Help with sunrise

Time to dust off an old topic. I shot a beautiful sunrise the other morning, and noticed it didn't take very long for the zebra stripes to show up. I have them set at 90%. and would manually close the iris down a bit until they went away. The problem is, there is a noticeable jump in the image when I did this. I remember thinking I should have set the auto iris, but ImageEntertainment says not to. Why not? Is there a better way to keep the transition smoother?
 
Well, this strongly depends on wether or not Sideshow is shooting time-lapse. If not, then only one manual exposure is necessary.

Capt. Quirk, if you are having trouble getting exposure for the duration of the sunrise, when you set up to shoot, if the sunrise has already started, bring the camera 2-3 stops below where you have proper exposure, this way the camera can hit proper exposure right around the 3/4 of the intensity, and then come a little over, which is easily within the cameras latitude. The best thing to do is go out one morning and just experiment.
 
Set the exposure and color settings for the final frame, and let the sunrise develop into those settings. to figure out the final settings, guess or go out the day before and test.
 
I started out before the horizon started to glow, so I had to start out fully open. It didn't take long to get to almost fully closed though.
 
Time lapses (the pro ones) are way more elaborate than just shooting a frame every x time.
Common video cameras have not enough latitude to render a sunny day and the night without tweaking them.
You can't just set to auto iris because due to couds moves and eventually the sun directly in the image (warning: it can burn your CCDs!) the footage won't have an even exposure.
You have to make an iris/WB setup for day, another for magic hour, another for twighlight and the last one for the night.
But how do you achieve this?
Many cinematographers shoot 1 time lapse during 4 days, changing the setting every day for a different moment of the day, then in post they fade from one shot to another.
There are cameras that can change their iris/WB balance automatically according computer commands. It's a very expensive tool.
So i just want to say that if your first time lapse won't be nice, don't worry it's not the camera, nor you.
And you culd however do wonderful time lapses, depending on sun position, sky, camera setting, just try.
 
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