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If you’ve been following either my own personal blog, or that of Jeffrey Friedl, you might have noticed us talking about Lightroom, time lapse and scripts. Now that Jeffrey has posted his script for modifying Lightroom crop metadata, I’m going to show you how I’ve been using the script.
The background to the script is that I’ve been interested in time lapse photography for a while. I’d not consider myself a videographer, or have much interest in it, but I do really love time lapse. So I’ve shot lots of sequences. But ultimately the static nature of the shot made me wish for something a little more interesting. Searching the web I came across sites that had panning in their timelapses, ‘very cool’ I thought. Then a guy called Chris Tierney showed up locally, with a bunch of cool timelapses. He’d been using After Effects to do his panning. I wondered if it could be done with some addons to Lightroom.
My pondering didn’t last long when Jeffrey came up with a Perl script that would do what I needed. Jeffrey explains the mechanics in detail in his post.
Sometimes though a video can help. So I put one together, it’s slightly rough because I’m using new software and doing it with a USB mic on my Macbook Pro, rather than the iMac I normally use. That’s because all my recent work for timelapse is there!

One or 2 quick points to note: Work with BACKUP files. While I’ve done 20 or more videos with no issues, that doesn’t mean that something won’t get corrupted. Jeffrey says the script is delicate and that means he’s not kidding. Also it may not be obvious in the video, but when I move the final crop, the aspect ratio is fixed. In fact it makes no difference if the size changes, because that will zoom the image, BUT the aspect ratio HAS to stay the same. Otherwise your video will be wonky..

Enjoy!
If you do create anything from this, be sure to post a link in the comments.

PS, Jeffrey tells me his website is pronounced reg-ex from Regular Expressions, his book, not the ‘rej-ex’ way I pronounced it.. Opps. Sorry Jeffrey!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 4:18 pm and is filed under 3rd Party Plug-ins, Lightroom Resources, Lightroom Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.