See article: How to shoot Timelapses, hyperlapses, dronelapses.

Yes I’ve put this title in the plural because I don’t think there’s only one way to create timelapses. First, it have to fit your needs, exactly like gear choice. But as the purpose is to create quality for sure, I’ll detail my ways to create lossless or almost lossless timelapses. You’ve got your full card of pictures, what do you do ?

1- Internal way: TimeWarp

Last GoPros (and some DLSRs) have an internal way to shoot and stabilize long accelerated video. Oh, it’s a timelapse, and if you’re moving, it’s an hyperlapse ! You’ve got a MOV file, congratulations !

2- Easy way: Timelapse Assembler

Take jpegs, put them in the same folder. Download Timelapse Assembler, set the folder and the export name, and push the button. You’ve got a MOV file, congratulations.

3- Quality way: Cinema DNG & Lightroom

It becomes interesting here: all your timelapse has been taken in raw (CR2, DNG…) and imported in Lightroom. Instead of trying to color correct a MOV file in post, let’s do your corrections on one picture, using the RAW capabilities. By selecting this one as reference, you can expand those modifications to all your timelapse. That’s prettier !

Export all this in 4K width, maximum jpeg quality.

4- Premiere

I’ve to admit: I’ve never done this technique for several reasons, but I’ve saw some “simple” timelapses workflows which imports all jpegs in Premiere and put all in a Sequence: here is your Timelapse, where you can add lumetri if necesary.

5- Geek way: ProRes4444

But It’s so much easier in my opinion to have a concrete timelapse file, and it’s better when no quality is lost. For this I use FFmpeg, an utility which allows to create video files from pictures and taking into account every configuration possible. So I can export by 4K jpegs in ProRes4444 and I’ve got my lossless file to put into Premiere (or to directly send !)

6- Expert way: LRTimelapse

Anyone which has search deeply about timelapses knows necessarily LRTimelapse.

This little gem developped by Gunther Wegner is almost mandatory to realize the holy grail of timelapses: a night-to-day (and reciprocally !). There’s perfect articles about the different techniques to do it and I won’t detail it here, but I’ve to admit the LR Timelapse is the easiest: coming as a plug-in to Lightroom, it draws a smooth transition between very long and short exposures, and creates masterpieces.

Also, using FFmpeg too, it allows to export in ProRes. Its only weekness: it’s not free…

7- Red way: RedLapses

Not the cheapest way, for sure 😉 But Red cameras have a function to take “mathematically” lossless images (Redcode 2:1) regularly, and compiles it in only one concrete r3d file, already accelerated, and raw. What else ?

I need to try this soon, but as ISO sensibility is a metadata and can be updated in post, I thing that by using several instances of a r3d sequence at different ISOs, it’s possible to make smooth variations on light (maybe not from stars to daylight, but why not !)

A little edit on Redcine X and you’ll be able to have a Lightroom-like result, and then add it to your Premiere project, a Lumetri layer can be useful to conclude this technique.