Hello,

I'm relatively new to time-lapse photography and have successfully exported a few taken in my backyard.

For a project taken over a long period of time, I'm planning to create a time-lapse video, delete the raw files, and assemble and color grade them potentially years later.

Obviously, deleting the raw files is giving up a lot flexibility.
(1) Therefore I was wondering if anyone has a good workflow for making something like an archival master video clip, that will still hold up in editing months to years down the line.
(2) Would this be a use case to convert all my ARW files (from my Sony Alpha) to DNGs?
(3) Or if I should just buy storage every time my hard drive fills up.

I hope that makes sense, I'd be more than happy to elaborate further.

Thank you,
(and thank you Gunther for LRTimelapse)

Lennart
(a fellow Hamburger Jung)

This post was last modified: 2022-06-19, 11:22 by Gunther.

Hi Lennart,
I can only recommend to keep the original raw files. Storage is cheap, they will deliver the best quality and get even better over time with better raw converters.
Is extremely unlikely that they will not be supported in the future and should they eventually get unsupported you still will have time to convert in another format.
I would not convert to DNG because they slow down the workflow (Conversion takes time plus metadata reading/writing is slower).
That's what I do and recommend.

The thing about an “archival master video clip” is that to fulfill that requirement, it must retain quality for future editing. Most end-user codecs like H.264 are highly compressed that quality is not optimal for use as a source file for further editing.

In professional video editing, “mezzanine codecs” such as ProRes are used for editing (not final delivery) because they retain near-original levels of quality, and are very responsive in an editing timeline because less processing is required to decompress them. So why not use that? Because of the tradeoff: File sizes are very large. The file size of a ProRes video clip of a time lapse could be a significant percentage of the total file size of the original raw still image files. So if your goal in throwing out the raw files is to save a large amount of storage space, then the goal may not be completely achieved, and the ability to edit at the raw level was still lost.

As of Lightroom Classic 11.4, exporting is getting so much faster (with the new GPU-accelerated export) that I am willing to throw out the intermediary files because they now take less time to re-export. But I will keep the raw files.

As usual the best long-term solution is to buy a larger hard drive…

(2) Would this be a use case to convert all my ARW files (from my Sony Alpha) to DNGs?

You will need to test how much space you would actually save, because it would depend on the DNG options you use.
You might save some space converting to straight DNG, and would still be able to edit it using raw controls.
You would save more space converting to Lossy DNG, but with some loss of visual quality or frame size. A small loss might be acceptable for video frames, because normally no one will inspect each frame as closely as a still image.
You might consume more storage space if you select the option to include a copy of the original raw file in the DNG, because that means the DNG includes both versions.