Hi all

My first time posting on here, I'm new to timelapse and finding it both enjoyable (at times) and frustrating (quite a lot of the time at the moment, when processing!). I'm trying to make a timelapse that goes from night to day and day to night, and getting great results from the day parts but any parts that have really dark sky I'm not able to make look good. Please see these two examples on Vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/50377982
https://vimeo.com/50377981

Password is: ihateflicker

Ultimately I want to create a longer piece which contains several different segments, which I'm trying to put together in Premiere.

As you can see the night to day one has some banding in the sky. I guess this is more of a compression issue than deflickering, but still I can't seem to make it go away, even when exporting from Premiere with Animation (Lossless) and then encoding with MPEG Streamclip to ProRes 422, or any of the other high quality (and therefore large file) codecs. H264 is worse as you can imagine.

The day to night one is more of a headache though - it has horrible flickery banding in the sky. I've tried everything I can think of or have read about - I've done Gunther's two pass workflow (thanks for the software and the book & web resources Gunther, it is all brilliant), and also tried putting the .mov into After Effects after it's exported from Lightroom and using GBDeflicker on it, which maybe makes a slight difference but nothing significant. The first time I tried I noticed there was a fair bit of highlight clipping, which is apparently a big problem for GBDeflicker, and presumably LRTimelapse too, so I re-edited the Raw files with super low contrast and lots of Highlight Recovery, then applied the deflickering and then re-applied contrast in Premiere - still no major improvement.

It was all shot on AV on a Canon DSLR, at maximum aperture for the lens (f4), shutter speeds around 1/5 of a second on the dark sections.

Why is this happening? :-( If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions they'd be much appreciated.

Hi, I'm not seeing much of flicker there, taking into account that you didn't shoot in M Mode this is really good - I think your main problem might be the banding. Those kind of images are hard to compress for the H.264 compressor. First to get rid of all the flicker I would go for manual exposure and use the holy grail approch (see my tutorial at http://lrtimelapse/tutorial ) than you might want to go with the RAW+XMPs processed and deflickered with LRTimelapse right into After Effects as a image sequence. There you can apply CC Time Blend (set it to 20%) to smooth out the last bit of flickering. Then you will still experience a bit of banding when finally going to H.264 for Vimeo, but that's unfortunately unavoidable and not a problem of your timelapse.

Hi, I'm not seeing much of flicker there, taking into account that you didn't shoot in M Mode this is really good - I think your main problem might be the banding. Those kind of images are hard to compress for the H.264 compressor. First to get rid of all the flicker I would go for manual exposure and use the holy grail approch (see my tutorial at http://lrtimelapse/tutorial ) than you might want to go with the RAW+XMPs processed and deflickered with LRTimelapse right into After Effects as a image sequence. There you can apply CC Time Blend (set it to 20%) to smooth out the last bit of flickering. Then you will still experience a bit of banding when finally going to H.264 for Vimeo, but that's unfortunately unavoidable and not a problem of your timelapse.

Hey Gunther, thanks for your response (sorry for not replying sooner, I was away over the weekend), I'll def try what you suggest with the After Effects Image Sequence and if that doesn't improve the banding I guess it's back out into the field and starting again with Manual etc.

Thanks again!

Hey again Gunther, have reprocessed the files using After Effects and the CC Time Blend and it is a massive improvement, so thanks for the suggestion, cheers!

Sam