How do you create a time-lapse on darktable?

@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 :frowning: :
https://www.mail-archive.com/darktable-dev@lists.darktable.org/msg02324.html

But you could be :smiley:

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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