Tilt Shift tutorial in Blender

Moby Motion writes:

Blender isn’t the most popular software among photographers, but it’s perfect for achieving a nice tilt shift effect!

You can use it for every part of the process: from stabilising your time lapse, to adding the tilt shift effect and colour grading. It can all be done right in Blender, and in this tutorial I’ll show you how.

I’ve also included loads of time lapses you can download, to try this out yourself!

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Always a fun time when firing up Blender. :slight_smile:
I’m getting sucked down the rabbit-hole of re-building the Halloween trailer using the bluray as a source to create an HD version (1080p)…

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I’ve done a Tilt Shift video in darktable some time ago:

I blogged here about it (German):

The two impotent links are the Script:

And the tutorial from @houz how to do the effect in dt:
http://houz.org/2014/03/13/fake-miniatures-in-darktable/

Since I’ve done this dt got a deflicker function, that could be very useful for time laps videos:
https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/ch03s04.html.php#exposure

Another interesting thing is the Lua video export script that I wrote some time ago:
https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-scripts/blob/master/contrib/video_mencoder.lua
I don’t maintain this script any longer, because mencoder is no longer maintained. But perhaps It’s useful for someone, or someone is interested to port the script to ffmpeg or gstreamer.

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I would like to see it when its ready.
Do you use tracking to mimic the camera motions?

Sehr nice!

Quite neat! You did it entirely in darktable?

Could your script be modified to use ffmpeg/avconv instead? I could have a look at some point (way down the road unfortunately).

@Mondayman - I’m hoping to have it done before too long. It’s nothing fancy, just recreating the trailer but in HD using the bluray (so pure video manipulation and splicing and time stretching). The movie is in 23.976fps while the trailer is for ntsc 29.97. :frowning:

Quite neat! You did it entirely in darktable?

No, I used this script for deflickering, because darktable didn’t had a deflicker function at that time.

Could your script be modified to use ffmpeg/avconv instead?

I think so. If you are interested, the script is only a few lines long. The main command is created in line 88:

https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-scripts/blob/master/contrib/video_mencoder.lua#L87

I could have a look at some point (way down the road unfortunately).

Don’t hurry. If you need help just ask.

I could have a look at some point (way down the road unfortunately).

Don’t hurry. If you need help just ask.

@patdavid You waited long enough. :wink: We now have a ffmpeg export script for darktable:

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I hope late questions are allowed.

I tried @Mondayman’s youtube tutorial with Blender 2.79b and it works great (after the 30th try). I thought Darktable is a bit complicated, but blender… oh boy :wink:

I wonder, can the DOF and composing part be saved as a style, to apply it on other videos?

BTW, my PC (i3 16Gb RAM) takes about 3-5 Seconds per frame (960 x 540)