First and foremost, to any who read this and respond, thank you for taking the time. I am new to the forums and only on my 5th time-lapse using LRTimelapse 4. The program is amazing and I am learning so much with each attempt. My most recent outing involved a gorgeous sunset in Fort Lauderdale. I shot in manual mode but opted to use a circular polarizer in the beginning in an attempt to keep shutter speeds longer since I had rippling water in the foreground (I have since read in the forums that these filters are not a good idea do to the variance in vignetting that occurs as you peel them back). I adjusted on the polarizer until it was at a minimum, and then lost it completely and continued into the night adjusting shutter speed and ISO. I had success manually entering HG keyframes and the only down side is the slight vignette movement. My main question is this.

When using the LRT motion blur, is preserving long shutter speeds that important. in the tutorials it seems that better results come from just allowing the ISO to climb to crazy levels.

If I were to modify a matte box to allow me to easily drop in straight ND's of higher quality would these yield a smoother end result? or am I going out of my way to create a headache that the motion blur in LRT will make a nonissue upon export.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

-Phil

Hi Phil,
LRT Motion Blur Plus does a great job but cannot fully compensate for long exposures.

I'd rather use smaller apertures and ramp them and deflicker the aperture-flicker later with the visual deflicker, than mess with changing filters, if you are planning a holy grail until the milky way and need all the light you can get.

If you stop earlier then total darkness, you can use a filter - but I'd not change it or remove it because this will give you trouble later when editing. You can read more about this here: http://forum.lrtimelapse.com/Thread-why-...holy-grail

Thanks Gunther.

I totally agree that the color cast can be an issue. After seeing the rotating vignette from the Circular ND, that option will also be canned going forward. I do however want to finish off this attempt if for no other reason then to really get a grip on the ins and outs of LRT.

I am using LRT 4 which seems to automate all the exposure jumps that it has Exif Data for. Am I correct in assuming that one of the older tutorials would give me an idea of how to properly manually adjust the exposures of my ND Jumps in Lightroom before allowing the LRT 4 auto holy grail to takeover for the remainder? Currently I placed HG keyframes manually and got the blue line smooth. I then placed blue keyframes before and after those jumps and proceeded with your method from LRT4 HG Tutorial. I am positive that you have a better way to handle it, I just haven't stumbled across it yet. Am I correct in assuming I should make a pass in Lightroom to deal solely with exposure with HG Keyframes, and then do a second pass for the actual look with blue keyframes? is that possible with the new updates to LRT 4?

Thanks again for the help. I really respect that you stand behind your program and help users get the most out of it.

-Phil