Hello,
I’m trying to build a timelapse of a Lunar Eclipse I shot a few years ago (never too late, hey). The camera was mounted on a telescope with tracking. Unfortunately the polar alignment wasn’t the best, so the Moon moved across the frame. I periodically re-centred it, but some movements are jerky (my fault, but here we are).
So I went to LRT (6.5.5, 20240515) and selected 44 keyframes in order to properly centre the Moon, taking into account also the jerky movements, then went to LR and diligently aligned and cropped them all to suit my needs. The crop was one size for all, but I aligned every frame at the start of a smooth “sequence” of movement, and of course all of the jerky ones.
After a few hours of this very fun and engaging work, I tried to do the auto-transitions in LRT, followed by visual previews.
The crops and alignments have been totally ignored by LRT.
I know I can use DVR to align the Moons, but my problem is that LRT simply ignored something it took me hours to do.
Also, some weird things happened with the masks, with LRT’s keyframe script referring to a previous picture (the one I copied from) when told to “intersect mask with subject/sky/background”. I ended up having to intersect or subtract an object.
Finally, some edits I did to the images, clearly visible in LR, we’re simply ignored by LRT.
I hope the problem is clear.
I dunno if it’s my laptop that is on old (2016 Intel MacBook Pro running MacOs 12.75), lightroom being an asshole or a few bugs in LRT.
Please, help

Cheers

Antonio

Hi Antonio, sorry to hear about that. The Crop animation is implemented a bit different than you did it.
There are 2 levels of keyframes in LRT to be able to separate Crop Animation from the other keyframing.
This means wherever you want to do such a crop adjustment you need to work with 5* keyframes for the crop, while the regular edits will get keyframed via the regular 4* keyframes. This is why your crop adjustments got ignored when doing the auto transition.
For such "Moon alignments" use the 5* keyframes (little rectangles in LRT) - set one before the shift where you moved the camera and one on the adjacent frame where the shift happened.

Masks have some limitations when used with LRT. You need to use the predefined masks. Also for the selectors inside the masks, if you want to add some you need to do this on the very first keyframe and they will be static then, not animated. Animation works only for the predefined masks and selectors.

I alreay did this kind of stabilization of a moon or solar eclipse where I had to reposition the camera a couple of times with LRTimelapse. It works very well. I'd recommend that you to fix the crop first via the 5* keyframes and make that nice before adding the other edits. Save a snapshot in LRTimelapse whenever you need to to preserve a certain editing step just in case you need to come back to it later.
In a second step do the keyframing. Mind the limitation of the masks for timelapse.

Hello Gunther,
wow, that was a quick reply! Thank you very much
Correct me if I'm wrong: whenever I want LRT to understand that a certain frame contains a crop edit, I need to assign it 5*, right?
I've just discovered you can assign stars in LRC and then LRT is smart enough to read the * rating from the metadata you save after you're done editing your keyframes - good job to the developer ;-)
Will LRT understand that most of the 5* frames contain edits other than just crop and align?

RE masks: I only use the masks already included in LRT (not the ones you're not supposed to touch, only those who say "edit me"), and I edit them at leisure. I understand when I synch keyframes the mask stays where it was in the "mother" keyframe. My problem is that I had a "sky" mask to show the stars (basically gradient nr 4 extended way beyond the limits of the image canvas, out of which I carved the Moon shape by having LRC recognise the subject. Of course when I synch the keyframes the mask ain't gonna follow the Moon, so I deleted the subject mask and asked LRC to re-select the Moon by using the subject feature. Lo and behold, the bastard keeps selecting the Moon position from the mother keyframe, not the one I'm working on. I had to resort to using a Moon-sized circle to have LRC select the object "Moon" instead of the subject "Moon".
Am I going something wrong os is the marriage between LRC and LRT an imperfect one?

Cheers

Antonio

Crops will only get animated on 5* keyframes.
For the animation for other, regular tools, LRT will ignore the 5* keyframes and use only the 4* keyframes (regular ones).
First and last image of a sequence will be treated as 4* AND 5*.

So best do your regular keyframing first from left to right (no crops), use the sync script.
Then in a second pass, add the 5* keyframes, and do the crop editing on those. To sync them from one keyframe to the next use the Sync feature from Lightroom (not the script) but make sure to have only "Crop" selected to sync.

"AI" Masks as Sky select and Subject select cannot be animated in LRT. You should not use them with timelapse. You can only edit the predefined selectors, which are the circular or linear gradients.

Yeah, I realised that.
So now I have to do do a bit of both
Oh, well...
Cheers
Antonio