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Create Timelapses With Ease Fast workflows for editing or social media.

Load original images directly from your card or storage.

Play it,  trim it, correct it all in real time.

Batch export MOV in H.264, H.265 or ProRes.

Done.

TimeLapse Forge V1 interface with city timelapse


Intro Pricing of  $79

 
Perpetual License For Each Major Version !
✓ Same Major Version Updates Included.
No subscriptions 😀

Purchase on Apple App Store

 

Timelapse creation made fast, simple and efficient.

Drop a folder of mixed images in. Do you have 5000 or more images ? Go ahead !

• Multiple sequences and formats are automagically separated into individual sequences correctly.

• Never waste time again manually sorting files into folders for each sequences. Those days are over !

• Separate multiple sequences in one folder as shot by the camera,

• Correctly sees sequences split across subfolders due to 9,999 files in a folder rollover in camera

• Ever have a battery swap that breaks your file cadence or file numbering ? no problem anymore.

• Have mixed JPEG, HEIC and RAW in the same location ? Easy !

• These typical problems are all handled intelligently, automatically. You adjust how time gaps trigger a new sequence, how many missing frames to allow, or turn detection off entirely to match other apps.

• Nested folders scanned up to 2 levels deep. Perfect for working with folders of sequences on your drives.

• Sequences grouped by using our special intelligent sorting technology

• Mixed shots from different cameras but same file names ? 😵 TimeLapse Forge will sort that too !

• Near instant sorting on folders of 5,000 images or more.

• No file count limit. Should be fine with 100,000 images or more in a session.

Your camera’s native files directly supported.
No wasted time or drive space for conversions.
No convoluted multi application workflow.

RAW files are loaded directly. No DNG, TIF or Jpeg 2000  intermediate exports, no  folder(s) of huge duplicate converted files eating up limited SSD space, no waiting for it to happen. What came out of the camera is what you can work with.

Camera metadata support:  body, lens, ISO, shutter, aperture. Displayed with sequence info and embedded into the exported MOV for tracking in post if needed. Clever.

Canon CR2, CR3   Nikon NEF •  Fujifilm RAF uncompressed and compressed • Sony ARW  Panasonic RW2  Olympus OM System ORF  Leica DNG  Hasselblad 3FR  Pentax PEF  DJI DNG  GoPro  and many more

JPEG • JPEG 2000 • HEIC •  HIF • TIFF • DNG  PNG  OpenEXR  BMP • PSD • and more

Full camera and format list >

See what you have before you export anything. Just hit play.

Realtime playback including RAW.  See your current adjustments for color correction, deflicker, crop, lens correction all running at once. All of it shows up in the preview as you work, at standard frame rates. A cache bar in the timeline shows how much is held in RAM if caching is needed.

For long RAW sequences which don’t fit into cache, dropping playback to 12 or 6fps keeps things smooth without giving up what you’re seeing. You can play directly off a camera card for a quick first look before you’ve even copied anything. This is a giant time saver for checking your work by avoiding copying from the camera card.

Deflicker and exposure smoothing
with intelligent exposure metering.

Flicker and multi frame exposure changes have a lot of causes and they don’t all look the same. More importantly, they don’t always affect every part of a frame equally. Shadows can change differently than highlights and a global correction that fixes one can easily damage the other. Problem solved. 

TimeLapse Forge analyzes every frame with a sophisticated multi-zone exposure tool utilizing GPU acceleration. Then corrects per tonal zone shadows, midtones, and highlights independently. You control how much correction applies to each zone, and you can override individual frames when one needs its own treatment. The exposure meter intelligently ignores moving bright spots like the sun crossing the frame or headlights passing through so they don’t skew the measurement. If you need to lock analysis to a specific area of the image like the sky, draw a sample box anywhere on the frame. It’s fast and adjustable.

Analysis controls:

• Exposure Smoothing Range: how many neighboring frames shape the reference curve.

• Variation Threshold Adjustment:  minimum EV deviation to flag a frame (start at 0.03–0.05 EV)

• Max Correction:  limits correction per frame if needed.

Correction modes:

• Frame by Frame:  isolated single frames.

• Small Group:  for groups of frames that are off, interpolate smoothly between good neighboring frames.

Per zone correction strength:

• Shadows • Midtones  • Highlights • adjustable 0 to 2.0± stops per zone

• Specular highlights and direct light sources are never corrected thanks to the intelligent exposure meter

Analysis is stored per sequence. Come back to a sequence later and everything is exactly where you left it. Make changes and it analyzes in seconds. 

Exposure Leveler™ showing EV exposure graph

When a bad frame just needs to go away.

The tripod leg gets kicked, a wind gust shakes everything, and the result is a motion blurred frame. Press B ( for blend ) and the frame is gone. It’s replaced non-destructively with a blend of the surrounding frames. Toggle blend on or off anytime, play it back in real time, and see which mode works for the shot.

Blend 1 or 2 frames : non-destructively remove the bad frame, then dissolve across immediate or wider neighbors. The type of fix you’d do in your video editor. For many shots this works well and is a fairly invisible fix.

Optical Flow 1 or 2 frames : use it on sequences with camera movement like a motion control slider with pan, tilt, or rotation. GPU accelerated as you’d expect.

 

 

Color correction in the same app.


Full per sequence color correction. It’s non-destructive and  runs in real time even during play. Deep color using linear color space floating point 16bit math on the GPU using custom Metal code. It’s super fast with no compromise on quality. Best of all extreme adjustments never clip image data like whites that can’t be recovered with the next adjustment. Example : apply large exposure increase, then reduce white point or highlights to bring that range back. 

Highlights and Shadows controls include exclusive Bias adjustment that lets you focus a correction tightly on the extreme end of the range or spread it more gradually across the tonal range. 

Exposure • Contrast  • Highlights  • Shadows  • Whites  •  Blacks •  Saturation • Shadow Saturation • Vibrancy • White Balance

 

 

LUT Support


Does your camera let you shoot stills in a log format ? no problem ! Apply up to two LUTs simultaneously in real time. One for colorspace conversion, the second as a Look LUT.

Standard 3D .CUBE format in 33 and 65 point versions.

DaVinci Resolve LUT folders are detected automatically if Resolve is installed. There is no need to duplicate LUTs for Timelapse Forge.

There is also a TimeLapse Forge user LUT folder plus a fourth user configurable path pointing anywhere on your system.

Color Adjustment Panel V1.0

Crop To Aspect Ratio.


Common ratios from 4:3 through 2.35:1, vertical formats like 9:16  included. The crop box displays on the preview window. Adjust it into position and see exactly what’s in and what’s out of the frame. Output resolution and crop interact intelligently: pick either the native resolution of the images or scale to standard sizes like 4K 4096 X 2160.  If input vs output  matches then it frames cleanly, mismatched aspects ( input vs output ) letterbox or sidebox predictably without surprises.

Anamorphic Lens Support


If you can put an anamorphic lens on your stills camera, why not shoot timelapse with it ! 

PAR aspect ratios of  1.0, 1.25, 1.33, 1.5, 1.8 and 2.0.

Output options V1.0

Export Files Ready To Edit In Your NLE or Upload To Social Media


Hardware accelerated* encoding when possible. Correct colorspace metadata set in the MOV file. Drag clips right into your timeline and they look correct.

Codecs: Apple ProRes 422, 422 HQ, 4444,  H.264, H.265/HEVC

Resolution: Original image  size, crop to standard 4K UHD through 1080p presets or Custom

Frame rates: 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, 30

Bit depth: 8-bit and 10-bit, codec dependent, 

Chroma: user setting and codec dependent 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4

* Hardware acceleration of encoding is M model chip dependent. While all of these CPUs have ProRes encoders, H.264 and H.265 specific capabilities will vary. For example M1 supports H.264 4:2:0 colorspace on hardware, but not 4:2:2.  M2 and higher supports 4:2:2. TLF intelligently probes the hardware to default to hardware encoding whenever it’s supported, but of course YMMV based on your exact hardware.

Built for Apple Silicon.


TimeLapse Forge runs on Apple Silicon  M1 and later. 

Three performance modes let you decide how much of the machine to utilize:

Low:  leaves lots of headroom for other apps

Medium:  default setting for most needs, balances speed vs working in other apps

High:  utilize everything the machine has, go as fast as it can

16 GB RAM minimum highly recommended. 8 GB supported with reduced sequence capacity for caching. Quitting apps you don’t need running to free up RAM helps on 8 GB machines. 

The more Performance CPU cores and GPU cores the better, TLF will use them.

Fast internal or external SSD recommended for longer sequences.

TimeLapse Forge

One-time purchase. No subscription. Small version updates included. 

 $79 Intro pricing for V1.0

 macOS 15 or newer   Apple Silicon required – internet connection for install and  activation

Now Available On The Apple App Store