LRTimelapse Forum

Hi, Gunther and everyone. I'm brand new to LRT with LRT4. Not new to photography or video editing; I understand keyframes. I think I will LOVE this software.

In very brief: 

1. Original files from Lightroom are DNG without sidecar files. I had already named them and applied noise reduction to them in Lightroom when I brought them into LRT4, following your tutorial. 
   
2. I set up keyframes and saved. This save produced sidecar files. 
   
3. In Lightroom CC (2015), I selected all the files from within the Library module and hit "Read Metadata from Files" from the Metadata menu.
   
4. I found the LRT4 filters, found my keyframes listed, and edited them. 
   
5. I saved (Metadata>Save Metadata to Files). Perhaps a key point: a Lightroom dialog opens and says, "XMP metadata will be written into the original files" when using DNG (and other formats like Tiff, PNG, PSD and JPG). So the sidecar files that LRT4 produced were not modified, but the DNG's were. I verified this via the modification times.
   
6. Back in LRT4, LRT4 does not see the changes. I believe it is looking for changes in the the sidecar files that it produced before I went back into Lightroom to edit my keyframes, but Lightroom ignores the sidecar files when saving the metadata to DNG, and saves it right into the file.
   

How can I get around this? 

I tried this workaround when I realized what might be happening with the sidecar files, but it didn't work: 
In Lightroom, after Saving Metadata to Files, I deleted the sidecar files before going back to LRT4. My hope was that it would force LRT4 to read the changes Lightroom had saved to the DNG files. But Lightroom did not see the edits to my keyframes with this workaround. I stayed up late trying to figure it out. 

Thanks for reading and thinking of ways to help.

I am very excited to get going with LRT4, I can already see from setting up keyframes that this is going to be incredibly useful in my time-lapse sequences. I found out about LRT4 in a Facebook group for Timelapse enthusiasts.

Thank you very much.

I looked in Lightroom for a way to force it to save to the sidecar files, but didn't see a way.

I also looked in LRT4 for a way to read from the file and ignore the sidecars, but didn't see a way.

Don't worry about sidecars or embedded Metadata. LRT and LR will use whatever is newer. LRT uses sidecars because this is much faster.
Just follow the workflow, when you get back to LRTimelapse, you won't directly see visual changes in the preview - only the curves and table will change. In order to see the visual previews, you have to explicitly activate them with the "Visual Previews" Button in the third row.
Check out my instructions and tutorials to learn about the workflow.
If you still encounter difficulties, please check this faq post: http://forum.lrtimelapse.com/Thread-keyf...vise-versa