Render Presets - cmuche/octoprint-timelapseplus GitHub Wiki

A Render preset defines how the timelapse should be rendered.

Name

A recognizable name for your Render Preset

Framerate

This is the base framerate of the timelapse. Corresponds to how many of your snapshots will be used to create one second of the final timelapse (FPS). If you don't use the Frame Interpolation, this will be the final framerate of your video.

Resize

Resizes your video. This also defines the final resolution of your timelapse. It's helpful when creating for example a small GIF image from frames captured with your 1080p webcam.

Combine Frames

If you want to make your timelapse shorter or if you have too many snapshots, you can reduce the number of input frames for the timelapse rendering. When combining frames, chunks of frames will be generated and the frames in each of these chunks will be merged to create a single frame.

Chunk Size

This defines how many input frames will be chunked and combined together. If you have for example 1000 frames in your Frame Collection and you combine them with a Chunk Size of 5, the timelapse will consist of 20 frames (if you would then choose a framerate of 10, your timelapse would have a duration of 2 seconds).

Method

Timelapse+ can combine frames in a chunk in multiple ways:

Drop Frames

Only the last frame of a chunk is used, the other frames will be dropped. This just reduces the number of total frames.

Blend

Frames in a chunk are blended together to create a motion-blur-like effect.

Weighted Blend

This is similar to Blend but weights the last frames of a chunk more and therefore adds a little more motion perception than the Blend effect.

Fade

This adds a Fade-In and/or Fade-Out effect to the start and/or end of the video. The color can be customized.

Pre/Post Roll

You can add a Pre Rolls ans/or a Post Roll to your timelapse. These are segments before or after the actual timelapse in which the print is presented first for example.

Max Blur Radius / Zoom Factor

The Max Blur Radius and Max Zoom Factor apply for Pre/Post Rolls which have the Blur and/or Fade Animation enabled. During this, the Pre/Rost Roll will animate from blurred to normal or vice versa and zoom in or out. There are the max factors for these animations.

Pre-Roll and Post-Roll Settings

The following settings are individual for either the Pre- or Post Roll.

Duration

The length of the Pre/Post roll. If the duration is 0 it's disabled.

Type

Defines what is shown during the Pre/Post Roll.

  • Still Frame
    Shows just the first frame if it's the Pre Roll or the last frame if it's the Post Roll
  • Still Frame (Final)
    Always show the last frame
  • Short Timelapse
    Shows a 'mini timelapse' of the whole print over the defined duration

Ease Function

The ease function is comes into play when Blur or Zoom is enabled. It defines how the animation is mapped to different values and can smooth the animation (more natural movement). It mimics the ease functions of CSS, you can have a look here.

Text Settings

If Text is enabled, Timelapse+ will show a text box displaying information of the print. This only affects the Pre Roll!

Size and Color

The Size setting defined the size of the text, Text Color and Background Color define the color of it (similar to the Timecode text size).

RegEx

The RexEx defines which information are displayed and how they are formatted. The RegEx can define multiple groups. The expression is matched against the file name of the print for which the rendered Frame Collection was captured. The file extension will be stripped. If the expression matches, a new text line will be generated for each group result.

Example

Let's assume you have a GCODE file:
3DBenchy - OPTIMAL 0,16mm - Extrudr PLA NX-2 200C.gcode

The Frame Collection which was created contains this information and stores the print name as:
3DBenchy - OPTIMAL 0,16mm - Extrudr PLA NX-2 200C

Now we want to extract the model name, the layer height and the filament out of this and display it in the Pre Roll.
Therefore we define a RegEx which matches against this name and extracts the needed information:
(.+) - [A-Z]+ ([0-9\\,\\.m]+) - (.+) [0-9]+C

To test your RegEx string, you can use tools like regex101:
image
Note that the mentioned groups are highlighted here

Timelapse+ will when iterate over all groups it finds and create a text box like this:

3DBenchy
0,16mm
Extrudr PLA NX-2

Frame Interpolation

With Frame Interpolation you can generate Frames between your captured Frames. This increases the framerate and/or length of your final timelapse.

Interpolated Framerate

This will be the final framerate of your timelapse. All frames which are needed to reach this framerate (based on your base framerate described above) will be auto-generated. As an example: If you choose 10 as your base Framerate and 30 as your Interpolated Framerate, it would generate 20 frames for every second.

Mode

There are two modes which define how missing frames will be calculated.

  • Blend
    Base frames are just blended into another. This is cheap and fast.
  • Motion Compensated
    This uses motion detection algorithms to determine which parts of the interpolated base frames have moved. It will try to mimic this movement and tries to guess what in-between-frames would look like. Keeep in mind that this is very costly and can take quite a lot of time.

Motion Compensation Settings

If you choose Motion Compensated you can fine-tune the algorithm parameters. You can find more information about these settings here.