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Joined: Feb 2011
The more you change your development settings, the more inaccurate deflickering could get. This is because a lot of the Lightroom/ACR development settings doesn't act linear. Not even the exposure.
That's not really a problem, if you do it right you will get fantastic results, but you have to know how to do it.
My workflow:
1st pass
- Prepare your original images as usual in LRTimelapse
- Save
- Load the folder in Lightroom
- Make your edits/keyframes but don't exaggerate
- Save metadata
- Load the folder in LRTimelapse
- Make your transitions
- Turn on deflicker, set reference area (see deflicker tutorial!)
- Use the Smoothness slider to get a fairly smooth curve but please don't overdo it!
- Save your changes
- Go back to Lightroom, read the changed Metadata.
So far for pass 1. If you have done a lot of processing to you images (thus changing the end appearance severely in contrast to the original files/previews) you will run into the situation, that the original/preview images doesn't match with your development results. In this case I recommend making a second pass.
2nd pass
- Export the images with LRTExport plugin like you would for rendering the video.
- Open the LRT_*-folder with the intermediate sequence in LRTimelapse, ignore the warning. You may have to "refresh" above the folder panel to see the new folder.
- Initialize the XMP-Metadata
- Deflicker as usual
- Save
- In Lightroom: Load metadata for this new sequence
- Export time lapse video
Background:
this way you circumvent the constraint mentioned above. Applying all your settings in the first pass will provide of the whole dynamic range your RAW files offer, a slight deflickering will not harm as well. Now you are safe to switch into JPG processing.
In the second pass we don't need a huge dynamic range anymore, what we need is accurate input to LRTimelapse for deflickering. Because all of the settings are already applied, we can focus on deflickering with no side effects.
Certainly you can use this Idea for a ACR/AE based workflow as well.
My experiences gave me really great results with this workflow, please let me now if this works for you as well.
This is the original sequence without deflicker:
[Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2088648/web/img/...ithout.jpg]
Here after the 1st pass (slight deflickering applied):
[Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2088648/web/img/...stpass.jpg]
And here is the end result after the second pass, you can see the blue line is very smooth and flickerless:
[Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2088648/web/img/...ndpass.jpg]