Auto-Alignment of Time Lapses – Episode 2 : why “Futura Time Lapse”?

Introduction

I have already written in a former blog post why there is a need to automatically align time lapse members when shooting either during windy conditions or with a tele-lens.

The conclusion of this post were: for those who don’t want to pay more than $20 / month or spend hours to understand how open source software can align hundreds of images, I have developed this feature into Futura Photo, an app designed to help the photographer by automating different tasks needed like culling or grouping images to facilitate the post-process.

I have recently release another app, Futura Time Lapse. It is a simplified version of the my flagship product’s capabilities (Futura Photo‘s time lapse rule). 

Hand held camera, with a 500mm lens. Time Lapse of downtown Geneva, Switzerland

Same time lapse members, aligned with Futura Time Lapse

Why Futura Time Lapse ?

The idea behind is simple: just enter your images’ source folder and where you want to save the align members and click to start the alignment. Take a coffee, come back and voila! Images aligned and available for creating the time lapse.

Futura Photo is proposing more features, when it comes to time lapse alignment, compared to Futura Time Lapse. However, this is coming as often with some more complexity. Nothing that difficult, please have a look at this video. Anyway, for many, the super-simple Futura Photo will be sufficient for their needs. 

The Next Steps

The app has been tested on many different kind of time lapses and works very well for most of them. 

There are still some challenges with some very low contrast images or some corner cases that I want to improve in the next quarters.

On a laptop – a mid-range one, 2 images are aligned by second. I have ideas to increase this rate by a factor 2 at least.

Don’t hesitate to contact me on twitter or on the company’s website if you want to know more, or for remarks.