Hi,

For long term timelapse purposes the following would be nice.
Sometimes clients ask for timestamps on the images, so it would be clear how time evolves.

In webcams most of the time this would be hardcoded in the original image, but as professionals we dont want the originals cluttered with info.
I can imagine that when you export from lightroom that you encode a timestamp per image. Either via exif, but probably better via filenames syntaxes which most long term systems use.
Lightroom Mogrify can do this, but then it would add another step to a workflow. More-over, it does it very slow and the long way around.


Even better would be this:
Since we are working with 24 Mpx files and zoom in later on, än hardcoded timestamp in your 6k file is not the best option. (maybe it gets out of view)
Would there be a way that when you export a sequence that you export the timestamp info in a separate file that could be used as an txt input for premiere/ after effects, where you can change its size, font etc.
(dont even know if that is possible, but I was thinking along the line of importing subtitles etc)

Regards,

Bas

I am sorry, the timestamp is already there ofcourse.
I tried it one time and it gave my a steady date then, so i figured it only stamped the first image date and didn't go for all the images. Never tried it again after that.

But thats because of question two, where it gets usable for editing

So please try that feature again, it should work as expected.

I did, it works!

Thats a nice thing, and again, sorry for asking an obvious thing.

But for editing its not really usefull, so I look to you with puppy eyes for the second option

This is a very special feature that most likely only you would be using, that's why I'm a bit hesitant to implement that.
Yes, LRT does generate a SRT subtitle file internally and uses that to render the time stamps, but those files are not easy to edit because they are full of timestamps.
You can find the file in the temp folder after rendering with timestamps. The location of the temp folder is written in the log and the srt file will be called timestamps*.srt
Check it out and see if you can do anything with it.

Hey Gunther,

This looks like this is a great way to go actually. Did some testing I can import the subtitle file easily and change every aspect of it in premiere.

I will do some more testing tomorrow to see how easy it is to get it in a real workflow on some longterm projects.
But as I understand correctly, i only get an .srt file when I check the box time stamp overlay? That way I would have to render everything twice.

If it works out okay, it would be nice to have a checkbox 'export timestamp overlay srt' and put that in the same folder as the exported timelapse.

I will do some workflow testing.

Thank you again for your quick reply's!

Yeah, currently you need to trigger the rendering. But you could abort it after a short while, the set file will be written directly after the render is launched.
Let me know, how valuable it is for you.

Hi Gunther,

That would be a good work around. But not for multiple folders (like months or weekfolders).

It would be of great value, for this is something I could not do any other way, and I would love to have a way of putting the exact dates of the image in movies, but with different designs for clients. It would add great flexibility to the workflow. I think with a good explanation a lot of other long term timelapsers could benefit from this.

But: Am I correct that it only outputs a timestap per second? I tested it on a large bunch, and the output movie only updates the timestamp every second. In the .srt I also see only 1 entry every second.
For it to work it would have to stamp every photo, it looks more like a counter then too.
But maybe that would be a drag on the proces?

Dont know?

I could add an option to output the SRT file to the render folder for each export, even if overlaying it is off.
But it would be in this format, where every second the subtitle changes. You know, the idea of those subtitle files is to provide a time stamp and then a text. In LRTimelapse's case, I'm "misusing" this to set a different subtitle every second with the Date/Time.
You cannot do it for each frame and it wouldn't make sense also, since the timestamps are only accurate to the second.
The program that you will use to overlay the SRT file will parse that file and put the timestamp subtitles to the correct places.

Let me know, if if would help you if I implemented is as outlined above.

Hi Gunther, I think it would be a valuable addition, if you can implement it like you said.

Regarding your comment about that it wouldn't make sense to implement it per frame.
With long term timelapse, after cutting, I regular use only a few images a day, so 1 second can have several days in its 25/ 30 frames. Especially when you edit 2 years construction in one minute, and if the timer goes per second it will show the wrong date for a lot of images.

So the use case per frame is there. If it is possible it would be even better.

Regards,

Bas