I'm having a little trouble in the latest LRT (4.5.1 Pro) with some JPG sequences made on my GoPro last year when driving in the USA. All the videos have been fine up to now—I've been working on each sequence individually, anywhere from 24 to 2000 frames, using the latest Adobe CC 2015 Lightroom. Suddenly my latest sequence (402 frames) is giving trouble. It renders the folder of JPG files perfectly, but when LRT video feature kicks in, it produces a video that is far too short and is missing most of the frames, in large chunks, so it skips frequently. I know the JPGs are OK because I made a video out of them in Quicktime Player 7 just to check. In LRT I'm rendering ProRes 444 UHQ 1080P, but I've tried other combinations such as MP4, VHQ - it seems to make no difference.
The only thing I've been doing differently on this video is an Auto Transition using KF5s (crop frames). Is this feature supported? I started off using KF4s and adjusting the crop that way, but I found it wasn't working as I expected, so I tried KF5s instead. In each case, I get the video issues...
I'm wondering whether I might have missed an update to the LRT export module? I recently upgraded from LRT4.3 and I didn't update anything except the software...
Thanks for any insights you may be able to offer!
Thanks Gunther for the fast reply!
That makes a lot of sense. If the aspect ratio changes, I guess it's obvious that it would be much harder to make a video properly—it would be like building a wall from bricks that are not all the same size
I have shut down my system for the night, but I'll try again tomorrow. Do you think one solution might be to bulk-edit the JPGs first in another program and force them all to be the same dimensions? Based on the information in that other thread, I'm assuming that would work.
It would look jerky. What I'd recommend is to export and render in Full size (no crop at all) in 4K or higher and do any ken burns in post processing. The video editors do it much smoother than Lightroom can crop.
Ah, OK. That would make sense.
However, I may try the quick fix in this case. Since I'm working on drive-lapse shot on GoPro with a five-second interval, the footage is so jerky to begin with that I'm sure it won't be noticed. All I'm trying to do here is end up with the best framing at the end of the journey (the car stops in a multi-storey car park, and the visible sky area is much smaller than the frame, so I wanted to zoom in on that size before the end, to make for a better view).
If it doesn't work, then I'll try your other suggestion. Thanks again!
Quick update: In the end, I just got rid of the crop animation altogether and left it static. The final shot wasn't too bad so it was easier that way!
As a suggestion:
Is it worth thinking about modifying the LR export module so that it can force every image into a particular set of dimensions? Obviously I realise that this would not be appropriate when working with very smooth sequences like MoCo starlapse, but in my drivelapse scenario it would have enabled me to get the rendered video I wanted. Not too important, but it would be nice to have that option. To be clear: what I mean is that the parameter dialogue for LRT export might have an option to check a box saying 'stretch image to fixed output dimensions', with the dimensions entered via two other fields. Then in the example I gave (1080P), I could have specified something like 3000x1688. The random jerkiness caused by the stretching would be a problem for some sequences, but it would have been OK for me.
Hi, like I said, if all keyframes have the same aspect ratio, normally you don't get any problems - even when doing ken burns with LRTimelapses crop animation. It just doesn't make sense, to change the aspect ratio and afaik LR does not support exporting "stretched" images.
The LRTExport presets will force all images to one width, but not squeeze them.