Good day and night fellow photographers,

for quite some time i have been thinking on a way how to improve my timelapse videos in terms of image shifting.
Unfortunately not big progress has been yet made on my side and it seems like i have a big problem wall, that cant be overcome just by me.

The way i create some of my timelapse videos, were created using a motorised rail setup with a platform on which camera is mounted.
Its job is to move camera, for example to position 1, position 2, position 3. And this repeats with a set interval.
Problem with this kind of setup is mechanical shifting after going to other positions and going back again.

While i did use some good rails and good bearings, precision stepper motor, good mounts, I still do get some noticeable image shifting ( vibrations, mostly in X axis).
These vibrations are several pixels for the most time, but sometimes they can become bigger too.

So far i have found out that there is an effect in Premiere Pro to reduce this vibration, that appears, but this effect does not do the job good for the most time.

This is where my suggestion comes to LRTimelapse:

Create settings for image shifting - for example, set up master image with a clear mark in picture, lets say it is an X mark 1 or 2 pixels lines colored in white.
Now this X mark from master image has its own coordinates that can be compared with all following images.

If there is a shift of pixels on x axis on one picture from master image, then move placement of the picture accordingly, in this case it is 10 pixels on x axis to the left. Now compared image will be saved with new position coordinates ( Of course now we lose a little bit of picture on the left side and probably gain some black line on right side, but it can be cut out in post processing. i think it is small price to pay for a shift free timelapse).

I think it would be a good setting for many timelapse photographers, who could use it and improve their videos a lot!

Thank you for your attention and i hope many people will find this idea useful and LRTimelapse developer team will be able to implement this.

Aleksejs Saveljevs
Its Time. Its Adventure.

Hi Aleksejs,
what you are trying to do is very special. There is dedicated software like After Effects or Davinci Resolve, that allows such corrections, you could for example use the Tracker to do such thinks. I'd recommend to search for youtube tutorials about that and learn how to do it.
You can do the whole workflow in LRTimelapse until the export, then feed the exported intermediary sequence into After Effects. I've explained this procedure in my Expert Tips Tutorial #10: https://lrtimelapse.com/tutorial/expert/

This is nothing that I could or would implement in LRTimelapse because LRTimelapse does lossess Metadata based edits only, not pixelbased. That's just not in LRTimelapse's scope and as I said, there is dedicated software for this kind of video editing.