Posts: 50
Threads: 8
Joined: May 2015
I open this thread in order to discuss the way we use ETTR with LRTimelapse. I think it could be a good place to share ETTR attemps with the settings used and also discuss if we could have had a better result with differents settings. This could help people to better understand it with exemples using different settings based on different situations and results. We also could find usefull tips.
I'll start with one of my first attemps where I tried to achieve a night to day holy grail timelapse while seeing stars at the begining.
Gear :
Camera : Canon 550D/T2i
Lens : Canon EF-S 10-18 mm f/4,5-5,6 IS STM
Tripod : Manfrotto 055XPROB
Head : Manfrotto 804RC2
Camera and Lens Parameters :
Focal Length : 10mm
Aperture : f/4.5 (I wish I had a f/2.8 lens but that is the wider I could go)
Maximum ISO : 1600 (550D is not good in high ISO, noise starts at 800 and ISO 3200 doesn't help getting more light, it just crop even more the highlights. If I had a 6D I would have put 3200 or 6400)
Image Review : On, 2sec (needed to enable it for ETTR to works)
After starting shooting, I hid the camera display (with the DISP button) to preserve battery (it only shows the previews after each shot). The cameras stops after 7hours of shooting which was enough for me.
I also used the Lens Twist Trick to avoid aperture flicker (don't really necessary I think, cause ETTR will add a lot of flickering and you'll need to unflicker the sequence in LRTimelapse either way)
Parameters in Magic Lantern
Beeps : OFF (wanted to get some sleep without hearing beeps all the time)
Interval : 26 sec (the best compromise I could find between getting the most stars I can at night and not a too horrible effect on the day)
ETTR Parameters :
- Trigger Mode : Always On
- Slowest Shutter : 20 sec (which seems to be in reallity 22.6 seconds. With the ETTR process and everything, I should have put 27sec interval to be more secure)
- Exposure Target : -0.5EV (default value was -1EV, -0.5EV seems to expose a little more to the right, that will let me more time before it starts changing the ISO and shutter speed down and loosing some crucial light info)
- Hightlight Ignore : 0.2% (not sure if it was the best value, it's the more difficult parameter to choose)
- Midtone SNR Limit : 6 EV (default value)
- Shadow SNR Limit : 2 EV (default value)
- Link to DUAL ISO : OFF
Here is the final video after many tweaks to get it usable :
[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf4lc1nIzxk]
My Camera and Lens are not good enough for shooting stars (but it forces me to try to understand how I could use it to maximize the quality and minimize the noise). I've done also a lot of post prod (with Lightroom, LRTimelapse and After Effects) on it to get rid as more as I can of the light pollution and to see the most stars as I can. I cheated a lot on After effect and speed up the video at 2x (but I used all the pictures to add some sort of stacking to increase brightness and decrease noise). That sequence will be the first one of the video I'm working on, and there will be a big title over the sky in the day part so the weird effect on the clouds won't be that annoying.
Here is the difference between the original (untouched pictures out of the camera) and the final result (you can see the great job of the visual deflicker in LRTimelapse) :
[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IIk9IkWsEo]
The original pictures don't seems so overexposed as I think it would be with ETTR (on the day for exemple, they are not that bright), maybe I missed something.
Now let's add more ETTR attemps to the thread and discuss how we can get the best out of it.
Yannick