This post was last modified: 2013-09-03, 01:15 by DLee.

I have a huge 116 hour time lapse that I'm starting to work on. LR is showing 32256 files! wow. Currently the job is separated by card in twenty four hour segments. A full day (24 hours) is somewhere between 5~6,000 files.

For what it's worth, a D700 with a Sandisk 64GB card and new EN EL4a battery will get you a solid twenty-four hours of TL at one frame per 15 seconds.

I am going to refresh myself with the LRT workflow in the tutorials and the book. But I'm wondering how to break up the continuous 116 hours of time lapse.

Twelve hours is about 2750 frames. Maybe this would be a good segment size? It seems an overlap in processing is necessary to accomplish a smooth flow.

It's a construction scene so there is very little lighting change during the night, my biggest changes are during the day and obviously the sunset /sunrise transition.

Anyway, any ideas on how to break this up and then put it all together would be helpful.

Dennis

I'm going to (begin) to answer my own question here and say that a little more advanced planning would have been very helpful.

At this point I'm settling on processing the files per card... or as in the first round per folder. I'm just at the JPG stage of rendering and it's quite slow... I may be getting that new computer sooner than I thought.

Anyway, I have a feeling I'll have some cleared ideas on work flow by the time this job is done. Happy to hear other input though.

Most of my folders are maxed out at 999 files and with rendering as it is, I may find this to be a good working number. My next batch is going to be closer to 1500 files and I'll comment on how that works out when I get there.

d

Hi DLee,
I would try breaking up the sequences into daily folder, you can use the Lightroom importer to sort by daily subfolders.

Then you should start getting rid of unwanted images, LRTimelapse Pro brings a feature exactly for construction time lapse that will help you to delete images by certain creteria - too dark, too bright etc...

Editing construction time lapse is a total different story then Scenic Time lapses, but it's not easily explained within a couple of sentences here. I already did consulting work for a couple of companies doing this, and they were really content with the results they could achieve with my technique. If you are interested, let me know. We can do this via Skype.
Best
Gunther

Gunther, that sounds good. I will need to set up Skype though - I have never used it.

My files are already pretty well organized by date - the problem is that they can be three or four folders with subfolders inside. I am going to try selecting a complete folder/sub folder set today for adjusting and see how that goes.

Exposure was set manually so there aren't too many light or dark moments. Change occurs during weather and it's occasionally quite drastic but gradual. I was assuming keyframes would find these changes. My first day was pretty simple with a nice clear blue sky. Day two starts getting complicated with weather and days three and four become even more difficult and will either black out or white out because I lost access to my camera for hours at a time when my man-lift was being used by workers.

Files to be removed are either at the beginning or end of long segments when I'm about ready to change the card in the camera and I'm trying to decide what exposure to set. These are culled out pretty easily.

I started and completed about four hours of TL yesterday and I think it should look pretty good. I'm going to try and do an eight hour sequence today that is a folder with two sub-folders. As the job goes along I have fewer folders for each day with the last two days being one folder per day. Subfolders max out at 999 files, so there can be several of them for a day.

Unfortunately I have a problem with video export which I'll put in another post titled: Video Render Error - STOP, ERROR, LAUNCH, ENCODER. I hope you can help with this. It's unfortunate that I can't view the playback on the first segment... viewing adjustment overall is obviously an important aspect to TL and I think I may have gone a little dark during midday... I might try rendering a Quicktime version just to see but often overall exposure changes with Quicktime exports.

I'm going to get started on the next TL adjustment now and try and load Skype later on in the day. I'll also check the time difference between NY and Germany when I get a chance.

I can reload/import files with LRT3 and create another LR catalog if you think that will be helpful. Meanwhile I'll try and finish day one with the current catalog.

Thanks Gunther,

Dennis

Hi Gunther,

I think I will take you up on the SKYPE offer.

I've been able to get three segments done and one exported - I had to render with Quicktime 7. Two segments went really well, but one needed a lot of files removed which I ended up doing manually in LR.

I saw the peaked files in LRT3 and can somewhat imagine how establishing a base line for overexposure could make finding blown files very easy. I may just try eyeballing those peaks and selecting files on the next ones until I hear from you.

I'm on location 9/3 and 9/5. Shall I email you about timing for the Skype? I still need to set it up here .

Meanwhile, here's the first segment I was able to get done. It looks pretty good to me, but I was wondering if I should go back and apply deflickering? My feeling is no, but advice from the pros here will be justly listened too.

First four hours

Thanks,

dennis

Hi Dennis,
please write me an EMail to support (at) lrtimelapse (dot) com then we can arrange something.
Best
Gunther

To me this image does not need deflickering.. It seems good to me by the way nice job