Hello Gunther,

I am having an issue where a particular edit I have made to the keyframes in Lightroom doesn't appear to be processed properly to all the photos in the visual previews in LRTimelapse.

So the problem I am seeing is this: All the edits I made in Lightroom seem to be properly applied to the visual previews except one. The exposure of the 1st radial filter. (I only used the 1st radial filter. I didn't touch the second one. I just left it there. So I can't confirm if it is doing the same thing.)

Anyway, when I get to the point where I create visual previews, something strange happens. For the first keyframe, the exposure of the radial filter seems to be properly applied. But by the time the visual previews reach the next keyframe something has gone wrong. The second keyframe shows a significant increase in luminosity for the 1st radial filter compared to the frames on either side of it. The radial filter moved as it should have, and maintained some portion of the exposure increase. But when it gets to the keyframe, the luminosity spikes, and then drops back down by the following frame.

Then, when it reached the third keyframe at the end of my sequence, the exposure of the radial filter doesn't change, but the rest of the photo dims. It's as if I inverted the radial filter. Which I double checked. I didn't invert the filter.

In LRTimelapse, I do see that the column for "1st Circular Local Exposure" is in the list of ramped items. Although it shows a value of 0.05 when the value I added in Lightroom was 0.20. I assume that is probably just a quirk of the programming. Nonetheless, it at least shows that LRTimelapse is aware that the edit should be applied to the photos.

And again, to some degree, it does increase the exposure as I requested. I know this because I tried an exaggerated version of my edit so I could see that the radial filter was moving properly and would be significantly bright to see what it was doing. I can confirm that it did move correctly, and it did increase the exposure. But upon reaching the second and third keyframes, the luminosity of the radial filter or the surroundings changed significantly.

And even more strange, this only seems to be happening with sequences shot with my Nikon Z 6. I tried to reproduce the issue with sequences shot on my Nikon D750, but the radial filters worked perfectly.

I thought this seemed somewhat similar to an issue I had earlier, which was resolved by updating the DNG converter software. Since that was the problem last time, I made certain that I have the most up to date version of DNG converter (13.3 at the time of posting) as well as the most up to date version of LRTimelapse (5.6 at the time of posting).

I also made sure I followed the proper workflow. I didn't add or remove any filters. And I was sure to use the Sync Keyframes script in the grid view to sync all my edits. I have tried this with several sequences. I have tried removing the photos from Lightroom and reinitializing the folders in LRTimelapse several times. I even uninstalled and reinstalled LRTimelapse to see if that would help. Unfortunately, nothing has worked. I'm stuck, and I don't know what could be causing the issue.

I'm out of ideas and hope you can help.

That sounds as if you already tried some good things for troubleshooting. The different numbers in LR vs. LRT for 1st Circular Exposure are normal, because Adobe uses number a different scale in the XMP files than in the LR UI. LRT shows the value from the XMP files.
Could you try to narrow down the problem. If you are rotating the Circular gradient, try rotating it to the other side. Sometimes you might get an overflow which would create a weird look.
Use a test sequence with 20 images only, try 2 keyframes, use a simple exaggerated edit on the cricular gradient, nothing more. Try the animation. If it works with 2 try 3. Maybe you can find a pattern, when it works and when not. If you find a reproducible scenario you might zip the short sequence and send it via https://fromsmash.com/ or other transfer service to support(at)lrtimelapse.com

Thanks for your reply Gunther

I think I have found a reproducible scenario. Over the last few days I have done a lot of testing with different edits. And I believe I have narrowed the issue down to the number of frames in the sequence.

I started by doing as you suggested and trying a test sequence with 20 frames and just the circular gradient. This looked fine. No issues with the luminance of the circular gradient around the keyframes. So then I added my full edits to see if the combination of all the edits together would somehow cause the issue. But once again there was no issue when dealing with the small sequence of 20 frames.

So I did the same tests with 50 frames and again with 400 frames. I still couldn't get the luminance issue to return.

But then I tried it with 500 frames. And all of a sudden the issue was back.

I thought this was odd, so I tried removing the last frame and edit the sequence with 499 frames. Surprisingly, the issue was gone.

For some reason, it appears the problem occurs when a sequence has 500 frames or more.

All of the sequences used the exact same edits. I made Lightroom presets to make sure. I didn't want there to be a variable for the size or rotation of the circular gradient to be a potential cause of the problem. So all the edits used the same presets, just with different amounts of total frames in the sequence.

And the results seem consistent. If there were 500 frames or more, there was an issue of changing luminance around the keyframes.

Do you have any potential explanation for why this would be happening?

Thanks for your help

That sounds really surprising to me.
Could you zip the sequence and send it via wetransfer or fromsmash to support@lrtimelapse.com so that I can reproduce that?

Sent mobile...