One thing I'm wondering about is if I enable dark frames then I'm going to get a bigger gap between exposures, resulting in a less smooth movie for the time lapse, unless what you said about the raw therapee program addresses this.
Right, there are two options:
1) Let the camera create and subtract a dark frame for each shot. This will cause a gap equal to the exposure length between each frame, plus the normal saving time.
2) Shoot with dark frames disabled on the camera, and use a separately created dark frame on the images later.
And do I need to uncheck the "disable canon dark frame" and check the "make dark frames" in the script options? I don't think the Canon firmware on this camera has dark frame subtraction as an option.
By default, the Canon firmware on most of these cameras does a dark frame if the exposure is longer than a few seconds. This is actually described in the Canon manuals, they just call it "processing" without mentioning that it's a dark frame.
The "disable canon dark frame" option prevents this. So if you want one dark frame per shot, turn this option off.
The "make dark frames" option shoots with the shutter closed. Use this if you want to make standalone dark frames, but remember to uncheck the option before you try to shoot another timelapse
You need to enabled "Lua native calls" in the miscellaneous menu for the "make dark frames" option to work. Except for the interval and number shots, all the script settings should be left the same as your real shots. The camera should also be at a similar temperature. Averaging several dark frames may give better results.
I'm still using your unfixed script - I was sure the 5 second interval was working, but I'll check when I use it again.
I'm pretty sure it couldn't work, but it's not the first time I've been wrong. At ISO 1600, the camera will spend a significant amount of time processing (even without dark frames enabled), so the difference between a 5 sec interval and no interval might not be obvious. If you are shooting 32 sec exposures, shooting as fast as possible may be the best approach anyway, the shot to shot variations probably won't be more than a second most of the time.
