Hi Everyone,

Curious as to whether the newly purchased LRTimelapse could improve my Lunar Eclipse time-lapse:  https://vimeo.com/141099161

I opened my sequence in LRTimelapse and set to work, it was only I applied the Read Metadata in Lightroom that I realised I had lost my original Lightroom edits!    I tried Ctrl Z but it did not undo the changes!

Obviously, I now realise I should have worked on copies of these files, but IS IT too late to retrive my earlier edits?   Can metadata changes be undone?      

Any advice would be gratefully received!  

Julian.

Hi Julian,
LRTimelapse 4 normally does not clear your edits, so I assume, you didn't save them to metadata before going into LRT? In that case - of course, LRTimelapse will freshly initialize and then if you load metadata in LR, you will bring the new settings into the catalog.

in Lightroom you have a history on every frame, where you could go back in theory - but only for one frame after the other. But: I'd recommend doing them again, since when using LRTimelapse you will most likely get much better results with less efforts. Make sure to watch my tutorials: http://lrtimelapse.com/tutorial - try on a simple sequence first!

OK, thanks Gunter.

How do i ensure edits are written into files?   Is that the "Automatically Write Changes Into Xmp" box in Lightroom's Catologue Settings?

No, you should definitely turn that setting off.
See: http://forum.lrtimelapse.com/Thread-ligh...s-into-xmp

Then please follow the instruction on http://lrtimelapse.com/workflow there you will learn about the whole process and how and when to write the metadata too.

Shall do Gunther, ...thank you.

Nice time-lapse of the eclipse Julian.  I too am working on one and was pleased to discover LRTimelapse.  I acquired the latest LRT4, and subscribed to Adobe CC 2015.  I am not using Lightroom, but instead prefer the simpler (to me) Adobe Bridge, which uses Adobe Camera Raw 9.1.1.

I thought I understood how the metadata was handled by Bridge and ACR:  when an adjustment is made in ACR and the "Done" button is clicked, the settings are immediately saved in the .xmp data next to the CR2 raw file.  I find the keyframes flagged by LRT, and add some of my own by setting the rating to 4 stars.  I use ACR to adjust those keyframes which get updated each time I exit the ACR window.  When I'm done, LRT then reloads the xmp data and performs the interpolations between the keyframes (brilliant!).

This worked well until I added a stage in my workflow that required going to tiff.  I wanted to keep the 16-bit pixel depths, so avoided jpeg.  Now I want to use LRT to do some more fine-tuning on the exposures.  ACR allowed me to write my tiffs to DNG, which I expected would behave the way my CR2 files did, but when I substituted the DNGs into place, all the metadata for them seems to be lost, and when I make edits with ACR, I do not find the XMP files to be changed.  

Is there a different behavior in the metadata for DNG files compared to camera raw files?  What do you recommend for my re-importing a sequence to LRT after being processed as tiff files?

LRTimelapse is a remarkable tool; I need to learn a little more about how it all works before I can use it successfully.
Thanks,
Thor.

When working with DNG ACR and LR will write XMP directly into the DNG files. LRTimelapse will always write XMP sidecar files. But both programs will read whichever is newer - so don't worry, normally the back and forth works fine.

BTW: since you have it, you should definitely consider using Lightroom for the timelapse work, since the workflow is much easier and more streamlined when using LRTimelapse. There are special filters, a special export plugin and the sync script in Lightroom that are not available if you use ACR. Especially the sync script is important once you work with Holy Grail sequences.

Aha!  So this explains where my keyframes went!  I had a DNG sequence that LRT helped perform exposure adjustment (it made XMP files).  I used ACR to convert the DNG files to tiff.  I then did other operations (registration) on some of the tiff files and used ACR to convert them back to DNG.  I thought I could just drop them into their former place alongside their XMP files, but LRT did not seem to recognize the older metadata, and the keyframe ratings (and everything else) went missing.

As I think about it now, with my new understanding of how DNG works, this is the only way it could work.  Otherwise the exposure controls would end up being applied twice, once when they get baked into the exported tiff, and then again when the tiff-converted-back-to-DNG is re-united with the old XMP file.

I'm glad LRT can manage it!  I needed to make some additional exposure fixes, which I was able to do by setting new keyframes and adjustments using ACR.  It was baffling to me why the XMP files were not being updated, until I noticed that the DNG files were being modified directly.  This seemed to violate my understanding of how camera raw files are managed (my CR2 files never get modified), but evidently DNG rules are different.  LRT understood all this and went ahead and created (updated) the XMP files and I am happy with the result!

I fully intend to become familiar with Lightroom, but it was important for me to understand how the image and metadata was being managed before I could become confident in the process.

Thanks for the quick response, and this cool program.

If you want to use DNGs that wrap tiff or jpg, please do the conversion at the very first stage, before any development has taken place. This will ensure that the previews for the dng are "flat", unedited too.

Then you can do the normal workflow with LRTimelapse and everything will work as intended.