[emtor]

I'd very much like to gain some experience in shooting HDR timelapse videos, but it's getting cold outside this time of year, and I hate the thought of spending hours outside just to return home with useless results. I'd much rather make my mistakes in the comfort of my home, learn from those mistakes and then go out and freeze my butt of, so I came up with an idea on how to test different exposure and interval parameters against different time-event situations.
The solution was staring right at me from the table: -My alarm clock!

A regular alarm clock has three hands: The hour-hand, the minute-hand and the seconds-hand, all three displaying three different speeds of time-events at the same time. The seconds-hand moves about as fast as people will move in a scene. The minute-hand as fast as rapidly moving clouds and waves, and the hour hand as fast as slow moving clouds, sunrises and sunsets.

I read a lot about shutter-dragging, and how this technique helps making smooth results, and I wanted to check out how this would turn out when shooting bracketed images at slow shutter-speeds and then combining three or more images into HDR.
So I did a timelapse-movie of my alarm clock for a duration of one hour.

167 HDR images (501 images total) made up from brackets of three images shot @ 0.5 - 2 and 8 seconds @ f8 @ an interval of 7 secs.
I used a K-20d with the Sigma 10-20mm wide angle lens for this, and I was surprised to find very little aperture flicker.
Is the Sigma that good or is aperture flicker minimized by combining the bracketed shots in Photomatix? -I don't know.
Anyway,-I now have a method by which I can sit at home and get a feel of which settings do approximately what . . . before dragging my lazy self out in the freezing cold.

The video can be seen here:

[blackcloudbrew]

Wow, doing timelapse is interesting enough but adding HDR into it is ... well ... over the top for me. Nice product though. My hat is off to you!

[emtor]

Thanks for the hat off.
HDR can ruin an image or save it,-it all depends on the settings. I miss the dynamic range of old negative film where you could shoot into the sun and there would be detail even in the highlights. Try that with digital sensors.
I mostly use exposure blending in HDR for my landscape shots to increase the DR,-avoiding the radioactive look contrast enhancement often gives you.

[deaning]

Very well done indeed and very helpful!

[emtor]

A couple of things that become evident when watching the video:
Pay heed to the hour-hand . . . it moves very smoothly. Obviously, these settings are great for slow events like sunrises / sunsets.
The minute-hand is a different matter, as it moves along in a jerky fashion. For time-events like these another timelapse setting might be useful, along with a different exposure setting. I'd much rather do these experiments at home instead of spending 20 gallons of gas and several hours worth of work outside in sub-zero temperatures.
Another thing,-the HDR-stills were tonemapped using Tone Compressor settings. That's why there's little or no flicker to be seen.
I've tried using Details Enhancer, which produces flicker, and I also noticed that some of the stills were grossly overexposed.
My next try will be at shooting brackets of five exposures. This will introduce even more shutter-drag for the couple of longest exposures, and as in the first attempt,-de-ghosting will be turned off in photomatix. Ghosting-artifacts are bad for stills, but perhaps beneficial for video.