Hi all

I am new to LRT and still getting used to it so it is probably a question that has been asked before. I like to make day to night timelapses which I have got to work pretty well. The only thing I am struggling with is the speed of the night section of the sequence.

During the day time, I can have my camera happily fire off a shot every 5 seconds where as night, due to the low light, the shutter speed increases to perhaps 30 seconds (with a reasonable iso of perhaps 800). This means that I can only fit 120 shots in an hour in the night and perhaps 1000s of shots per hour in the day time. I realise I could limit my intervalometer to take photos at the lowest common denominator (no more than one every 30 seconds) but this seems like a shame. Is there any function of LRT that compensates for the reduced number of shots at night. Every clever thing I can think of seems like a poor compromise when I am sure Gunther would have come up with a clever solution.

Anyone know how I could solve this?

Any change in the interval would lead to a visible speed up or slow down of the final clip.
This is why we mostly try to shoot with a constant interval. Normally there is no reason to limit ISO to 800 on normal cameras. If you go up to 1600 for expample, you'll get the same brightness with only 16 seconds exposure. If you go up to 3200, you'll be able to use 8 seconds.
This means normally you should try to find a compromise, so that you can use the same exposure during the day and the night - this will get the smoothest result in terms of timing.

Another option is to make a break after sunset. Change the camera locating/angle and start a new shoot with longer exposures for the night, if you want to go until the milkyway. (but still 30 seconds is too long in my opinion. I never shoot longer then 16 or max 20 seconds.

And the third option would be to use an intervalometer that allows for a slow and gradual ramping of the interval over the time. So basically you try to hide the fact, that you are speeding up / slowing down by stretching this over one or 2 hours. Unfortunately there are not many solution for this available. That's why I decided to build an own intervalometer as a diy community project. I'll publish this soon here on my blog. Stay tuned!