Personally, I’d use DT to process the stills, then use slowmoVideo Home · slowmoVideo/slowmoVideo Wiki · GitHub to do the actual time-lapse. (Although I’ve not used it for time-lapse, I’ve used slowmoVideo to process video files, and loved it.)
Darktable doesn’t have a time-lapse tool. I wrote some years ago a script to export selected images as a video. But I don’t really use this script, it is not flexible enough.
And here is a video I created with the help of dt some years ago:
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.
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?
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timelapse-darktable seemed to do exactly that but even cannot install any more and way too outdated I am afraid.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…
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
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.
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.
@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.