Hello,

my current challenge is that I want to render a h.264 4k UHD timelapse sequence from an 8mm fisheye lens using LRTimelapse 4.5.1 Pro and Lightroom CC. So I cannot crop the picture, but need to make the canvas larger so that I get the necessary 16:9 ratio. If I use a custom size for the video, Windows Media Player will refuse to display it. With ProRes, Quicktime can dispay the movie, but the black levels are horrible on a Windows machine, even with advanced settings switching off DirectX and the file size is much larger than h.264. VLC cannot handle those sizes at all and produces stutter, even with hardware acceleration turned on (although the computer itself is fairly powerful).

Can anyone please share some help on how to arrange a good workflow for this task?

Kind regards,
Frank

I don't think that you can make the canvas larger in Lightroom or did you find a way?
When it comes to the player on Windows the MPC player is by far the most performant one.
https://mpc-hc.org/

In general, Lightroom only offers non destructive operations and a larger canvas seems to be considered one of them as it changes raw data. There are hints that this might work during export, but the LRTimelapse plugin does not offer such functionality. There are some resizing features on other export options, but I did not try them yet, JPEG is not an option for me, I want all colors I can possibly get, so it is 16bit TIFF for me.

What I currently try is to point Bridge to the folder with the exported TIFF files and then run a batch which changes the canvas in Photoshop. I checked the output, the resolution of the new TIFF files is now perfectly 16:9. I had to leave for work, so I left the conversion run unattended and will try this evening to render a movie from those new files. Although I found another entry in this forum that resizing those TIFF files is not supported, so I might need some more tweaking.

Maybe some options to resize the canvas with selectable canvas background color might be a nice feature request for LRTimelapse? The render dialog can enforce 16:9 already but will do so with a crop, it would be fantastic if it could support enlarging the picture as well.

Thank you very much to point out the mpc player, I will give it a try.

Kind regards,
Frank

Hi Frank, this is a very special request, don't think so many others will have need for it. But please feel free to post a feature request in the appropriate forum, but this is certainly something that will not be very high on the todo list, I fear - but maybe others chime in and prove me wrong.
http://forum.lrtimelapse.com/Forum-lrtim...e-requests

The workaround with the Bridge/Photoshop action batch is doing its job nicely. The render video function accepts the resized TIFF files without any problem and the resulting video is exactly what I wanted. And it is not too much additional work. So I am quite happy and can continue with all of the timelapses I have on my to do list.

Thanks for the support!

Kind regards,
Frank