Hi,

I have a question about High ISO speed noise reduction (internal camera function) at night. Do you use it, or turn it off?
What works best for you if you want to keep noise at minimal levels even at 3200 iso? For example Canon R5 have Low, Standart and High noise reduction functions. Does it record noise reduction into Raw file?

This post was last modified: 2022-07-23, 10:29 by Gunther.

Ususally there are two types of noise reduction in cameras.
1) The noise reduction where the camera records a dark frame after the actual exposure. This will double the exposure time and should therefore be turned off when shooting timelapse.
2) A noise reduction that the camera applies to recorded JPGs and Previews - this doesn't matter for your Raw files, which you should be shooting for timelapse.

Bottomline: for timelapse turn any in camera noise reduction off. Work with Noise Reduction in Lightroom, if needed.

Thank you, Gunther!
Maybe you know some examples for a good noise removal in lightroom? I just can't find the right settings for me, especially when doing holy grail timelapses and ISO reaches 3200 or a little higher. At night many people uses almost the same settings (3200 iso and 20 to 30 sec exposure, so noise removal settings also could be pretty the same depending on camera and brightness of the lens of course.) Just thinking...

There is not "the right setting" - it depends on the images. Just make a visual approach, do only as much as you need - don't make the keyframes too smooth, this will cause banding and is counter productive for timelapse.
Later when rendering apply some "Motion Blur" in the LRT Render Dialog, this will help way more than the noise reduction on single images.

If one is not satisfied wirh the denoising in LR, wouldnt it be possibe to denoise the RAW files with e.g. DxO PureRAW, export them from DxO Pure RAW as DNG files and then proceed in LRT/LR?

The denoising in DxO is IMHO fare better then in LR, nut I never used it in combination with LRT.

I would not recommend that. First of all for timelapse it's mostly not worth the effort as I explained above. And second, if you export DNG from other tools they will not be "Raw" anymore, they will consist of an embedded TIFF file which already has the developments baked in. This would not be ideal to process in LRT anymore.
If you really want to go that route, rather do the LRT/LR Workflow first, export the intermediary sequence and pass this to another tool for additional denoising or whatsoever.

I can also well imagine that flickering occurs when denoising with DxO or other tools. The process is definitely not linear.