I had almost 100 photos of the starry sky. I had taken these in succession while waiting for the Milky Way to appear. I wanted to turn this into a short time-lapse video.

But there was one issue — the previous old time-lapse software I had used stopped working. After a couple of hours of attempting to fix it and get it to recognize file destinations, I gave up. 

This is the time-lapse video created with GlueMotion, adding music and credits afterward via DaVinci Resolve. The music is from my band The Mercury Seven. The second half of the video are cumulative star trails created by StarStax.

In search of a new time-lapse app

I began looking around for another time-lapse creator. GlueMotion (for macOS) caught my eye. This appealing-looking app had a deflickering feature and control over the frames per second. That sounded exactly like what I was looking for, all in an easy-to-use interface.

I downloaded the demo, and it worked really beautifully. The interface was intuitive, all but walking you through the process. I decided to purchase it from the Mac App Store for $17.99

Very quickly, I had a finished time-lapse video. After two hours of struggling with my previous software, I had created a video in less than three minutes. Here’s how it works.

Step 1: Load the files

GlueMotion will prompt you to browse the files you want to load. It loads by folder, not individual files. If you have other folders contained within that folder, it will not load them or any of their contents. However, you can load this afterward if you wish.

GlueMotion supports PNG, JPEG, TIFF and RAW files. For this example, I used full-sized JPEG files encoded at the highest resolution, thinking this would be more than enough resolution for a video that would ultimately be seen on YouTube.

Step 2: Frame editing

Here, you are simply specifying the crop, scale, rotation and more. It also offers some basic editing adjustments, such as saturation, exposure and brightness.

Step 3: Deflickering

When making a time-lapse, there may be some flickering from frame to frame due to minute changes in brightness. This can create unwanted flashing, or flickering. GlueMotion allows you to remove this effect with two modes.

Uniform mode

If your time-lapse gradually changes brightness as the images progress, look no further. Uniform mode is for you. For example, with photos taken in succession, the sky grows gradually darker. In this scenario, uniform mode would be the best mode.

Experimental mode

Use this for basically everything else. This might be when the light or exposure keeps randomly changing. I did not use this mode, so I cannot tell you if it works or not.

Step 4: Encoding settings

You may choose from a variety of settings to export your video, including pixel size.

GlueMotion can export either a QuickTime Movie (MOV) or MPEG-4 (MP4, M4V). You can also choose the video codecs: HEVC, H264, JPEG, Apple Pro Res 422 and Apple Pro Res 4444. I wanted a reasonably high resolution, so I chose MOV and Apple Pro Res 422.

The frames per second (FPS) default to 24. I kept it there.

The original time-lapse video as originally created by GlueMotion.

What I liked

GlueMotion held my hand and walked me through the steps. I like this method as opposed to most video editors, which have different menus that you select. The layout was clean and easy to follow, and didn’t look like it was made by propeller-heads. It also worked quickly at both loading, editing and exporting. The demo version works flawlessly, but imprints a logo in the bottom corner.

What I didn’t like

So far, nothing! I love this app. Be sure to check out GlueMotion and see how you can quickly develop a time-lapse video with your photos!

I made the time-lapse video from the same images that I used to create this star trails, allowing them to do “double-duty.”