I've been doing a couple of test renders with my Go Pro HD Black with the new software and although I'm not having any problems up to the point of creating the video, once I play back the final video I get horrendous artifacting, the kind of thing you get on satellite TV during bad weather.

There is a distinct pattern to it, it seems worse in areas of the image that don't change frame to frame, and the whole image cleans itself up once every 6 seconds (at 30fps) which I guess must be a key frame in the mpeg file to reset any artifacting issues.

Certain parts of the image suffer more than others, but most noticeable is that if there is a lot of activity from frame to frame everything is stable, it's usually only when there is no activity the problem dramatically increases.

I've tried rendering in everything up to VHQ and every sequence has exhibited the same issue so far, I haven't had one clean rendered sequence yet.

Now this was all experienced playing back the video in windows media player, when I played back using quicktime the vide would just hang on the mpeg keyframes and then show no movement until the next keyframe. Eventually quicktime just hung and I had to quit.

Finally I tried using jRiver media centre and that has been the only player that has played back the rendered sequence artefact and fault free.

So it does not appear to be a problem with the source material, or LRT itself, but it does appear to be an issue with the rendered mpeg 4 video not being produced in a way that is compatible with all playback devices.

I'm using LRT3.1 on LR5. I was using the large memory version of LRT and 64 bit version of windows 8 & LR.

Most of the players have problems with the high bitrate/high resolutions that LRTimelapse produces. Those sequences are for further post processing. Try exporting with lower quality setting, and Full HD those files play fine. The others are for further post processing and will load fine in your favorite video processor.

I mean it does not make sense to create huge files just for monitor playback only because you can - current hardware and players just don't play that back - look at the size of those files!

I'm not sure I follow the reasons why this is happening.

I never had any articating issues ever with LRT2, but it seems no matter what quality setting I use with LRT3 I get artifacting all the time. It's not just an issue that happens with a few frames here and there, it's large areas of the movie and all of the time (apart from when the mpeg key frames reset the image).

I don't have any other post processing software, I had fully intended only to use Lightroom and LRT3 on there own to create the movies, do I have to go and buy some post processing software to make this problem go away now?

I'm guessing this can't be a common problem as I've never seen this mentioned before, but would really like to get it resolved otherwise I'll have to go back to LRT2 and LR4 again.

I never had any problems playing back those videos in Windows Media Player or VLC. I was only suggesting to not render in the ultra high or very high settings or higher then Full HD, because most of the pc's are not able to playback that footage smoothly. Have you tried VLC player?

As a follow up I was doing some filming at the weekend on my Go Pro in high res and playing that video back caused juddering on all the aforementioned players except again for jRiver. So it may just be that those players don't like high bitrate/high resolution movies.

I'll play some more, but as you say it doesn't look like it's got anything to do with the encoding after all.

Having read even further into this, it looks like there is a problem in general with Windows 8 and video playback. Lots of posts on the web about stuttering playback and no one seems to have an answer as yet (not that has worked for me at least). This seems to be at the root of the problem I've been having.