I've got a question regarding licensing & what would "make the most sense" given what I'm trying to accomplish.

I took a long series of photos during a long train trip (approx. 12 days worth of 5sec interval stills) a few years ago which I never got around to processing into a timelapse video. I somehow managed to forget the project until today. LRTimelapse seems like it'd the right tool for the job, but I'd only need it for this one task. I'm trying to decide whether buying a license (seems I have too much content for Free) is the best route to take. Technical skill or ability to learn isn't really an issue; its mostly that that this is one-off job which I'm unlikely to repeat in the near future.

Would it make more sense to buy a private license, or would it be better to hire someone with an appropriate license to to process the series for me?

If you want to use the long term editing tools and filters, you'd need LRTimelapse Pro. Currently there is no other option than buying the full license, regardless of how often you will use it. If it makes more sense to hire someone to do the job for you, that's something I can't answer. I just cannot imagine that someone would do a long time timelapse editing with thousands of images, filtering, editing, exporting and rendering etc. for less than 249€, which would be the price for the Pro license.

I think I gave the wrong impression in my last post. I'd like to ask from a different perspective instead.

I have 4 "scenes" of about 3-days worth of anywhere from 5sec to 10sec interval images each (depends on settings used for each scene). These images were taken via a camera hard-mounted to a traincar window facing outward for the duration of each trip segment. Vehicle speeds were anywhere from 0 to 80 MPH. Images taken at night could be discarded due to poor/no low-light performance, which could reduce image counts by as much as a third. That'd still put me over the recommended 10k images per time lapse however, but I've no issue with breaking the content into about 6 chunks per scene (at ~52k images per scene). Each image is JPEG 3648x2736px, 24bpp @ 72dpi.

The key questions for me are about the learning curve for new users & what amount of time should I realistically expect to put into producing a final product. As mentioned before I may be able to learn the tools quickly (IT/CompEng background FWIW), but I think I need a "reality check" on whether proceeding with DIY processing is a good idea or not. I know from experience that just because someone can buy a decent camera and Lightroom/Photoshop doesn't mean they'll produce good results without spending sufficient time & effort to learn the tools.

I'm willing to buy & learn what I need to, but I'm not completely sure I currently have enough experience to fully understand the scale of what I'm trying to do. I've dome some work with Lightroom and Photoshop in the past as part of pre-press work for a newspaper, but that was over 10 years ago. I've done basic editing and touchup work occasionally since then, but nothing I'd call "professional" quality. Once I get a better idea about where I stand with regard to skills and typical learning curves for LRTimelapse I can make an informed value judgement on whether to proceed with DIY or hire an expert who is willing to do the job for me.

If I do end up doing this myself, does lrtimelapse.com/workflow/long-term-construction fully document the long term toolkit's features? I haven't been able to take a look in-depth yet; I only just now found it while searching for product documentation.

This post was last modified: 2022-06-28, 09:24 by Gunther.

If you have no experience with Lightroom and LRTimelapse, of course, there will be some learning involved.
There is lot's of tutorials and documentation on this website. I'd recommend starting to watch the tutorials and learning the basic workflow with the free version, before you decide to buy a license.
The basic tutorials: https://lrtimelapse.com/tutorial/basic
After that please watch my long term editing tutorial on https://lrtimelapse.com/tutorial/advanced (at the bottom of the page) there I show how the long term filters work.
After that maybe you can decide if that's a route you want to go or rather see if you can find someone who does it for you.