LRTimelapse Forum

So, I have been working on learning the Lightroom/LRTimelapse workflow and I can never completely remove the flicker. It is improved over the uncorrected sequence, but it's never ever smooth.

I've spent a lot of today and parts of other days learning this and I feel like I'm hitting a brick wall. I've attached a sample image. This test sequence was shot over a half-hour, 1 shot every thirty seconds, from 0800 to 0830. It is a clear, sunny day with no clouds.

I've tried placing the reference area in the sky, in the gravel in the bottom half, and spanning both. I've tried moving it around within each of those areas (I don't mean animating it with keyframes). I've tried varying the smoothness and the strength (knowing that you shouldn't have to touch 'strength' 99% of the time) I usually get about the same results every time, though I haven't yet rendered out any side-by-sides in After Effects to make sure.

Any helpful advice would be appreciated....

Hi, only by watching your image I can't say much. I would at least need a screenshot with the curves and the reference area. But even than it's difficult to state a remote diagnosis.

There is certainly no guarantee that you will be able to remove each and every kind of flicker with LRTimelapse - although most people get perfect results in most cases. But deflickering begins on shooting. That's why I dedicated that area a whole chapter in my Ebook describing all strategies to prevent flicker on shooting. All residual flicker can normally be easily removed in LRTimelapse, if you do it right.

Please read the following FAQ articles:
http://forum.lrtimelapse.com/Thread-how-...red-curves
and
http://forum.lrtimelapse.com/Thread-i-tr...flickering
if nothing else helps, you could as well try the two-pass-approach:
http://forum.lrtimelapse.com/Thread-how-...d-workflow

I hope I could help -
best wishes
Gunther

I will read the articles. In the meantime, here's some pics demonstrating the curves.

Before Deflicker


After Deflicker: Avg Smooth = 10, Strength = 10



After Deflicker: Avg Smooth = 15, Strength = 10



After Deflicker: Avg Smooth = 20, Strength = 10



I could also show an example where the area selected is sky not ground, or some of both.

I don't have your Ebook, but i did read your links above extensively. I've tried the two-pass approach but not extensively, as it seems to me this is a relatively simple sequence of photos. Bright daytime sunlight, no clouds.

This is a long-term (six months' duration) construction project. Aperture priority, f14 which may be a bit small. I may open it up to f11. With an NDX8 filter, I'm getting exposures around 1/20 to 1/40.

Hi, the thing is, when you take images at different days with a lot time between, Lightning changes a lot. Another problem could be aperture flicker introduced by the small aperture. I always recommend shooting wide open to avoid this.
Like I said, there is no guarantee that you will remove all flicker in each end every situation, it seems to me that your sequence has more to it than the "normal" flicker. So I would try going for the two step approach and do the best you can.

(2012-03-23, 10:47)gwegner Wrote: [ -> ]Hi, the thing is, when you take images at different days with a lot time between, Lightning changes a lot. Another problem could be aperture flicker introduced by the small aperture. I always recommend shooting wide open to avoid this.
Like I said, there is no guarantee that you will remove all flicker in each end every situation, it seems to me that your sequence has more to it than the "normal" flicker. So I would try going for the two step approach and do the best you can.

OK so perhaps I should open up all the way on this? This lens goes up to f3.5. I have the opportunity today to reset the camera. I think you're right, perhaps it would be wise to open up all the way even though that will mean shorter exposures. I have the ND filter on it so that will still slow down the exposure by 3 stops.

That's still going to be an exposure shorter than 1/100, which I understand from the reading I've done on this is a good exposure for introducing a bit of blur in moving objects and is desirable for the final timelapse movie.

I would definitely recommend that.

I tried a different sequence, from 1120 to 1600 on a single day with an exposure every 10 minutes. It's only 29 frames but at least for this 1 second sequence the results were much better than with the above sequence. Today I will retrieve a full week of images and I'll have the opportunity to test deflicker on longer sequences.

Coming back to this thread after a while. Still not satisfied with the results from LRTimelapse:

1) a previous version showed odd smoothed (green) curve when 'deflicker' was first clicked. It looked very smooth at the default setting of 10/10. I would slide the avg. smooth slider to 20, it would actually look 'rougher'. Then I would return it to 10, and the green curve would look rougher than the original green curve showed when I first clicked, "deflicker". The latest update seems to have fixed this.

2) I still cannot get a satisfactory result with LRTimelapse. I have followed the tutorials repeatedly. I have experimented endlessly with setting the reference area, which certainly alters the result depending on where you set it, but the results just are not satisfactory. At this point, I do not have time to endlessly experiment with getting LRTimelapse to work; I just have to work on my images manually and come back to trying to get LRTimelapse to work for me, later.

3) I at least was able to use LRTimelapse to do a transition from before sunrise (covering approximately 1.5 hrs' worth of images) to full morning sun. I have now been unable to use it even for that; sometimes it would disregard keyframes and do a transition for the entire folder of images (adding an unset and unwanted keyframe on the last image). I was able to work around that, though it wastes my time to have to move my .XMP files and .CR2 files which I don't want to do the transition on, to a separate folder, do the transition then move the others back. Lately what it does now, is just set all the exposures to 0. No transition whatsoever.

I'm going to do a 'repair permissions' in case maybe that's the issue. I'm sure others have gotten LRTimelapse to work for them, or you wouldn't be bothering to work on it. I just haven't been able to get it to work for me at all.

I am on OS X 10.6.8, MBP 17" 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo. The sort of timelapse I am doing is outdoors, often with bright, cloudless, sunny weather. It's a long-term construction timelapse. Shooting 150 frames/day.

Not sure if at this point you have any advice to offer; I can continue to try to get this to work but I'm not optimistic and as stated above, I no longer have time to endlessly experiment.

I updated the version of Java on my Mac to the latest version. I still have the issue where the exposures are all set to 0 when I attempt a transition. See the two images below. Has anybody else run into this? I used to at least be able to do transitions in LRTimelapse. It's completely useless to me now. I can't believe I'm the only one having difficulty using this.