Brinno timelapse flicker, and how to fix it

Why Brinno clips flicker

A Brinno camera is built to sit still for months and take one photograph at a time. Every one of those exposures is metered independently, minutes or hours apart, under light that never repeats exactly. Two consecutive frames can therefore differ by a fraction of a stop for reasons that had nothing to do with the scene: a cloud, a work light switching on, the sun crossing a window frame.

None of that is visible one photo at a time. Played back at 24 or 30 frames per second, those small differences land back to back and read as a strobe — the effect people search for as "Brinno flicker" or "exposure flicker". Long deployments make it worse simply because they contain more light conditions.

Worth saying plainly: this is a normal consequence of shooting one frame at a time over a long period, and not a fault in your camera. Nothing you did on site caused it and no setting would have removed it entirely.

The fix in post is temporal smoothing: pull each frame's brightness toward the average of the frames around it, so the jitter flattens while the real change in light survives. The deflicker page covers the causes and the maths in more detail.

Fixing the clip you already have

1. Create a free account and start a project. No credit card and nothing to install — Tweedia runs in the browser. One project per deployment keeps the clip, the edits and the renders together.
2. Upload the timelapse file from the camera. Video goes in as .mp4. If your camera saved stills instead, upload the folder and Tweedia compiles it into a video first, ordered by the time each frame was captured.
3. Switch on Fix flicker on the Edits tab. Your footage is measured for flicker automatically, and when it is found the card flags it and you switch on Fix flicker. A months-long Brinno deployment is close to a worst case for this, so it usually is flagged.
4. Render and download. Rendering runs on our workers rather than in your browser, so you can close the tab. Free-plan renders carry a Tweedia watermark.

Before you render, the Fix flicker card draws the frame-to-frame brightness of your own clip alongside the smoothed curve the filter will produce. It is computed in the browser from measurements already taken, so checking costs no credits.

If your camera wrote an AVI

Brinno models differ in what they leave on the card: some write an MP4, some write an AVI, and some can be set to keep the individual stills. Tweedia's video upload takes .mp4 today, so an AVI needs one extra step.

Two ways round it. Convert the AVI to MP4 with any converter and upload that — or, if the camera also kept the stills, upload the photo folder instead and let Tweedia compile the video. Uploading the stills is the better option when you have them: you choose the frame rate at compile time rather than living with the one the camera baked in, and you can rebuild the video later without going back to site.

Reducing it on the next deployment

Nothing here helps the four months already on the card, but it is worth knowing for the next install. Flicker tracks how much the exposure decision is allowed to move between frames, so anything that steadies the light or the metering reduces it: a framing that avoids direct sun and sky in the same shot, a scene lit consistently after dark rather than by lights that switch on and off, and — where your model offers it — a fixed rather than fully automatic exposure.

Check your camera's own manual for which of those it exposes; the controls vary across the range. Whatever you do at capture, some flicker survives a multi-month shoot, which is why the post step exists.

What this costs

• Fix flicker is not a paid feature — it is available on the free plan like every other operation.
• 2 GB of pooled storage across unlimited projects, and no per-project frame limit.
• 10 starter credits toward rendering. A longer or higher-resolution render uses more of them.
• Renders carry a Tweedia watermark on the free plan. Every plan exports up to 4K — the watermark, not resolution, is the free limit.
• Raw photos are kept 30 days after a project's last activity on the free plan, then cleared.

Solo at $15/month removes the watermark, raises the pool to 50 GB and keeps your raw photos while the subscription is active — which matters if you run several sites at once. See the plans.

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