Hello. When shooting a timelapse, quite often exposure values swing up and down with my Nikon D810 and D850, appearing in the LRTimeplapse visual luminosity column as values ranging from around .01 to .02. Both cameras often do it at shutter speeds from 1/160 and slower, never at faster speeds. Please see attached screenshots, it's really strange. I'm wondering if this happens to anyone else. LRTimlapse seems to take care of it with deflicker, but I'm not a pro so not sure if my mind is tricking me! The final renditions look great, but it seems the pros online often spot sneaky flickering. For this small range of flickering, is this well within the range of what LRTimlapse can handle? I love these workhorse cameras, want to keep using them.

Generally deflicker is exactly for this: remove flicker that cameras might be introducing to mechanical inconsistencies for example in the lenses aperture or the shutter.

But in your case, that's a really strange pattern of flicker, even for aperture flicker, since it's all over and very uniformly. An it happens with both of your cameras, which is strange. Is this both with the same Lens maybe? If so, try to use another lens and see if you still experience it. Also try shooting a sequence with aperture wide open to eliminate the reason "aperture flicker". This would be the most common reason.

Also, I'd recommend that you set a flat profile in the camera, best would be "Flat" or "Standard" and no additional edits which would be applied to the preview image (responsible for the blue curve).

Generally this kind of Flicker is no problem at all for LRTimelapse to reomve via Deflicker. But still it would be interesting to know, what is causing it, therefore I would recommend to try narrowing down the reasons to see where if comes from.

Please let me know what you find out, it really interests me!

thank you Gunther, some great ideas there to test out! I had assumed it was the shutters on both cameras that caused this, but it makes much more sense that a lens maybe is the cause. I will do some tests when I have a chance, and will post results here. Also will review my archives, find out which lens or lenses were used when this flickering appears.

Hey Gunther, I had some time to go through my timelapse archive. Here's what I found in there: the culprit is indeed a lens and not the D810 or D850 bodies. I use primarily 3 lenses, and it's the Nikkor 24-70 f/2.8 G ED that makes the exposures oscillate so uniformly up and down like that. My 14-24 and 70-200 lenses don't do it at all.

On the 24-70 lens, it doesn't do it from f2.8 to f4.5, but it starts to kick in at f5.6, though not totally uniform, as you can see in the image. At f6.3 and up (or should I say down?) the exposure will fluctuate very uniformly.

I don't think the shutter speed has much to do with it, though there were two night sequences I did at f6.3, which had none of this crazy fluctuation and the shutter speed was at 6 seconds. So that was an anomaly. Maybe the long shutter speed gave the aperture a chance to "settle in" with each shot.

Here's another weird sequence with this 24-70 lens, taken with fast moving thick clouds above that made the sun come and go very quickly. There is a noticeable difference in how much the exposure fluctuated when in direct sunlight and when in shadow. The shutter speed remained the same throughout the sequence, at 2 seconds.

This post was last modified: 2023-11-07, 10:47 by Gunther.

I think you have your culprit. :-)
See this video, to understand, why it happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVnqd4f3Kmk

LRTimelapse will totally remove that in a lossless way, so usually there is nothing to worry about. Personally, I don't care about any aperture flicker since many years because I just remove it with LRT. Back in the days, where there was no solution for this, I needed to shoot wide open all the time, to come around this. This was one of the main reasons for me to start developing LRTimelapse. If you are interested in the story, check out my 10 years video on the main page: https://lrtimelapse.com/