In part one of this tutorial, you learned how to create a time-lapse in Lightroom, with a setting of 24fps or 29.97fps. But what if you want to use a nonstandard frame rate?

Lightroom doesn’t allow you to manually adjust how many frames are displayed per second if it’s less than one frame. Perfect for slideshows — not-so-perfect for timelapses. But by knowing how to customize your time-lapse templates outside of Lightroom, you can slow down your timelapses (or speed them up), making for quite the cool effect.

Locate Your Presets Folder

In order to edit your time-lapse templates, you first have to locate them. First, go to your Lightroom preferences, and click on the “Presets” tab. From there, click “Show Lightroom Presets Folder …”

Clicking this will take you to your Lightroom folder where it keeps all your develop presets, slideshow presets and more. Open up the Slideshow Templates folder, and then the User Templates folder.

Here you’ll see a bunch of templates, which you downloaded earlier when first creating your time-lapse.

The first step to template freedom is to duplicate one of the templates and to rename it. It doesn’t matter which one you duplicate, but rename it to something that makes sense. In this case, I wanted to create a 12fps time-lapse, so I named my file accordingly.

Edit the Time-lapse Speed

From here, open a text editing program. On Mac, this might be TextEdit. On Windows, look for Notepad. Or, if you have an HTML editing program, even better!

Open the file you just duplicated, and do a search for “speed.” In the first result you’ll see something like the following:

This number is determined by dividing 1 by the number of frames you want per second. You’ll see that 24fps has a speed of 0.041666666666667 (which is the same as 1 divided by 24).

If I were to want 12 frames per second, the speed would be 0.08333333333 (1 divided by 12).

If you need a quick calculator that can cut and paste, go to Google and type in 1/12, and you’ll get this output.

Paste this value into the template.

Edit the Template Name

If you scroll down in your file, you’ll see a line for “internalName” and “title.” Edit the name to the new frame rate. For instance: “12fps Time-lapse.” Make sure they’re both the same. This is what displays in the Lightroom Templates in the Slideshow module.

Then click Save, and restart Lightroom. You should see your new template, and be able to export the video with your new settings!

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Music courtesy of Kevin MacLeod