 We start directly, everybody knows them, the beautiful images of stars or cities on day and night in time lapses, but you might ask yourself, how can I achieve this myself? We have a guest now that knows, he is very well, a software developer who has made his job to the hobby, and he is doing the landscape animal photography and specified on time-lapse photography, written his own software, and he can explain now to us how we can do this ourselves, going to be excited to be here. Yeah, thank you for the invitation, and I am very happy to tell you something about my topic of time-lapse photography, time-lapse is the thing that I've been working for during the last 10 days, specifically the night cycle photography and overlap of the two. Before we start to explain this, we look at a couple of examples. Most difficult part is to do it from the start to the end, from the evening to the morning, to make the image of the milky way, and this is something 10 to 15 years ago, it was almost impossible, so that's why it was called the Holy Grail of time-lapse photography, and before I elaborate on how to do this, I would like to give you a glimpse of how time-lapses are, or what they are, and how to record them. We're always talking about sequences of separate images, which we are taking in an interval of between 1 to 30 seconds, and the whole thing where afterwards replaying in video speed 30 seconds per images per second, so we have the best acceleration. When you have a so-called interval of 5 seconds, so the time between the two images, that's 150 times acceleration, with this milky way imagery, you usually work with 20 to 30 seconds intervals, so you have an acceleration of 900 times. This is fascinating, because you can visualize things that with naked eye are not visible, and usually I explain first how one makes time-lapse recordings standardized. I've even written a book on this, 480 pages, so it is a lot of input needed there, and then eventually we come to the Holy Grail of the overlapping day and night, night and day photography, but we're talking today directly about this, so I hope you excuse that I'm not going into the basics today due to time restrictions, but if you're interested, you will find a lot of free information on my website. Yeah, so if we are taking time-lapse photography, I said initially already there is this interval, that is the time between two images, and within this you have the exposure time, so the time the camera is exposing and the black time, so that's not exposing, and by doing this, the time-lapse are doing several images after each other, and the challenge here is, on this day to night and night to day imagery, is the high range of dynamic, the high dynamic range, especially, for example if we take an image during the day, usually the exposure would be something like a thousandth of a second with the ISO of 100 and a shutter of 8. During the day when the sun is shining, it's a usual camera setting, in the night, like during the milky way that you just saw, then we're talking about exposure time of 16 seconds and ISO of 3200 and a shutter of 2, so we have an entirely different settings that we need at night. And to realize how vast this difference is, talking about aperture changes, and that is the ISO is 5 aperture changes, and the aperture change is also 4 aperture levels, each aperture changes a half, so half of the brightness, so we come to 23 aperture differences, we have a brightness difference of 2 to the power of 23. So at night, 180 millionth of the image is reaching our camera as compared to the day, so it's obvious that it's going to be difficult to go and feature this dynamic range, this immense dynamic range, and it's just the dynamic range of the images, and then added to that the dynamic range of the actual image, which is also 12 to 14 aperture stops. And so we have to have a lot of different settings during the day and night, and before my technology, the technique I developed was available, producers of nature documentary, and they usually took one capture during the day with the upper settings and then in the night with the lower settings, and then during post-production, fade them into each other, which looks a certain way, but does not actually depict the reality, and it's not as fascinating as you actually see it live. So when you look at this dynamic range in the camera, and how it's put together, this 14-bit RAW file, which most of the cameras are exporting, there's a lot much higher dynamic range than what we are going to have in the final image. So we have some range where you export to JPEG or video, and this is 8-bit usually, resolution, which just has 265 steps for each color channel, compared to the 16348 in the RAW file. And we can use this. We're showing this dynamic range as a histogram here, and we have the possibility to move this histogram during capture. Very important for this is that during capture, we try to avoid overexposure. Overexposure is going to be cut off. That's the lights. We are never going to be able to recapture. To the other hand, a slight undexposure is not so bad, and even a strong undexposure can be recovered in post. So if you know this, then you can change the settings manually during capture. Yeah, so you look at the histogram, and if you see an overexposure, then carefully readjust the camera, and you get this zig-zag luminance curve graph. So at sunrise, it becomes brighter and brighter, then you readjust the camera, and becomes brighter, and you readjust it again. And in the end, the aim is to remain inside this corridor of the dynamic range that the camera can capture, so that at no time you really overexpose or do an extreme underexposure. So, and with the software LRTimelapse that I've created, you can then combine all this. So, successively during the histogram, do the recording, the histogram walks to the left all the time, moves to the left, the images become darker and darker, and if we see we have a little bit of space on the right, then we can readjust the camera, and the dynamic range and the histogram moves to the right again. And the sequence with the jumps looks like this, so we have a sunrise, so it becomes brighter and brighter, and just before the overexposure, we readjust the camera, and so we, to bring the pictures back into the dynamic range that the camera can record. And then then you use LRTimelapse with the so-called holy grail wizard, with the magician that can correct it all, that calculates a correction curve, that is the mirror image of the luminance curve, and if you look at the whole thing then, then the result is wonderfully smooth, and all the jumps have become invisible. And with this, with this technique, this method, you can do arbitrary transitions, and all the horror of these jumps is gone, and so if every individual picture is exposed, that it is not outside the dynamic range, so it is not overexposed, then everything can be corrected afterwards. So the question is always why don't we use the automatic mode or the ISO automatics, and the problem is that the light meter in the camera isn't really very, very reliable, the light meters, they're really vary a lot if there's a small disturbance, and then it uses another exposure, and they don't really work if it's getting too dark, then they don't work very well, and you have very little control over the shutter time, and the light meter inside the camera does some standard exposure, but we can't really control it if we see that the pictures become too bright or too dark, and this is with the modern cameras, it's getting better and better that they even can adjust to these situations, but I still prefer the manual way or even better an automation with the help of a smartphone app, that I also, or that some other developer and it's called QDSLR dashboard, and I contributed some ideas for making these holy grail timelapse recordings to control them automatically, and the cool thing about it is that there's a very special algorithm that analyzes the histograms from the camera and ensures that the exposure is always perfectly adjusted at the camera, and you don't have to readjust the camera by hand all the time, and you still can make this sequence optimized for this timelapse, and that looks really nice, as you can see from this graph, and the results are really, really perfect as with regard to the exposure, and everything else happens in the software then afterwards. Yeah, let's take a look at the software. I jump over to the LR timelapse, and I would like to, in the short time, work on a sequence together with you, and the one sequence that I showed you in the beginning, I load it here so you can really see how it works, that's how it comes from the camera, we can really play it here, and there's really wild flickering until the final exposure setting is reached, we start with half a second shutter time ISO 100, and in the end we are at ISO 4000 and 16 seconds shutter time, so it's a big dynamic range that we have here, and even if it's already starting in the blue hour, and the explanation, and extensive tutorials you can find on my website, rttrtimelapse.com, lrtimelapse.com, and there are also books and e-books that explain all of this, so we do it in the quick way here. In the beginning I define keyframes that are those that I want to work on, I don't want to work on and edit every picture, and it automatically marks the jumps, so we don't have to worry about that, it's only important that in places where we think the color changes or the contrasts in the sequence, that we set a keyframe there, and for example I would set a keyframe here because the white balance changes, and the Milky Way comes up here, I would set one here, and maybe here, another one, and maybe I should remove this one here, and maybe rather have one further back here, and we have one in the very end. So the next, so these are the pictures, the images that we really take a look at and edit, and all the pictures in between will be edited automatically, and adjusted automatically, and we ask it to correct the zigzag curve, and that's the wizard that does that, and creates the compensatory curve, and sometimes you have to rotate it a bit, so it's very close to this medium line, so there are no too big deviations, and then we are saving the sequence to Lightroom, and there we want to work on the keyframes, so we pull it over to Lightroom, maybe I should have started it before, oh it's already there, so I will just read the metadata from the files to to to pull over the to import the editing that we have done so far, everything that we have prepared in the LR time-lapse that is now transferred to Lightroom, and all the adjustments that LR time-lapse does are only recorded in the metadata, so just before exporting the final movie they are used to change the metadata in the raw files, and it's all calculation before that, and we can edit as much as we want without reducing the quality of the pictures, so I put a filter on my keyframes, because we only want to see the keyframes, these are the ones that we want to edit, so we do the usual thing here and develop these keyframes, and I would quickly go through them, and I take care that, look at the histogram, so that we don't overexpose and raise the the darker parts and do contrast adjustments and white balance adjustments, so if we want to have a nice transition through the blue hour, so I make that a little bit more blue, and I would perhaps use a gradient filter for the lower region, which is quite dark, so I have one of these great filters and put it over here, so I can make the the ground a little bit brighter if it gets dark, so make it a little bit brighter here, and then I would perhaps use a second filter, and that's a mask for the Milky Way, and I put that roughly here, where the Milky Way will then show up, and we can perhaps switch back, and it's going to be around about here, so I can put this mask roughly there, and then in the end afterwards I can separately work on the Milky Way in the picture, so let's switch to the second picture, and there we would start a script that transfers the adjustments to the second keyframe without destroying the changes we made in LR time-lapse, so we go to the second picture and remove the mask here, and the stars are coming out, and we adjust the white balance a little bit, because the night sky isn't really blue, so we're still in the blue hour here, and perhaps I would make it a little bit brighter here, and so the Milky Way just comes up over the horizon, and now let's go to the next frame, synchronizing and moving over to the different the other image, so we have the starting point, now we can go to the Milky Way, the filter which we said looks good so far on the positioning, and there we make a small contrast adjustment, not too much single adjustments on the Milky Way that quickly becomes very unnatural looking, just do a bit more contrast, maybe a small micron of dust removal to make the contrast a bit more prominent, and now we make the white balance when it's really dark, the white balance is almost neutral if it's really dark, so we can take the color picture and click on the sky, and the color would be correct, some people have issues setting the colors for this night imagery, and that's a quite good tip, the night sky is usually quite neutral in its coloration, a bit more contrast now, and now we synchronize into the next keyframe, you see how the white balance changes during the duration of the night, how the color temperature is switching, which is not really real, and the actual is just what the camera is gathering, so I'm neutralizing it again, but there's completely different white balance than the previous image, so this is why it's also very important to make this transition, it looks good, now let's brighten the ground a bit, because we have that one gradient filter and synchronize to the next keyframe, to the next image, here we would make the milky way and move the mask a bit further, the milky way has traveled across the sky, so we had to move the gradient and update it, and we do that on the last one as well, yeah it moved even a bit further, you can see the change, I didn't do a lot slight contrast, just in the milky way, okay that's enough for the editing, I'm going back to the raster view in lightroom, I'm selecting everything and saving the metadata to the files again, by clicking on metadata to file, and now we're going back to timelapse pro, do a auto capture, we're loading in the keyframes and the metadata from the keyframe, and doing the calculation of all the images in between, and afterwards the visual preview is being built, so it's being done by, in accordance with the edits we have done, all based on the metadata, only that we see the preview, and we can actually see the brightness changes, and you can see all this up and down sort with movements, they've all been rendered out by this wizard, and now we have the previews, and this looks quite good already, when we're done we can play it, and we have pretty good editing of this transition from day down to the milky way, it's a bit rough shapes in the curve here, and so we will fix that in the next step, where we do a visual de-flickering, this is also algorithm based, and it's completely lossless, we can do an ideal curve over our luminance curve, and say, okay so we want to have the luminance curve run like this, before I do this I do the reference frame for the reference of this curve here into the sky, simply so that this contrast affects, or cars that might appear with their lights or something wouldn't affect the algorithm, and this is a good area I would say in order to calculate this curve, now we flatten the curve, make it more equal, a multi-pass filter, which means it does several passes until all the curve is really even, and all this is done lossless, it has covered the red correct curve, and now I'm applying these fixes, and the more we do this, the closer the pink curve is going to be aligned with the green one, and it's only touching those images that are actually diverging from the green curve, and you can do 10 or 20 pass-throughs with this, usually you don't need as many, have no quality, because it's just doing the calculations in the background, and only at the final end when it's doing the export, it's being applied to the raw files, so now it looks very nice and smooth, we have no flickering, and with this the sequence is ready for export, in order to do that we're going to go back to Lightroom, now I would load all the images in between the keyframes, so the complete sequence, and selecting them all, and going to get the metadata data from the files, so these are all the metadata that our timelapse has written, and afterwards we have a perfectly developed sequence with all the adjustments in Lightroom, still based on the raw files, and the instructions with the instructions to development, the next step we can export the sequence, there is a special plugin from LRTimelapse, this is quite large actually, and there we can export the sequence, and now it's developing, it's producing developed master files from this, which you can do for the professional area for stiff files, now for this demonstration we are going to do a JPEG, but Lightroom is exporting these files, and in the next step it's going to render the video, these JPEGs from LRTimelapse, I'm showing you already the render preview image, this is the window where you have the video settings, you can do H264 codec, H265 progress, the NXHR, and do high resolution 8k, and even higher depending on what codec you want to apply or use, you can do different qualities, we're going to do in the previous case do H264 and 1080p with high quality, and then we can also do some post-production processing, we can do the cropping on the ratio, we can select the crop for 16 to 9, which is the usual format in video production, and we can here, especially useful for night captures, do a motion blur, which is, yeah, well, a fading of different frames, which makes it a bit visually appealing, our export should be done by now, we're going to click on video render, render video, and now it's producing the video from these master files, from these developed master files, they're being pushed to the video file, which is quite quick, and then we can look at the video anyway, during any time based on these exported files, and you can render the video in different formats again, so you could do a preview in full HDD, and then the client says, I'd like to purchase the sequence, you don't have to do this whole thing again, but you can do this from the exported raw files, and render it again, and do it for example in progress format, now we look at the result, let's start it again, yeah, so that is for the gravity and speed, we did this in a quite passable and respectable result. Okay, so that was really the fastest presentation to Holy Grail that I've ever made, I hope you were able to follow, of course the basics were really missing the time lips basics, but you can find that on my pages, and I would really love it if you pass by and if you have questions, and there's a time lapse forum at forum.timelapse.com, and there are interesting discussions about this, and I also answer some questions there every day, and here are the links, and I thank you very much for your attention, and of course for the invitation from Macau's computer club, and here's my software and my tools to show you my software and my tools, yes, thank you very much for these very beautiful pictures, and it's really interesting to see that. We have some questions that the signal angels prepared, thank you very much, the first question is do you have experience with Canon Magic Lantern, the free option? So I don't use it myself, because I use Nikon cameras, I have installed it once, and it works pretty well, and there are some tools in this alternative firmware that make it easier to record time lapses, but it is not quite as flexible as the app that I have shown, QDSLR support, and because if the camera is running, once it is running, you can't adjust it again, and that would be the point where I would say that I didn't like that very much. Okay, understood, the next question is if I read this correctly, you change a lot of aperture during day and night, how do you work around the change in field of depth, because you usually have things in the front, do you change the focus? Yes, that's a good question, especially if you change the aperture, that once is the depth of field that changes, and that is with landscape, depending on what the foreground is, it's not really very bad in a time lapse, but what may change is the vignette of the objective that all lenses do that differently between open and closed aperture, and you really have to keep that in the back of your mind, and I try to avoid it to change the apertures too far from 11 to 1.4, because normally you would still see that in the final time lapse, and it's very hard to compensate, and so I remain in a certain range, and it always depends on what the result is supposed to be and what situation there is that I have that I'm recording, and it's really a valid point, and you have to keep that in the back of your mind, and really think about if you really want to do that, or if you really don't don't change the apertures and already start with an open aperture, but it depends on the situation. Okay, understood. The next question would be what kind of hardware you're using when doing photography, usually you say you use Nikon? Yeah, I use various Nikon cameras, I have used now use the mirrorless Nikon Z cameras, because they are a little bit smaller, and they have some advantages. They're the more modern variants compared to the DSLRs, but I've used DSLRs for a long time for recording time lapses, and it really works wonderfully. The camera itself is really, except for small nuances, small things, there really doesn't really no huge requirements put on the camera. All cameras of the past years are really so good that if you record it in raw format, and make the pictures that you get really good results, and the differences are really visible with really extreme night pictures with a milky way, where you really need the good noise response. But if you use a faster lens, that makes a big difference. So if you have an open aperture of 2.8 or 1.4, and that's really two aperture stops, so the 2.8 lens will only allow a quarter of the light in. So in the last 10 years, I think we haven't had such a huge development camera sensors that they could compensate for that. So if you have a 10 year old camera with a 1.4 lens, would be at least as good as a current day camera with a lens with a 2.8. So but I invest in new lenses that makes much more sense than always having the latest camera. Okay, now I notice when I get to that level regarding the programming of the camera, is there anything to consider that? So I programmed it in Java because it's platform independent, and I'm making it for PC and Mac, and the new version, there's a native Mac Silicon, Apple Silicon architecture, which is really efficient and had high performance, especially for these kinds of jobs and tasks, and which really gave it a performance boost. And there are really lots of calculations that have to be done. And it's really about having it work efficiently and fast. And for an LR time lapse, I really use parallel threads and multi-threading. And this really was working on 32 cores in parallel. So making the previews is really highly parallelized. And I already implemented it where at the time when Lightroom really was working sequentially, no matter the hardware power that you had. And it's really from a computer science point of view, it's really a non-trivial job to parallelize these processes that only by very small steps gets into the software because individual cores don't really get a lot faster. So you have to use multiple cores and the software really has to make use of that. And LR time lapse really does that very well, and that makes it very efficient. Okay, I have one last question before we go to the extended question answering session. How strong is LR time compatible with Lightroom? Can you enter other major data? Isn't Lightroom necessary? Or are there other open source tools? Yeah, I looked at all the raw converters, and there's no other one really that offers good interfaces except Adobe with the XMP data. And LR time lapse really has interfaces to the data format. So you don't really need Lightroom, it would also work with bridge or with Adobe Camera Raw, but we use these Adobe products. And with the version six, you can do stuff in LR time lapse itself with some limitations. I have a video published a video about that where I show how that works and explain the limitations. And you can do some things in LR time lapse itself, but to really use the full potential of this great raw converter that Adobe has created that supports all the cameras and where there are always new updates and new versions for new cameras. That's something that really is hard to achieve with open source software. And with the solutions that there are such as Darktable or so, there are some interfaces are still missing there to really work with it. And I've been developing LR time lapse. I'm the only developer for LR time lapse and it's a question of how much energy can I put in supporting different raw converter software. And of course, I decide for the market leader because I don't have the time to work with two one or two additional raw converters. So we're excited for the future. I'd like to say thank you very much also for the beautiful images and the technical views how to do this here in next talk will be at 12 30 regarding measuring exoplanets and their transits.