This post was last modified: 2018-01-09, 10:46 by Gunther.

Hi,

A couple of questions regarding visual deflicker for a Long Term Construction Time Lapse:

1. Can you over do it? I really don't know what level it should be at because the lighting is so different any way. Should I just put it at the full 50?
2. After you've done one lot of deflicker and clicked save, then go on to use "refine", does it A) reset what you've just done or B) add to the deflicker you've already applied.


Would love some advice on this as it's hard to see results on the long term construction time lapses.

Thanks,
Olivia

Normally deflicker is not the approach that you would use in the first instance for Long Term Timelapse. The reason is, that those images normally do not differ only in luminance flicker, they differ in Contrast, Hue etc.
That's why the Long Term Workflow in LRT Pro offers a couple of filters to remove images from the long term timelapse that are off regarding contrast, brightness, hue. After this you should have a sequence with images that do not differ so much anymore. Then you can apply the deflicker to them.
For deflickering you could set the smoothing all the way to the right to get a straight reference curve, then the deflicker will try to bring all images to the same average brightness. Refine will use the last deflicker as basis and add to it, so that you can get a result closer to the smoothing line.
But please note - if you have images with big differences like in Long Term sequences, deflicker cannot produce totally smooth results because auf the differences in contrast. Deflicker only works on the average brightness. But nevertheless, if you combine the long term filtering with the deflicker and then use "Motion Blur Plus" when rendering as the 3rd tool, you'll get very good results.

Thanks so much. I have been filtering out the bad images and that really helps, but obviously still a lot of variation. So basically would you agree...I can't overdo deflicker with the long term time lapse.

No, but always remember that you can also use the reference are to define the reference for deflicker and filtering, even in the long term workflow. You can set the reference area by clicking and dragging into the preview panel.
There is lot of freedom when using this in combination with the filters. You can even set different references for different filter steps, if you do them one after the other. Just think about what could make sense for your sequence.