Timelapse Plus

Timelapse Plus enables you to render high-quality timelapses on demand, where you control which images are being processed, and can use a number of advanced rendering options to better configure the outcome. It also allows rendering at 4K!

Timelapse Plus is intended as a step in quality between our automated timelapses, and sending your images to a professional to handcraft a timelapse video for you. Because sometimes you need more than a snack, but are not hungry enough for the full menu.

How to render a Timelapse Plus video

Contrary to the timelapse feeds, Timelapse Plus is not automated. You order it when you need it, and you determine which images go into it. The essential mechanics for this are very simple. You can find the essential menu to interact with the Timelapse Plus feature on your cameras browse page:

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This menu may not be visible if you do not have SuperUser authorisation and you have not bought any Timelapse Plus credits for this camera. What are those? Well, I’m glad you asked…

Timelapse Plus credits

The first thing you need to render a Timelapse Plus video is a Timelapse Plus credit. Timelapse Plus renderings are payed for in these credits, which you can buy in advance in packages of 5. Credits are bought for a specific camera, and can only be used for the camera they were bought for. If you have multiple cameras that you want to have a Timelapse Plus video for, you’ll need to buy credits for them separately.

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Credits can be bought for a camera directly from the Portal if you have SuperUser authorisation by just clicking on the appropriate button in that cameras browse page.

If you do not have SuperUser authorisation, you should contact your yellow Administrator to buy credits (most likely the company who provided your camera). You should also contact them about pricing information.

Rendering a Timelapse Plus video

Once you have credits for a camera, you will need to decide what images should actually go into the timelapse. For this, you can use the normal image selection tools that you would also use if you wanted to download or delete a particular set of images. Right above the Timelapse Plus menu is the Current Selection menu which shows you how many images are currently selected. This selection depends on the Settings in the filter and advanced filter tabs:

When you hit the render button, the images going into your timelapse are all images in this selection. Note that Timelapse Plus credits are not bound to a particular table. You can render one from any table of the camera you want.

Once you click the button, a confirmation menu pops up where you can choose to override settings from the default Timelapse Plus configuration for this camera. All settings are covered further down in detail.

When you hit the render button, the order for your timelapse will be sent. You will receive an email once it’s done. Depending on the length of the timelapse and your settings, this can take up to several hours.

Your Timelapse Plus credits will not decrease at this point, only once the video is successfully rendered. Note that you are limited to one rendering per camera at the same time. You cannot order another Timelapse Plus video for this camera until the ongoing one has finished.

Reuse filter settings

In a lot of use cases, you will come up with a set of filter settings for a given camera that you’ll want to apply for each rendering. For this purpose, you may store a default filter preset for a camera and apply it with a single click.

Once you have set up your filters, click on the button “Set current filters as default”. This will store the current filter settings. Any future click on this button will overwrite those settings with whatever is set at that moment.

To reuse the stored settings, click on “Apply default filters”. You will see a popup that will ask how the time and table stored in the filter settings should be applied:

Apply time: Imagine you set up a filter to render a timelapse of this week. The timerange stored in the filter is defined by the date and time you set. Now, a week later, you apply the filter. If you choose to apply time absolutely, you will have the same images in your selection as last time, i.e. by now the images from pre-last week. But quite probably that’s not what you want, you want the images of this week. In that case, you should apply time relatively, which means that the filter will use the same timespan as configured in the filter, but relative to today.

Apply table: The image table that was selected at the time is stored with the filter. Most of the time, you’ll want to render your timelapse always from the same table. In this case, choosing “Table from filter” will conveniently switch to the right table. Alternatively, you can select “Current table”, in which case all the same filter settings will be applied, but to the table you have currently selected.

Of course you can freely adjust your filters further after applying the default filter.

Configuring default render settings

Other than the automated timelapses we provide as a feed, timelapse plus is associated with a specific camera. Each camera allows you to configure a default render configuration that will be used whenever you order a timelapse plus video for a camera. It can be set up in the cameras configuration page:

Here you can adjust the target resolution of the video, its length and its framerate. By dropping out the advanced tab you get access to the full range of adjustable parameters. Using these correctly will require some knowledge about graphics and video editing in general. If you have that knowledge, they will enable you to get the best out of your video.

Read on for a more detailed description of the individual parameters.

Configuration parameters

Note that ffmpeg is used to render the video. If this doesn’t mean anything to you, that’s not a problem, but if you happen to have ffmpeg knowledge, it will help you to know that most of these options directly correspond to ffmpeg parameters. This will be noted where applicable, so you can better apply your ffmpeg knowledge to render more beautiful Timelapse Plus videos right out of the gate!

Resolution

Here you can adjust the target resolution of your timelapse video. There are presets for the most commonly used resolution, as well as three options for customising resolution which are explained in more detail:

• Scale to width: You can set a custom width you want the video to have. The renderer will determine the height of the video based on the aspect ratio of the input images.

• Scale to height: You can set a custom height for the video. The renderer will determine the width based on the aspect ratio of the input images.

• Custom: Freely choose both width and height of the resulting video

In case the aspect ratio of the input images does not match the aspect ratio of the targeted resolution of the video, the images will be processed in a way that guarantees that the entire resolution is filled. This consists of first scaling the images to either width or height, whichever is appropriate, and then cropping the images in the other dimension, with the origin at the center. In other words: It is always guaranteed that either the full height or width of the input images will be preserved in the resulting video, and that the center of the resulting video matches the center of the input images.

Length and framerate

Adjust the length of the resulting video in seconds, and how many images should be used to render each second of the video.

Note that there is an intrinsic relation between video length, framerate and the number of images you will choose for the video. The amount of images used for the final video will be length * framerate. If the selection from which you render your timelapse plus video contains more images than this, images will be dropped from the selection at regular intervals. I.e. your video will not contain all the images that your selection contained. This is usually not preferable, as it takes some control out of your hands which images go into the timelapse and which are dropped. It can also lead to the timelapse appearing jerky if a lot images need to be dropped.

If, on the other hand, your selection contains fewer images than are needed to render the video, the renderer will interpolate the missing frames from the images that it has. This can actually be desirable, as the interpolation can lead to a much smoother transition from one image to the other. However, if the individual images are too far apart in time, this can also create artifacts.

Quality

Effectively the compression level for the video. The further to the left you drag the slider, the smaller your video file becomes and the worse its quality will be. Still, this does not strictly mean “more right equals more better”. All the way to the right you have no compression at all, which means that your images will get rendered into the video without any compression at all - which will most likely result in a very, very large video file that probably doesn’t look that much better than one with average compression, but that might literally take hours to download to a cellphone. This might be a good choice if you need a video that you intend to show on a large screen at a convention, but not if you want one to start autoplaying on your homepage.

ffmpeg: This parameter corresponds to the crf parameter for vpx encoding, with a range between 0 (best) and 35. The default of 23 is respected if not set. We have decided against an exact numerical representation on the slider, as it is not very expressive.

Contrast

Adjusts the color contrast in the video. Positive values lead to a starker difference between individual colors, negative values to less difference. If set to ero or disabled, the contrast of the original images will be preserved.

ffmpeg: Corresponds to the contrast setting of the eq filter. -100 to 100 map to values between 0 and 2, with 0 on the slider being 1 in ffmpeg.

Brightness

Adjust the overall luminosity of the video.

ffmpeg: Corresponds exactly to the brightness setting of the eq filter.

Saturation

Adjusts the color saturation in the video. Saturation is a bit difficult to explain, but is often associated to how vibrant colors appear to be. Choosing the right saturation can give that certain “wow-effect” to an image, but too much can also make it seem unrealistic or artificial. Here’s a decent article about saturation if you want to read up on it: https://photographylife.com/what-is-saturation-and-how-to-get-optimal-saturation

ffmpeg: Corresponds exactly to the saturation setting of the eq filter.

Gamma

Adjusts the gamma level of the video. There’s not really a simple way to describe what Gamma is. In essence, it manipulates ranges in the color space to better accommodate the relative perception of the human eye. This is not very helpful, but it’s a very complex topic. If you want to learn more about gamma you could start here: https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/gamma-correction.htm

ffmpeg: Corresponds exactly to the gamma setting of the eq filter.

Deflicker

Reduces flickering in a video by adjusting brightness between individual frames in a sequence. The value the slider controls is the number of frames in each sequence.

ffmpeg: Corresponds exactly to the size property in the Deflicker filter, with mode set to ‘am’ (arithmetic mean)

Sharpener

Makes the final video sharper or more blurry, depending on which you choose.

ffmpeg: These are two fixed presets for the unsharp filter. The sharpen preset will use these values: luma_msize_x = 7, luma_msize_y = 7, luma_amount = 2.5 , while the blur preset will use luma_msize_x = 7, luma_msize_y = 7, luma_amount = -2, chroma_msize_y = 7, chroma_msize_x = 7, chroma_amount = -2

Deshake

Attempts to make a shaky video more stable by adjusting the position of individual frames.

ffmpeg: Corresponds to deshake without any options.

LUT file

This option allows you to upload a LUT (lookup table) file for advanced color correction. You can upload one lut per camera. I’m afraid it wouldn’t do much good trying to explain here what LUT files are exactly or how they are created. If you’re interested you may start reading up here: https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-lut/, but be warned that this is a rabbit hole. If you want to employ a LUT, we generally recommend that you get a video professional to make you one. Since the general lighting conditions for any individual camera are fairly constant over time, having a good LUT for a particular camera you want to get the most out of can be worth it.

ffmpeg: Corresponds to the lut3d filter. Any file working with that filter will work here as well.