How can I auto-align slightly shifted photos for a timelapse?
Asked 6/26/2013
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2 answers
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I’m documenting a project over several weeks for a timelapse, but my camera mount allows small movements. From day to day, the framing shifts slightly, and over a few hours the camera can drift downward a bit. Is there a way to batch-align the images based on common reference points so the scene stays steady, then crop the edges afterward? I’m using Sony Vegas Pro, but I’m open to other software if needed.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
13y ago
2 Answers
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align_image_stack is a command-line tool available in the development version of hugin to align overlapping images to facilitate HDR creation, Exposure blending, extended Depth of Field, and Stereoscopic images.
It does exactly what you're looking for, just takes a bunch of images that should overlap perfectly and adjusts them the few pixels/degrees to make that happen, without doing all the complex panorama stuff that Hugin does separately.
Originally by user2094. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user2094
13y ago
0
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Yes. A suitable tool for this is Hugin’s command-line utility align_image_stack, which is designed to align a set of overlapping images that should match closely. It can correct small shifts and slight rotational differences, which is exactly the kind of drift you’re describing for timelapse source frames.
Example usage on Linux:
align_image_stack -a tif *.JPG
This outputs a series of aligned TIFF files that you can then import into your video editor and crop to remove the empty edges caused by the alignment.
So the workflow is:
- Batch-align the still images with
align_image_stack. - Import the aligned outputs into Vegas Pro or another editor.
- Crop the frame edges as needed.
This is essentially similar in goal to stabilization, but done at the image-sequence stage before assembling the timelapse.
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