R5 Time-Lapse Gear Updates - What's Up with YouTube?

[Ben Egbert]

My Anker Core 68000 PD 45W arrived yesterday and I used it last night to charge my battery in camera. Took me a while to find a cable for this as the device arrived with only the charging cable.

The instructions are pretty minimal. How do you know when the unit is fully charged? Those winking white lights seem to be on anytime you press the button. I would assume when they are all on and not blinking it's charged.

@Mike Lewis

 

[JimFox]

Hey Mike, the thing I dislike about Adobe Lightroom is the file handling in data base style. I never know where anything is. If LRT lest you load your files into its UI from folders of your own creation, I might give it a try.

@Mike Lewis

I agree with you Ben. It's the first thing that turned me off to LR years ago how it forced you to use it's system to catalog your photos. I have been programming and using computers from day 1 with computers, and I did not want to give control over to some arbitrary program. Plus, if you can use Photoshop there is no reason to use LR, why would I go backwards?

 

[JimFox]

Ben,

Interesting. I consider the database part of Lightroom to be one of its best features. It empowers the non-destructive editing at the core of the application which really lets you do any number of edits, backwards and forwards on actual or virtual copies and always be able to get back to any step in the process while never harming a single byte of your raw file. It also lets me quickly find 'all the images I have ever taken in Rocky Mountain National Park' or 'all the images I have taken with my 70-300 L IS lens', or have an instant count of how many images I ever took with my 5DsR,' just to name a few.

As for the folders, I am not sure I understand your issue. Yes, you do have to import images before you work on them. But I always copy images off of my memory card to folders of my own naming convention and organization before I import them, at which point they are externally organized just the way I want as well as being cross referenced and accessible in Lightroom. And if I ever need to move them I just move them and then tell Lightroom where I moved them to and it is happy again.

As for LRTimelapse, it loads in your files from where you specify, but eventually you pass that info on to Lightroom so that Lightroom can import your images and edit then keyframes you have identified in LRTimelapse. LRTimelapse will eventually do some of its own naming and locating of the output time-lapse videos, which it recommends are not located in the same file as your stills you used to make the video. I have not used LRTimelapse enough yet to fully understand how it wants to organize its output files yet.

Don't know if any of that is helpful in any way. Perhaps if I still have not answered your question you can ping me again

ML

Hey Mike, so how does doing Timelapse in LR differ from doing it in Photoshop? I would think it's about the same?

 

[Ben Egbert]

I just watched a video tutoral on LRT and after doing a couple steps it wants you to drag your files to LR. I stopped the tutoral at that point. My primary interest is that it has smoothing which my camera does not outside of in camera TL.

I doubt I will be able to do time interval time lapses with my r5 without flicker so I will probably just forget about it.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Jim,

LRTimelapse has a bunch of functionality that analyzes the metadata to determine where possible exposure jumps occur. It then graphs that across your set of timelapse frames and suggests frames to mark as keyframes. You then export the keyframes into Lightroom, where you can make edits. You are able to edit just the keyframes, and then export the Lightroom edits as metadata back in those images. LRT imports back in the new metadata and then passes those edits on to ALL the rest of your frames in a controlled gradual way so as to make everything look consistent and eliminate flicker. It does an amazing job of eliminating flicker across your frames by making very small adjustments to the visual luminance value which it measures accurately. The result is with very little editing, you can completely eliminate flicker from your frames. Once you are done with that process the altered metadata is again read into Lightroom and you use Lightroom to export your frames as jpg files, fully edited and de-flickered. Then you point LRTimelapse at that folder and it is used to render your video output, with all the options for resolution, FPS, codecs, bit depth, yada yada yada. For my 300 frame timelapse I worked this way the entire process took about 25 minutes, not counting how long it took Lightroom to export all my files as jpegs at the end of the process (which is of course required at some point with any software approach unless one uses jpegs out of the camera and is willing to take the huge editing flexibility hit that comes along with that approach.)

If a person does not wish to use Lightroom there is a workflow that does not use it. I have not checked that out though as I am very much invested in Lightroom myself, and typically only go into Photoshop if I need to use content-aware fill or some sort of layering (like combining RGB stars with starless NB nebula data as one example).

I would also say that at least IMHO, the eBook, although it obviously has sections in it that relate to the LRTimelapse software, is worth the $28 bucks just for all the other excellent content in provides. I learned quite a lot about some techniques as well as common pitfalls and mistakes that I would not have known by reading through it.

For shorter timelapses that do not have a lot of changing light I think you can use many different workflows but once you start to try to get Day to night and night to day transitions there are some issues that can come up with some of the approaches that might require one to use different techniques. Since I aspire to being able to shoot those type of timelapses someday, I plan to continue to pursue the time interval shooting methods as from what I have seen so far they are possibly better suited to that scenario than using video. As I continue to study this stuff though I may find out that is not necessarily the case. We will see.

ML

 

[Mike Lewis]

I just watched a video tutoral on LRT and after doing a couple steps it wants you to drag your files to LR. I stopped the tutoral at that point. My primary interest is that it has smoothing which my camera does not outside of in camera TL.

I doubt I will be able to do time interval time lapses with my r5 without flicker so I will probably just forget about it.

Ben,

As stated above I think there is a LRTimelapse workflow that does not require Lightroom, but I cannot speak to it as I have obviously been using the Lightroom approach myself.

ML

 

[Mike Lewis]

My Anker Core 68000 PD 45W arrived yesterday and I used it last night to charge my battery in camera. Took me a while to find a cable for this as the device arrived with only the charging cable.

The instructions are pretty minimal. How do you know when the unit is fully charged? Those winking white lights seem to be on anytime you press the button. I would assume when they are all on and not blinking it's charged.

@Mike Lewis

Ben,

Yes that is the way it works. If I recall, isn't the charging cable a USB-C on both ends? If so that is the exact cable used to not only charge the unit itself, but also the cable required to charge/operate the R5 as well. Are you saying you did not get a USB-C to USB-C cable with yours?

ML

 

[JimFox]

Jim,

LRTimelapse has a bunch of functionality that analyzes the metadata to determine where possible exposure jumps occur. It then graphs that across your set of timelapse frames and suggests frames to mark as keyframes. You then export the keyframes into Lightroom, where you can make edits. You are able to edit just the keyframes, and then export the Lightroom edits as metadata back in those images. LRT imports back in the new metadata and then passes those edits on to ALL the rest of your frames in a controlled gradual way so as to make everything look consistent and eliminate flicker. It does an amazing job of eliminating flicker across your frames by making very small adjustments to the visual luminance value which it measures accurately. The result is with very little editing, you can completely eliminate flicker from your frames. Once you are done with that process the altered metadata is again read into Lightroom and you use Lightroom to export your frames as jpg files, fully edited and de-flickered. Then you point LRTimelapse at that folder and it is used to render your video output, with all the options for resolution, FPS, codecs, bit depth, yada yada yada. For my 300 frame timelapse I worked this way the entire process took about 25 minutes, not counting how long it took Lightroom to export all my files as jpegs at the end of the process (which is of course required at some point with any software approach unless one uses jpegs out of the camera and is willing to take the huge editing flexibility hit that comes along with that approach.)

If a person does not wish to use Lightroom there is a workflow that does not use it. I have not checked that out though as I am very much invested in Lightroom myself, and typically only go into Photoshop if I need to use content-aware fill or some sort of layering (like combining RGB stars with starless NB nebula data as one example).

I would also say that at least IMHO, the eBook, although it obviously has sections in it that relate to the LRTimelapse software, is worth the $28 bucks just for all the other excellent content in provides. I learned quite a lot about some techniques as well as common pitfalls and mistakes that I would not have known by reading through it.

For shorter timelapses that do not have a lot of changing light I think you can use many different workflows but once you start to try to get Day to night and night to day transitions there are some issues that can come up with some of the approaches that might require one to use different techniques. Since I aspire to being able to shoot those type of timelapses someday, I plan to continue to pursue the time interval shooting methods as from what I have seen so far they are possibly better suited to that scenario than using video. As I continue to study this stuff though I may find out that is not necessarily the case. We will see.

ML

Thanks for the explanation.

For myself, I have exposure smoothing already built into both my D810 and D850. Flickering isn't an issue for me. It is for Ben, but it's because he is not going total Manual. So while the smoothing part of the LR timelapse function would be great, I think almost all of the newer cameras include it built in.

But for those shooting with older cameras, it's nice to know that LR does have it. Of course that means I would have to install LR... thankfully I don't need to.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Not sure what feature you are referring to - what is it called exactly? I wonder if my R5 has it - that is not exactly a older camera. Come to think of it, isn't Ben shooting with one or does he use his 5DsR?

ML

@Ben Egbert

 

[Ben Egbert]

Ben,

Yes that is the way it works. If I recall, isn't the charging cable a USB-C on both ends? If so that is the exact cable used to not only charge the unit itself, but also the cable required to charge/operate the R5 as well. Are you saying you did not get a USB-C to USB-C cable with yours?

ML

Yes, it did come with a USBC for charging and I had it hooked into the wall plug and did not even look there for it. So yes, to your question. USB c is new to me.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Not sure what feature you are referring to - what is it called exactly? I wonder if my R5 has it - that is not exactly a older camera. Come to think of it, isn't Ben shooting with one or does he use his 5DsR?

ML

@Ben Egbert

I am shooting with both a Rdsr and a R5. So far as I can tell neither camera has smoothing in time interval and both have flicker in that mode. The R5 has no flicker in internal time lapse (vireo mode). I am not sure about the 5DSR as its is no good for me in internal time lapse because it has very limited resolution and you cannot set it to expose each frame like you can on the R5.

The R5 is limited to 1/8 second in internal TL video so not great for night stuff. I am going to try one tonight at f2,8 and 1.8 second and see how far I have to crank up the ISO.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Ben,

I will be interested to see how that effort comes out, as I have assumed the inability to get longer shutter speeds in video time-lapse is a killer for nightscape based time-lapses. Let me know how it goes...

ML

 

[Mike Lewis]

Yes, it did come with a USBC for charging and I had it hooked into the wall plug and did not even look there for it. So yes, to your question. USB c is new to me.

OK, well the R5 has USB-C for its USB connection too.

ML

 

[Ben Egbert]

I just read about an intervalometer that does exposure smoothing. It was called inbuilt, I could not find an intervalometer by that name when I googled it.

I might post my results from tonight if not too rough. I di done the other night at f4 and got 12800 ISO. It was better than expected for that iso but not really usable.

Did you look at the one I posted this morning that was a time interval version at 5 seconds and f5.6? It came out pretty good accept for flicker.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Check out promote controller which also does exposure smoothing. They call it bulb ramping. It’s now discontinued but used ones show up on eBay.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Promote-Sy...-/284093161397?_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49292

 

[Ben Egbert]

Ben,

I will be interested to see how that effort comes out, as I have assumed the inability to get longer shutter speeds in video time-lapse is a killer for nightscape based time-lapses. Let me know how it goes...

ML

Ok, Mike, I started with 1/8 second f2.8 at 70mm. I had to go to ISO6400 for exposure. It came out better than expected, but not good enough to post.

In Photoshop I still needed to bump exposure up about .6 in the terrain and another stop on the sky. I also used a fair amount of NR. The playback does have some noise artifacts, especially in the sky.

It was a totally overcast night with boring and non reflective clouds and zero stars.

 

[JimFox]

Ok, Mike, I started with 1/8 second f2.8 at 70mm. I had to go to ISO6400 for exposure. It came out better than expected, but not good enough to post.

In Photoshop I still needed to bump exposure up about .6 in the terrain and another stop on the sky. I also used a fair amount of NR. The playback does have some noise artifacts, especially in the sky.

It was a totally overcast night with boring and non reflective clouds and zero stars.

Ben why are your shooting at 1/8th of a second while shooting at night? Your timelapse settings at night should be the same as if you were shooting a regular still photo. So that means setting it for the longest shutter you can to get the lowest ISO possible. If you are shooting at 70mm that means a shooter speed in the 6 to 8 sec range to prevent star trailing.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Jim, as I have been saying, the maximum shutter for in camera TL is 1/8 second. I wanted to see what I could get with a high iso in camera TL because the alternative is time interval which has flicker.

I tried my old 5DSR remote to try locking it but it does not fit. The RF remote does not have the lock feature. I expect the flicker to be present anyway.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Ben,

As far as I can tell, R5 has same remote shutter connection as 5DsR. The R5 connection is on the front face of the camera though, which is different. I have al old remote shutter release/intervalometer. The Intervalometer portion no longer works but I think the shutter release portion would still work. I will see if I still have it and report back.

ML

 

[JimFox]

Jim, as I have been saying, the maximum shutter for in camera TL is 1/8 second. I wanted to see what I could get with a high iso in camera TL because the alternative is time interval which has flicker.

I tried my old 5DSR remote to try locking it but it does not fit. The RF remote does not have the lock feature. I expect the flicker to be present anyway.

I get that, but why are you doing in camera Timelapse at night? Switch back to shooting regular night sky images with a longer shutter speed, full manual, and lock in your Remote Release.

My recommedation is to use the in camera TL for during the day and sunsets. But once it gets dark, just go to individual frames and then bulk process them in ACR and Photoshop and then put them together into a Timelapse in Movavi.

There is no way around it, shooting at night at 1/8th of a second just isn't going to work.