LRTimelapse Forum - A difficult Holy Grail shoot

Here's my situation. I'm going to be recording timelapses in somewhat difficult circumstances and I'm looking for ideas on the best way to shoot them.

The timelapses will record 24 hour time periods but often in changing and unpredictable light conditions. This includes night to day and day to night but also indoor shoots where various lighting may be turned on and off, with people coming in and out of frame in dark and light clothing, in a moving vehicle at night, etc.

Coupled with this it will often not be possible to have access to the camera during the shoot.

I'm shooting with a Canon 5D iii and Canon intervalometer at the moment. I'll also need some external power as I won't always have access to mains power. I have an Android phone with DSLR Dashboard.

Given the nature of the finished video I want to 'underexpose' dark shots, ie if it's indoors at night with the lights off I want it to be pretty dark not for the camera to bring exposure up too much (too long shutter speeds would mean missed shots also of course).

I want to avoid things like flicker as far as possible given the shooting circumstances but it seems that Gunther's classic Holy Grail Technique, splendid though it is, won't really work in this situation.

I'm thinking that I might shoot in Manual with Auto ISO (on the Canon you can set upper and lower ISO values for Auto ISO so I'll get a range of allowable exposure levels). Obviously this will introduce some flicker which I'll take out as far as possible in LRTimelapse.

Are there any better options? Will the DSLR Dashboard Auto Grail feature that Gunther is working on help with this? Any ideas generally?

Hi Dipper,
I don't think Auto Holy Grail will work for this.
For this special use case, just use one of the camera automatics, I don't think there is a better option. Then try deflickering as best as you can. You could as well remove very dark / very bright frames with the "select by criteria" option in LRT.
Best
Gunther

OK, cool, thanks for the quick reply.

I've started shooting and have run into some problems with post-processing.

1) I'm using Adobe DNG Converter, Bridge CS4, LRTimelapse 3.2 and After Effects CS4. I'm finding that exposure changes made to keyframes in Bridge are not appearing when reloading in LRTimelapse. It seems it might be because I'm using an older version of Bridge? Is CS4 compatible with LRTimelapse?

2) What's the best way to get the maximum performance for LRTimelapse? I have 16GB RAM and I'm using the Large Memory Launcher but still get occasional out of memory warnings (I'm processing 7200 sRAWs each time, I know that's a lot but it is necessary - the end product is not a conventional linear movie).

CS4 is rather old. But you can try setting LRTimelapse to the old process version in the settings (Lightroom3 process ) - please start the process again then with initializing. I'm however not entirely sure if it will work with CS4 - normally CS5 is required, but please try it.

If I were you, I would spend the ~100 US$ in Lightroom 5 then you have the latest process version (=way better quality then CS4 in terms of RAW development) - and a streamlined workflow that doesn't even require you to use After Effects, Bridge, ACR.