TimeLapse Forge FAQ — Licensing, Formats & Requirements

Most questions are answered in the dreaded manual so please start there.

The handy PDF and HTML online version are searchable and less than 20 pages.

PDF Manual for TimeLapse Forge 1.7

Online Manual for TimeLapse Forge V1.7

My license key doesn't work ?

You may have some incorrect characters, additional characters or missing characters in the information you are entering in the licensing popup. It’s case sensitive and very particular about what is put into the system, so double check that first. If you keep having issues, contact us at support@timelapseforge.com. Having a screen shot or writing down the exact error message will also help track down what the problem might be.

How many installs do I get ?

3 for ver 1.x. Laptop & desktop of a single user is the expected use for most folks.These are for your own personal use. This is not intended to be 3 seats for 3 people, especially when those people don’t share the same household. If three people are using TLF then they need 3 seats, one for each of them. This is not buy one for yourself and share which is a violation of basic trust and the licensing.

Why does it say I don't have any more installs left ?

You have used up your installs. Deactivate one to free that seat up and use it on another machine. If you go to the email you were sent when you purchased the license, click on “view order” and sign in to [provider], you can click on your license key and manually deactivate any licenses you aren’t using, which frees them up for activation again.

How do I contact support ?

Before you do, consider this is not a giant company with dedicated staff of 50 people in support. Every request takes up someone’s time that could be used creating new features, fixing bugs, and, well, getting a good 8 hrs of sleep or having weekends off.

With decades of user experience and interface design, we approached the interface with a few guiding principles:

Keep it Simple Silly, and hopefully obvious how things work.

Don’t hide key features in wing menus, odd small UI buttons. There is a contextual menu for the sequence panel. There are tool tips to help give you an explanation when needed.

Did you read the manual or format support page first ? we won’t respond to questions clearly answered in the manual or which involve basic computer skills.

Are you running the required the macOS 15.0 or newer ? If you copied the app onto an older OS it may not work, may not work correctly or other weirdness. Intel machines are NOT supported, there is no x86 binary in the app at all.If you think it’s a bug, can you reproduce it ? and provide any files needed ? and be sure to indicate OS and basic hardware configuration, where you media is stored.

Is it an install or licensing problem with [Provider] ?

Contact us at

support@timelapseforge.com

My camera's RAW format doesn't work ?

Check the manual or format support page first. If we say your format of RAW should work, then you likely found a bug. 🙁 Please contact us, provide us with a couple sample files and we’ll see if it can be supported or what the problem may be..

There are a few points here :

We can and do support a lot of formats including some older and uncommon cameras, but please don’t expect support for a 20 year old camera. We do support some very exotic cameras used in professional high end projects such as the Achel 9X7. We can consider supporting very special purpose cameras but there may be a cost involved depending on how many people are actually going to use it for high effort and low number of users.

We have encountered corrupt RAW files. In one case the RAW files only had the JPG preview in them. The actual RAW data was completely missing. TLF will display an error in the image preview area indicating this. If you locate the actual file, its size will typically be less than 1 mb vs the normal 10-20 mb or more of that format. In other cases the RAW image data was damaged, likely when it was written to the camera card. Unfortunately, it happens.

In the case of another brand of camera, each body seems to make somewhat unique to that model RAW file content. Sure its got metadata to decode and figure it out , but we still encountered at least one corrupt file. The JPG preview looked ok in the Finder, but the RAW data itself was bad, or at least not consistent with its metadata. Hopefully this one file was a one time thing.

Why Isn't My Sequence Fully Caching ?

If you have a machine with 8gb of ram TLF can allocate about 2GB for cache which may not be enough for a particular sequence.

On a machine with 16GB, or ideally 24+ GB go to Menu TimeLapse Forge -> Settings -> Performance and change caching to High. TLF will then look to allocate about 6-8 GB or about 1/2 the available free RAM which will hold considerably more frames.

As of release V1.2 TLF has new expanded dynamic RAM management. What this means is if you quit other applications also currently running which frees up RAM, TLF can now detect that and allocate more of that freed RAM to its own cache. Restarting the app is NOT required for this to work. 😊

You can still try the High setting on an 8 GB machine if there are no other apps running and TLF can actually allocate real RAM. The problem is the OS can allocate storage which turns out to be Virtual Memory- aka Swap Disk Memory. Use of virtual memory aka disk swapping will significantly reduce performance. If you have a utility app that shows memory use its easy to check ram usage. There is the OS supplied Mac SSD/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor option as well to monitor RAM. If you do go into swap aka virtual memory, a reboot may be required to force the OS to fully stop using it once its allocated. Virtual memory and swap space is OS level managed.

Why Doesn't the Eyedropper / Sampler Work ?

Specific OS versions – 15.8, 27.2 broke they eye dropper tool. Update to latest vers of TLF V1.7+ and it should work again. Eyedropper tools are tricky to implement because of what they do so OS updates can break them. So we patch it, and release the fix as soon as we reasonably can.

Can You Add This Other Export Format ?

TLF was designed to support 2 workflows and needs.

Typical editing post process where you want to hand off your sequence to an editor in a high quality format, with or without being framed to the format being edited. 4K, 2K in all the common aspect ratios from 16:9 through 2.35:1. ProRes or high bit rate h.264 422 10bit similar to what many cameras generate.

Quick posts to social media. There’s nothing like being able to take your sequence just shot and upload it to the site of your choice including supporting square 1:1 and 9:16 vertical formats in 1080. H.264 or h.265 with a bunch of settings for low bit rate quick to upload files.

Need MXF For Delivery?

Export ProRes MOV, then:

ffmpeg -i output.mov -c copy output.mxf

Rewraps to MXF Op1a in seconds. No re-encode, codec data identical. Other commercial paid apps like EditReady can also rewrap ProRes MOV into MXF.

If we get enough requests for MXF output we may consider adding this at some point. Its not a V1.x feature consideration right now.

Release Notes and Is There A Planned Product Roadmap ?

Yes ! There is a nice list of smaller features that didn’t make 1.0 to add short term. Those will be added in over V1.1 – 1.5.

Ver 1.01 June ’26 was optimizations in playback & caching, UI, other under the hood improvements for future features.

V1.02 released in Jul ’26 provided a rewrite of the Exposure Leveler image correction, special handling of high frequency flicker cases, more cache improvements, new per frame correction tools in Exposure Leveler, support for direct sales & licensing of the app, and more internal work.

V1,1 became V1.2 release. Extensive list of big new features like full screen playback, color notch filters and more. see release notes. Display more sequence meta data like camera, exposure.

V1,5 Full screen playback, 1:1 zoom mode, Motion Blur, Notch Filter, 5-10X faster metadata reading especially on network volumes, UI improvements, CR3 improvements, more cache code fine tuning.

V1.5.1 Some bug fixes, UI clean ups, small fixes like display sequence shooting rate.

V1.7 Ability to display sequence lists in full screen mode, or hide it, when moving CTI to location that isn’t cached that frame moves to priority decode for more responsiveness, improved UI updating when moving sliders, Eyedropper in Notch filter stopped working in OS 15.8 now fixed, was fine in 15.7

There are some really amazing larger features for… well… you will have to wait until they are done. Hate saying trust us it will be amazing, but, well, it will be !

Will There Be A Windows Version ?

It’s a consideration down the road, but it’s a very very high effort project. TLF is written using macOS technologies and Apple Silicon optimizations for performance. A windows version would for all practical purposes be like writing the app all over again to make the most of what that platform has to offer.

Will There Be A iPad Version ?

FAQ’S