I recently made a video about must have timelapse software and today we’re talking about must have timelapse plugins.
These plugins will plug in to Lightroom and After Effects, as they are the main apps I use to edit high quality timelapses. Let’s begin!
First up is Timelapse Support by Jeffrey Friedl. This is a free plugin for Lightroom that allows you to ramp (slowly change) certain settings over a series of photos. It’s donationware, so if it’s useful for you please consider donating to the developer.
Here’s how the Timelapse Support plugin works: You edit the first and last photo in a timelapse sequence, run the plugin, confirm the settings and then it will gradually adjust all the photos in-between the first and last photo. You can for example change your white balance from cool to warm, or add more contrast to a scene over time etc.
This functionality is similar to one of the four things that Timelapse Plus Studio does, if you want to find out more about that plugin please watch this video right here.
The next plugin is for After Effects but you can get it for other apps as well. As you should know by now I use After Effects to turn my series of photos into a video file. As mentioned in my other video: timelapse flickering is bad.
You should do everything you can to avoid it, but sometimes it’s just unavoidable. You can fix it in a number of ways but the one I like is using a plugin called Flicker Free by Digital Anarchy. I’ve had great success with this plug in and definitely recommend it.
Keep in mind that LRTimelapse was practically developed to deflicker footage and I definitely recommend this stand alone software to deflicker footage over a plugin but sometimes you want to just keep your edit to After Effects and don’t want to open another app.
Want to learn the basics of timelapse? Download my free e-book right here:
The next plugin is also for After Effects. Sometimes your photos are very noisy because your camera isn’t great in low light for example. When you end up shooting at a high ISO you get a lot of noise. You’ve guessed it, this is a demonising plugin. Reduce Noise by Neat Video is absolutely amazing. It’s fully customisable and super powerful. Even the auto profile setup can do a great job, here’s a comparison with and without the plugin (I'm not sure how well the compressed gif will display the noise or lack thereof).
I want to briefly mention Davinci Resolve as a deflickering software (a standalone app, which didn't make it into my previous video). It was mentioned a few times in the comments of some previous videos. I’m currently researching this app for timelapse editing. If you have any experience with it let me know, I’d love to hear all about it!
Do you know of any other plugins? Let me know in the comments!
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