How to achieve optimal exposure during a day > night hyperlapse

[Dakrisht]

Trying to figure out the best way to shoot a long 25+ minute day > night hyperlapse without changing exposure while shooting / making fine edits in post that are painstakingly difficult to perfectly match as the scene transitions from light > dark.

Setup:

I’m shooting full manual everything, but unless I manually adjust exposure (either by decreasing the shutter as the scene darkens or opening up the aperture, 50% of the video will be underexposed). So I have to correct for this in Lightroom 10-20 photos at a time by increasing exposure by 0.10-0.20.

Thinking of trying shutter priority to let the drone pick the exposure based on available light but not sure about it yet.

Might just be easier to drop the shutter every 3-4 minutes while in the air to have more or less properly exposed RAW files.

Working with around 350 raw files (14GB!!) so editing exposure in Lightroom and exporting to Premiere Pro is a pain, but only a pain simply because I have to manually transition the exposure from light > dark with my eye and ensure it matches.

So the question is: best practices for keeping exposure stable and consistent throughout the scene when shooting a long hyperlapse with a significant change in available light.

Thoughts?

 

[brett8883]

Trying to figure out the best way to shoot a long 25+ minute day > night hyperlapse without changing exposure while shooting / making fine edits in post that are painstakingly difficult to perfectly match as the scene transitions from light > dark.

Setup:

I’m shooting full manual everything, but unless I manually adjust exposure (either by decreasing the shutter as the scene darkens or opening up the aperture, 50% of the video will be underexposed). So I have to correct for this in Lightroom 10-20 photos at a time by increasing exposure by 0.10-0.20.

Thinking of trying shutter priority to let the drone pick the exposure based on available light but not sure about it yet.

Might just be easier to drop the shutter every 3-4 minutes while in the air to have more or less properly exposed RAW files.

Working with around 350 raw files (14GB!!) so editing exposure in Lightroom and exporting to Premiere Pro is a pain, but only a pain simply because I have to manually transition the exposure from light > dark with my eye and ensure it matches.

So the question is: best practices for keeping exposure stable and consistent throughout the scene when shooting a long hyperlapse with a significant change in available light.

Thoughts?

If you want to try to use auto exposure I think Aperture priority would be better since you don’t want to have a changing depth of field throughout your time-lapse.

What if you just tried applying auto adjustments to ALL the frames in Lightroom and see how close that gets you with the raw files? Then you can just export that as a video in Premier(psst you can also do that straight from Lightroom as long as you are ok with it being only 1080p too.) Once exported reimport and use keyframes to get it smoothed out the rest of the way since keyframes will be easier to handle. You won’t get the benefit of RAW for the keyframes but hopefully the auto adjustment will get the necessary range out them that it won’t take much in Premier.

There’s also a program called lrtimelapse LRTimelapse - Advanced Time Lapse Photography made easy! that I just started messing around with and one thing that is kinda interesting, though I haven’t had enough time with to understand the technical aspects of what it’s doing, one of the options to covert the the still frames to a video requires .DNG files. What’s interesting about this is it would be cool if there was a way to convert dng still frames to cinemaDNG. I know you can extract a dng still frame from CinemaDNG video but I don’t know if a way to do it the other way around. If there was then you could have the benefit of the raw while also using keyframes. Maybe somebody knows a way to do this?

 

[Dakrisht]

Will def check out LRTimelapse in the morning. Already seeing some interesting info over on their forums re: the drawbacks of shooting in Aperature priority mode, but still worth a shot for experimentation purposes:

LRTimelapse - advanced timelapse photography made easy!

Timelapse editing, keyframing, grading and rendering. Supports Windows, Mac and Raw-files from any camera. Works with and without Lightroom.

forum.lrtimelapse.com

Also seems the creator of LRT has developed a tool to smoothly transition the exposure changes when shooting a day > night or vice-versa Timelapse.

 

[Dakrisht]

Some good reading here as well:

The complete guide to shooting and editing a Holy Grail timelapse

This holy grail timelapse tutorial takes you through how to shoot and edit your timelapse from beginning to end using LRTimelapse and Adobe Lightroom.

www.matjoez.com

 

[brett8883]

Will def check out LRTimelapse in the morning. Already seeing some interesting info over on their forums re: the drawbacks of shooting in Aperature priority mode, but still worth a shot for experimentation purposes:

LRTimelapse - advanced timelapse photography made easy!

Timelapse editing, keyframing, grading and rendering. Supports Windows, Mac and Raw-files from any camera. Works with and without Lightroom.

forum.lrtimelapse.com

Also seems the creator of LRT has developed a tool to smoothly transition the exposure changes when shooting a day > night or vice-versa Timelapse.

Yea IF you INSIST to TRY an automatic exposure mode is more what I meant ? . I think they are saying the same thing about S priority as well but hey experiment and find out for yourself who knows might end up working just fine for your project.

 

[Dakrisht]

Any thoughts on optimal export settings within Premiere?

Exporting as an uncompressed MOV file using ProRes422 gives me a massive 1.2GB file.

H264 with 50Mbps compression gives me a 100MB file but the quality is terrible.

Looking for A+ quality around 300-400MB file size...

Maybe Adobe Encoder?

Trying LRTimelapse shortly...

 

[brett8883]

Any thoughts on optimal export settings within Premiere?

Exporting as an uncompressed MOV file using ProRes422 gives me a massive 1.2GB file.

H264 with 50Mbps compression gives me a 100MB file but the quality is terrible.

Looking for A+ quality around 300-400MB file size...

Maybe Adobe Encoder?

Trying LRTimelapse shortly...

Always use Adobe Media Encoder but 50mbps is more than enough bit rate something else is happening if you can see that much of a quality difference. You could try H.265 if your computer can handle it.

 

[brett8883]

Also just compress your ProRes file. No need to export again from Premier.

 

[Dakrisht]

Also just compress your ProRes file. No need to export again from Premier.

Will try this. Using Premiere Pro CC 2019 (latest) but don't see the H265/HEVC option. Strange.

Will try ProRes uncompressed export > Adobe Media Encoder (or maybe Handbrake) > H264/H265 and see the difference...

 

[brett8883]

Will try this. Using Premiere Pro CC 2019 (latest) but don't see the H265/HEVC option. Strange.

Will try ProRes uncompressed export > Adobe Media Encoder (or maybe Handbrake) > H264/H265 and see the difference...

It should be under the QuickTime codecs but yea Adobe Media Encoder or Handbrake either way. Handbrake is just as good.

 

[Dakrisht]

After using LRTimelapse I have to admit, it’s an absolutely marvelous tool that cannot even be compared to the traditional LR > Premiere workflow. Simply fantastic piece of software that was an instant purchase for me.

The amount of control you get to make a stellar Timelapse, including proper and simplified export settings is incredible. Not to mention the dev has built a fantastic exposure mode that will mathematically correct exposure on each and every shot in your sequence to transition smoothly from day > night or vice versa.

Just amazing ?