Depends on what you want to do, exactly. FFMPG will stitch all your images and output a movie. There are also many graphical editors, such as open shot and kdenlive.
What I would like to see indt is method to set the parameters of the first and last image and then interpolate between them.
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There is a darktable fork on github that adds a ui for these timelapse things. I am on my mobile and therefore don’t have the link at hand. Maybe you can find it with github forks view?
GitHub - theres/dt_timelapse: [Darktable](darktable.org) plugin (lua script) for creating timelapse video is alua plugin that isn’t ready yet, the other I saw was called timelapse_darktable and hasn’t been touched in 3 years.
And there is this old issue:
https://redmine.darktable.org/issues/8930
The problem is still, that there is no method to manipulate iop parameters with Lua.
I think the deflickering option is now in dt:
https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/modules.html
Hey guys,
Who saw the abilities of LRTimelapse, knows, what DT, even with the de-flickering in the exposure, cannot do.
I would love to use LRTimelapse in the method it is meant (handshake with LR). I didn’t test yet, but afraid that the interpretation of DT when fed with LR-xmp-files will not always produce the results wanted.
Currently we cannot set several keyframes and edit those with interpolation between them. We can merely edit one and past it to all, which makes the fading light become constant…
timelapse-darktable seemed to do exactly that but even cannot install any more and way too outdated I am afraid.
Pitty Harry Durgin became quite inactive (understandably) behind his gallery. He would be the guy to figure it by tools :->> which I am not capable…
Anyone see a solution?!?
Cheers
Axel
Hi,
I had this problem a while ago when doing an eclipse timelapse and came up with a dirty script to do the work: timelapse.zip (1.9 KB)
What I was trying to do was to simulate the light decay during the eclipse, so it’s kind of the opposite of what you what to accomplish. But maybe you can get some ideas from it. What the script does is:
- look at the exposure of the picture (taken in auto exposure)
- calculate the correction to apply in order to compensate for the camera’s exposure change
- modify the parameter of the exposure module directly into a base.xmp file (not so simple, the numbers are encoded in a complex way, see encode_exposure file)
- rename the base.xmp file and repeat for every picture
In this case I was also modifying the low-light module’s blending percentage, but the idea for that parameter is the same.
The script runs directly in bash (at least in Ubuntu’s flavor of it). Looking at it now it looks mostly gibberish (it was very clear back then!), but if you find it useful and need some help understanding it, just tell me.
Cheers,
Guillermo
Hi,
I’m wanting to create my first timelapse using darktable so I googled and found this thread.
Searched a little more on the web and found this youtube clip which shows someone has extended darktable specifically for creating timelapses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUGtla-q8OE
The comments in the video also contain the modified source code.
Would it be possible to include this in an upcoming update for darktable? It looks like most of the tough work is completed already.
You need someone who cares about the code. Just pushing it in doesn’t help. And I would really like to see this in dt too.
For the record, LR was never really a very good video editor. And I don’t believe it did anything for time lapse work. I would suggest VirtualDub, which is a FOSS video editor that will allow you to import a sequence of jpeg’s and output them as an .avi file. I used it recently for this (pointless) little project.
We are not looking for a video editor, that’s the last step.
What we do:
- Shoot photos in raw
- develop them in dt
- export the files
- create a video (Video Editor, Script, …)
The problem is if you have a time laps over a longer time and the light conditions change you can’t develop all photos the same. You will then edit some keyframes and interpolate the settings between them. To get the best results this needs to be done with the raw files and can’t be done in an video editor later.
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@Tobias I did a quick search and found this link, Joe Giampaoli: Time-lapse Photography with Linux. He uses darktable to develop, then exports and runs a deflicker script against the exports. There is a comparison of deflicker script results here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aABIlQokIaM. This shouldn’t be too hard to code up. In the blog post he uses blender to create the video, but we could also do it with ffmpeg or some other executable, or launch blender.
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Ah, you’re looking for some exposure ramping. Sunrise→Daylight or Daylight→Sunset, sometimes called the “holy grail” of timelapse video. Getting your transition exposures evened out to look smooth in the final video. That’s tough to do without some help, even in LR. There’s a plugin out there called LRTimelapse that allows the user to accomplish that task. I tried it once but was never able to really get the hang of it. Other than that, I wouldn’t know how to accomplish that task without doing your own math and adjusting each image individually. That takes more patience and skill than I’ve got.
Perhaps this script can help with deflicker: timelapse-deflicker/README.md at master · cyberang3l/timelapse-deflicker · GitHub
@wpferguson and @paperdigits I think deflickering is a solved problem, we have even a deflickering in the exposer module:
https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/modules.html#exposure
And we have this old Lua script to create a video from exported images:
https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-scripts/blob/master/contrib/video_mencoder.lua
(This script should be ported to ffmpeg, as memcoder is removed from most distributions.)
What we need is more control. Have a look into the video from @Mazza or search for LRTimelapse.
I’ve looked into the code from fhrtms an it should be possible to port it to 2.6, but I’m still not a C developer.
I tested the code a while ago and it seems that it is not the latest version, it seems that the author did not push the most recent changes/additions to github.
I found a little bit newer version of this patch:
And here someone added a little bit more but that is no longer available 
:
https://www.mail-archive.com/darktable-dev@lists.darktable.org/msg02324.html
But you could be 
Programming is programming, and coding is coding. You already know how to program, and you code in lua. Now just start coding in C.
If you decide to start working on the darktable code, get a good editor. I use sublime text, which has a free trial version. When I hover over a function, it displays where it’s defined and other places it’s referenced. You’ll have to jump around a lot to figure out what is what.
I cloned the updated repository. I’ll look at it when I get a chance, which may not be for awhile…
I noticed on the site lua-scripts/contrib at master · darktable-org/lua-scripts · GitHub when I visited that there is a lua-plugin video_ffmpeg.lua. I installed it on DT 2.7.0.
I’m just learning the basics of timelapse videos. I had a small number of photos and got HDTV 1920x1080 video. Various options were available from VGA 640x480 video up to 4K video. Format container can be selected from five such as AVI and MP4. Codec can be chosen from six, for example H264.
As a timelapse beginner I can’t say how good this plugin is, but try it out.
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