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Sometimes there is less activity around real estate properties, and you would need to shoot hours-long videos to capture any movement. Learning how to make a timelapse in Lightroom will help you capture stills and create a video with the much-needed movements.
A timelapse is a series of photos of a specific subject that you stitch together to form a video. The creation of a timelapse starts by shooting a sequence of photos with a predefined interval between the shots, which you can capture for hours or the entire day.
You will then need to use photo manipulation software such as Lightroom to stitch them into a video. However, keeping in mind that Lightroom doesn’t come with video rendering features, you will need to use it with custom templates to create the timelapse.
Typically, Lightroom will help you organize your photos into the correct slideshow sequence and apply the necessary edits, and then the custom template will generate the actual video. You can use the following steps to create custom templates of varying video frame rates and then make a timelapse in Lightroom.
The minimum display time for a slideshow photo in Lightroom is limited to 1 second. Keeping in mind that videos have a minimum of 24 frames per second, it means you can’t export the slideshow to a video in fractions of seconds.
However, you can bypass this issue by creating a custom Lightroom preset that will help you render the slides in the frame rate of your choice. Typically, you can use the following steps to create several templates with the common video frame rates.
If you have created several video frame rates such as 24fps, 30fps and 60fps, it’s advisable to rename the templates based on the number of frames per second to avoid confusion when applying. Restart Lightroom after creating the templates for the changes to take effect.
With the templates ready, you can import the photos you want to use for the timelapse. It’s advisable to create a timelapse with JPEGs so you can speed up the import and processing speed.
Keep in mind that the photos will be in different formats depending on the camera you are using, such as 2 x 3 format for aps-c and 4 x 3 format for micro-four-thirds. Typically, you can use the following steps to crop the images to the standard video aspect ratio of 16 x 9.
Finally, you will need to create a slideshow using the saved custom templates. Remember that the number of photos you will need for a 1-second video equals the frame rates. That means you will need 240 photos to create a 10-second timelapse at 24fps.
Usually, you will see the number of pictures you have at the bottom of the photo in view. However, Lightroom will round the exported timelapse to the nearest 1 second. For instance, if you have 238 images, the resulting video will be 9 seconds, not 10 seconds, because of the two images lacking.
You can use JPEGs or RAW files to create a timelapse in Lightroom. However, even if RAW files are better when editing the image data, such as the white balance and exposure, they can significantly slow down the application, especially when working with a large collection of photos or even prematurely fill up your storage.
You can use third-party plugins, presets, and applications such as LRTimelapse to create the timelapse. Typically, Lightroom will help you organize your photos into the correct sequence and apply the necessary edits, and then the third-party plugins, presets, and applications will generate the timelapse.
Learning how to make a timelapse in Lightroom can help you capture and compress the activities in a real estate property into a single few seconds video. You only need to create a template with your desired video frame rate and then create a slideshow using the templates.