processing?

Does anyone know a good free program for making time or hyperlapses? Most of the tutorials I've seen use Premiere and not interested in paying that much for a suite of videos. Nor After Effects or any of the other Adobe suite.

Just a hobbyist here, not making money off it.
 
I use LRTimelapse Pro, but you can use it without the pro features for free if you don't buy a license.

Note that many/most of the workflows on the webpage talk about working in conjunction with Adobe Lightroom, but that's only if you need to post process the images for many reasons and using the full power of the tool.

But you can still create a video from the Mavic produced images in full-4K (I forget if you need to convert the DJI DNG files to JPG / TIFF first, but there's probably a free tool for that as well).

 
I believe LR Timelapse is limited to like a couple hundred shots, IIRC?

Initialy I was saying DNGs in addition to the videos. But I probably decided at some point that I wasn't going to really go back and do those so now saving just the completed video because the storage was becoming an issue.

Just got a good 13-second one out of the M2P, kind of wished it was 4K.
 
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It's not a lot of money and it's not an ongoing subscription.

I hope the next Mavic Pro, they support 4K time lapses out of the camera.

They should be able to get enough processing power on board to do such.
 
Davinci Resolve (both free and studio version) will make a video from a sequence of JPGs or DNGs. The bit depth in the DNGs is excellent for recovering shadows and highlights.
 
Just want to confirm, because I don't see it in the DJI specs page,, that built-in hyperlapse movies are 1080p max but to get 4K you have to stitch the individual photos in post-processing?

Does anyone know a good free program for making time or hyperlapses? Most of the tutorials I've seen use Premiere and not interested in paying that much for a suite of videos. Nor After Effects or any of the other Adobe suite.

Just a hobbyist here, not making money off it.
I've been using LRTimelapse4 for years and just upgraded to LRT5.Someone mentioned that you can only use "a couple hundred shots." Well, that's about all you really need, and in fact, that's about all the battery will allow at a single frame taken every 3 seconds, which I think is the fastest option available in frame rate.
 
It's actually every 2 seconds and I've shot as many as 375 or so. One strategy I use is to have the drone fly back towards Home with the locked direction hyperlapse option and so it will take the shots and still be near Home.

Good to know about DaVinci Resolve. May have to play around with it some, because I haven't seen any tutorials for it.
 
I use LRTimelapse Pro, but you can use it without the pro features for free if you don't buy a license.

Note that many/most of the workflows on the webpage talk about working in conjunction with Adobe Lightroom, but that's only if you need to post process the images for many reasons and using the full power of the tool.

But you can still create a video from the Mavic produced images in full-4K (I forget if you need to convert the DJI DNG files to JPG / TIFF first, but there's probably a free tool for that as well).

LRTimelapse free version will only process 400 images and no, it accepts the .dng’s without Converting them to jpg. You need Lightroom to adjust for changes in exposure/lighting, otherwise your video will have flicker. If you shoot it in the daytime and don’t change your exposure, should be able to get a flicker free video out of it. Never tried that because I shoot sunset to night time lapses.
 
Davinci Resolve has a stabilizer (some hyperlapses can have jitters) built in and is seriously meant for colour correcting.

From 4m29 shows how to import an image sequence into Resolve:


The previous four minutes shows him colour correcting before importing into Resolve - I can't see the point as Resolve is built for that.
 
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LRTimelapse free version will only process 400 images and no, it accepts the .dng’s without Converting them to jpg. You need Lightroom to adjust for changes in exposure/lighting, otherwise your video will have flicker. If you shoot it in the daytime and don’t change your exposure, should be able to get a flicker free video out of it. Never tried that because I shoot sunset to night time lapses.
When I do a timelapse using LRTimelapse5 , I calculate my flight as follows; 3 second interval equals 20 frames per minute (60 seconds divided by 3). Estimated flying time after getting the drone up and the doing the settings, and returning to home, I am winding up with about 15 minutes of shooting time. So 15 minutes x 20 frames per minute (at 3 second interval), gives me 300 frames. At a frame rate of 24 frames per second (300 divided by 24), that gives me about a 10 second show before editing.
 
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Thanks good tips all.

I had some windy conditions. Drone kept warning me to land but I didn't have other days to wait to get footage so I captured anyways.

Though I turned the setting to save DNGs for hyperlapses back on just yesterday. I know in a lot of work flows, people import DNG into LR, do editing there and then export JPGs, which they then use to build a clip.

DNGs seem to provide a big improvement so that's what I'm saving but man 40 MB a piece!
 
Thanks good tips all.

I had some windy conditions. Drone kept warning me to land but I didn't have other days to wait to get footage so I captured anyways.

Though I turned the setting to save DNGs for hyperlapses back on just yesterday. I know in a lot of work flows, people import DNG into LR, do editing there and then export JPGs, which they then use to build a clip.

DNGs seem to provide a big improvement so that's what I'm saving but man 40 MB a piece!
Do not disparage LRTimelapse. It is a great software program. I have been using it since 2015. There is a huge world of difference in saving the data in RAW files (which DNG is), as opposed to JPGs. It can mean the difference of saving details in dark shadows (foregrounds) or not. Unless you have a very low capacity computer, shooting and saving your date in RAW is so much better. Editing a few frames of these files in LR Timelapse will then be converted to the entire file, after which the actual rendering is done in JPG.
 
Do not disparage LRTimelapse. It is a great software program. I have been using it since 2015. There is a huge world of difference in saving the data in RAW files (which DNG is), as opposed to JPGs. It can mean the difference of saving details in dark shadows (foregrounds) or not. Unless you have a very low capacity computer, shooting and saving your date in RAW is so much better. Editing a few frames of these files in LR Timelapse will then be converted to the entire file, after which the actual rendering is done in JPG.


So you import DNGs into LRTimelapse rather than JPGs after post-processing in Lightroom?

I've seen workflow videos doing it exactly that way, import the DNGs to LR, post-process, export as JPGs, and then use the JPGs in LRTimeLapse.
 
So you import DNGs into LRTimelapse rather than JPGs after post-processing in Lightroom?

I've seen workflow videos doing it exactly that way, import the DNGs to LR, post-process, export as JPGs, and then use the JPGs in LRTimeLapse.
There is a bit of a learning curve but not bad. The new 5.3 edition is quite easy. Just go to LRTimelapse and look at Gunther Wegner's Tutorials. They are easy to follow. The program is not expensive. He has an unique software for doing HOLY GRAIL of timelapse, which is day to night and night to day, without flicker. The web site is filled with the Forum, where any and all questions are answered, and a Showroom which shows some really excellent timelapse work. It has changed my entire photographic life. I look at everything in terms of if it would make a good clip or not. I love moving shadows rolling over mountains, clouds moving, fleeing people on crosswalks, etc.
 
So you import DNGs into LRTimelapse rather than JPGs after post-processing in Lightroom?

I've seen workflow videos doing it exactly that way, import the DNGs to LR, post-process, export as JPGs, and then use the JPGs in LRTimeLapse.

I load RAW files (DNG) into LRT (LRTimeLapse) for the fist part of the work-flow, then import those into LR (Lightroom)

After all of the ramping (with LRT keyframes in LR), transition and deflickering in LRT, I then export 16-bit TIFFs from LR for use in LRT render of the video. (Detailed steps not given — as Dale mentions, go watch the tutorial videos on the LRT website.)
  • "Holy crap, 16 bit TIFFs are HUGE!"
Yes, but they're just intermediate files. As soon as you render a video that you are happy with, you can delete those intermediate TIFFs. Since you have already made adjustments and they are stored in the XMP files, you can always recreate the intermediates later if you need to. (Of course, 16-bit TIFF intermediates still take much longer to write.)
  • "But it still creates a larger video file!!"
A few points on that:
  1. If all you want to produce is a small, simple video to post to social media, then yes: export relatively small JPGs from LR and create a medium quality, 1080p video. I've certainly done that.
  2. In the LRT Render Video dialog box, you have a lot of options you can work with to adjust size vs. quality, so even if you work from 16-bit TIFF files, you can reduce the size / quality of the rendered video.
  3. If you are producing videos that are themselves intermediate — meaning that you will use them as clips in a video editor to create one larger video that contains several smaller time-lapse sequences —- then it's a good idea to keep the keep all of your work files as high as quality as possible. Then, when you produce a final version, it will be made from the highest fidelity sources right up to the end.
In addition to being able to delete large intermediate TIFF files, you can also delete the raw intermediate videos that you render from them. All you need to keep is a) the source RAW files and b) the XMP settings.

Chris
 
OK, I just tried doing it in DaVinci Resolve, following that video posted above.

First of all, it will import DNGs but it won't show any of the post-processing changes to it. So I had to export as JPGs and they're still ike 21 MB each.

DAR can't preview them at all, guess too much data in each of the files, even if they're JPG.


I edited them in LR to make it brighter, with more color saturation than the hyper lapse video which came out of the drone, which still looks good but the one I made at 4K24 in DAR is brighter and sharper.

Major differences though, the one from the drone is 16:9 and the one in DAR is 4:3 since I didn't want to crop out any of the detailed terrain.

This one particular video I'm attempting was captured on a very windy day. So you see some shaking on the hyper lapse video out of the drone but it looks like they applied some stabilization, along with the 16:9 crop.

The one I made from DAR is much more noticeably shaky. I guess I could play around with stabilization in DAR but my guess is it would reduce the resolution.

And I'm assuming there would be no stabilization in LRTimeLapse?
 
Yes, any program that will read a RAW file (DNG), but not read the sidecar files (XMP) will not be picking up the settings you changed.

Correct, no stabilization in LRT. Although I have yet to try this, I found out on the Blackmagic forum that Resolve has stabilization in the Inspector, and also something supposedly better called the Object Tracker on the Fusion page

It's probably a good idea to think if your final-video aspect ration when shooting. Since 16:9 is a common aspect ratio, I think of that when I'm shooting and always have stuff to crop.

Resolve won't preview super high rez material from stills unless you have a super top-notch editing machine. However, if you're already working with video (rather than high-rez frames for a time-lapse), you can down transcode them for editing, which allows you to preview.

LRT will show you previews, as it makes a small preview cache from all of your images (regardless how large). LRT also has a 16:9 ratio slider to make it easy to see what will be cropped, as well as variable motion-blur processing. All of that on top of exposure-ramping/smoothing and de-flickering.

So I create my intermediate videos using LRT, then use those clips in Resolve to produce a final video with soundtrack.

Chris
 
Well I captured this using the Hyperlapse mode. So no real chance to frame. I set the direction of the drone and had it capture for like 20 minutes or so.

Sure I could crop it in LR but there's a lot of good detail in the foreground and the background, cropping the middle of the 4:3 frame would cut off a lot of the sky, where there are cloud movements.

I guess I'll play around with the stabilization and see what it looks like.
 
Sure you can choose. I've been doing a project that is mostly about clouds, so when doing a hyperlapse with the Mavic, I tip the gimbal above 0 degrees. I decide right then that I'm not interested in foreground, so the horizon is only 10-20 % from the bottom of the frame. It's a choice I made before the shoot.

Maybe you didn't frame it that way this time, but you can next time. And you can still decide to cut one or the other (closer foreground or upper sky) with your recent shoot, if you want to.

Or you can decide to have it all and keep it at 4:3, but that means it's not going to fill anybody's screen (most people have TVs and computer monitors that are closer to 16:9). If you post it to youtube and your friends play it, it will have black bars on the side.

And that's okay, but it's a choice you can make before you start shooting, s'all I'm saying.

Chris
 
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