Time-Lapse App Reviews

A simple piece of software that does excatly what it promises. I used it to convert 600 still image sequences in JPG rendered from AutoDesks 3DS Max and it converted them to a Quicktime movie in a few seconds! The resulting movie looked great. I was able to change the frame rate to slow it down as well. I highly recommend this piece of software if you need to convert still image sequences to movies. Suggestions for improvement include: 1) a thumbnail-sized preview movie window and 2) the ability to reverse the sequence, 3) the ability to specify from what frame number to what frame number to convert, 4) the ability to specify conversion of every Nth frame (convert every 10th frame for a more flip-book animation effect), 5) Specify a custom widthxheight crop size.

I was frustrated with iMovies converstion of my beautiful time lapse pictures to a horrible, grainy movie format, and this app does a great job of simply transforming pictures into a movie. The quality is excellent - way better than iMovie, and a much more simple workflow. For my digital picture JPEGs, I recommend setting the app for the JPEG Codec and Max quality. Its also nice that the photos are resized to 1080p at the same time - makes the workflow quite simple! Thanks! Now, if only I could add the movie file back into iMovie with this quality maintained!

I tried this app out to make some quick time movies from my ContourGPS camera when using it in single frame mode. I found out that the camera would create a new folder for every 999 pictures and thus I had to process each folder and make a short movie for each group of pictures. I contaced the developer to see if he could support adding entire folders to the list of images, and now we have version 1.4. It works beautifully, now all I have to do is select the DCIM folder from the camera and a single movie is made no matter how many images I have recorded. Great support and a lot of fun. A recent weather timelapse that I created with this app, was even shown on our local TV station!

This app does precisely what I needed/wanted it to do and nothing more—it lets you load up thousands of stills and will process them into a time lapse video. Although offering options like 1080p or 720p, I very much like that it gives you the option to preserve the native size of the images. It also offers a lossless quality setting and a Motion JPEG codec - resulting in truly near-lossless results. Fantastic.

This app does exactally what I need. the interface is simple and it creates the movies very quickly. If you are looking to create time laspe movies from your still shots try this app.

I had over a thousand images I wanted to create a time-lapse movie but QuickTime Pro 7 couldnt render some of the files. Maybe some of the images had some corruption or some other problem but even if I tried to make a movie out of 30 images one of them would stop the whole process with QT7. I thought I was stuck not being able to construct my time-lapse until I came along this app. This app did the trick, Took almost 2K images and created a movie for me. Now I can just bring it into Final Cut Pro X to finish it up. Variable frame rates, multiple codecs and more make this a great app. Its pretty bare-bones but very functional. Works fine on Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1 with my MacBook Pro. One suggestion I would make is to add a Select All Files button when choosing the list of images to be rendering into the movie. *UPDATED (5/4/12)* The addition of the time stamp is nice but needs to have some options to control size, placement, color and font. If the background is light then the time-date stamp is unreadable. Also I prefer not to have the seconds showing on the time stamp. There seems to be a bug in Time-Lapse where if I create more than one movie in a row it doesnt allow me to create a filename after the first time-lapse movie is rendered. The application goes straight to creating the movie and saving it with the same name as the first. Luckily the Mac appends a numeral to files being saved with the same name. Other than that good improvements. Still would like a Select All Files button when browsing for the individual images to add.

Ive only done it once so far but it was easy. Just dragged the 200 gopro jpegs in a batch into the Time-lapse window and it created the video. Very smooth. It made a .mov video and I was then able to import that file into iMovie and edit it as a normal movie. It was a cloud sequence set on an interval of once every 60 secs. Im very happy with Time-Lapse so far. No problems.

I purchased this app based on the reviews, installed it on my Mac and thought the process would be simple. I dragged in 100 jpegs and everything seemed to be working until I went to play the Quicktime movie and the screen is black. Nothing. I have tried slightly different variations on jpeg size, date and time etc., and still a black screen. Hmm...support screen doesnt load either, so I couldnt get any assistance. It was only 4.99 but I guess you get what you pay for. Disappointed.

This is the best app I have ever used for assembling time-lapse videos from collections of photos. So far the largest time lapse I have created was about 9000 frames from a 18MP DSLR and it handled it great. Apparently you can not do full frame 18MP time-lapses of this size, but I think it is not a limitation of this app per-se, because I tried other apps and they failed as well… the solution is to use the 1080p cropping feature. I have never had a problem when using the 1080p or 720p cropping.

Does exactly what it says! Beware of hi-res photos, though. Anything at 18 meg plus or, god forbid, all 36megapixels of the d800 wont work unless you set the crop at 1080 or 720 (Though this isnt a real issue because you shouldnt be taking time lapse-photos at high resolutions, as, obviously, that res will be wasted as each frame flies by in much less than a second). This really speeds things up for me! No more fumbling around when I want to add a timelapse to a Final cut project…and I didnt have to spend $30 on Quicktime pro just for this one function! In short, its great!

This is a great app that does what it says it does, but what it really needs is better documentation. - The current version, 1.8, must be downloaded from the website because of some complaint about the AppStores sandboxing policy - The "documentation" is a PDF that is technically a document, but doesnt really walk you through the process of making a timelaspe movie. - There is no help, so you have to use the documentation PDF from the website (URL in the About menu) It is not very fast, (likely this old MBP), but the most unexpected feature was an ability to rip TIFF stills right out of a quicktime MOV. All the key features are there, now spend time making it user friendly! Thanks for making a good app at an afordable price.

I expected options to convert a video to individual images. None! No option for how many frames or images per second and no option on size of exported image. Waisted 5 bucks! QuickTime Pro 7 at least offers frames or images per second, but does not size the images. MPEG Streamclip worked and I should have just stuck with that. Hope this helps someone else. joe

This app makes it a lot easier to crop and prepare a timelapse than my old standard method. I used to batch crop and edit thousands of images in Adobe Lightroom, then export those, create an image sequence with the outdated Quicktime 7, and then convert that video into the format I need. Now its just a few clicks and Im done. And the quality is pretty much on par with Quicktime. I highly recommend this to make your timelapse workflow easier.

Thats all, I mean if youre doing timelapse, RAW is going to look the best. If you do RAW, dont buy this app.

i love it but its really slow making the timelapse. if they made it faster it would a perfect 5 no other complaints

Straightforward, clean, and best of all… it works great! Other apps, including QT7 and Compressor were choking on relatively large jpegs from my GoPro. It processed 31GB worth of stills (8,000 images) perfectly!

Im primarily a linux user, so although I tend to go to command line and enjoy it, I wanted something that would give me a decent gui so I could crop as needed before rendering. Time-Lapse does this and more in spades. (I might add its competitor Sequence does not do this as of Mar 2013.) I tend to use either a GoPro Hero 1, Hero 3 Black, or a Canon SLR and this renders the HD quality images into a video editable mov file (of your choice). Its fairly intuitive, but does require a bit of a learning curve and some technical parsing of the manual to fully utilize the options. Specifically the Custom Crop option is confusing and the manipulation isnt smooth, also theres no saving your crop short of using an animation file (which doesnt render compressed). This leaves areas for improvement, but its still very useable and much, much simpler then other time lapse rendering techniques (i.e. command line ffmpeg for starters). The Filter Panel is a very nice enhancement, and almost worth the purchase alone. The ability to quickly and easily modify & crop the basics of your images, get visual feedback, and then render it for a quick view (i.e. using a rate increase) definately puts time-lapse at the top of my time lapse rendering apps. I havent tried time-lapse with more then about 8000 frames, but I do have some upcoming that I will be testing it against and if I see issues Ill report back.

Will only export a black movie.. slider moves along but the movie is just a black screen… Tried it several times with a few as 25 clips and thats all I got for my 5 bucks.. ??

I was skeptical when I frst saw this program, because Ive killed every other app that I bought for my time lapse project. I love the very simple UI. It just completed a 22,078 frame TL without locking up or crashing. I highly recommend this app!

In my opinion this app is very useful and user friendly but you can’t add music to your final project that’s very disappointing!