NK Remote vs. Nikon's built in Intervalometer

Time Lapse. It's a subject of much interest for me and others. Including my Australian brother who was having some difficulty with the integrated D300 intervalometer last night while shooting some star trails.
Essentially he would like to take 30 second exposures, one sequentially following the other for a duration of one hour. Let's use this example as our benchmark to compare how the two different tools mentioned in the title stack up against eachother and the workflow required. Let's begin...

D300 Intervalometer: 
1) Go into the shooting menu, select interval shooting and select a period between intervals
2) Select a number of intervals
3) Now is where it gets tricky. The camera software will factor in the time it takes to take the exposure against the time you've preselected between shots. I was shooting full manual with a fully open aperture and 30 second expose time. As you can see on the left column when I select 1 second intervals, the number of intervals decrease at a more rapid rate. Over the course of one 30" exposure it goes from 999 to 966.

Instead, choose the approximate time between exposures as the interval time as demonstrated in the right column. This results in going from 999 to 997. The following shot not pictured shows 996 remaining intervals. The varying speed likely relates to noise reduction or the amount of time writing the file to the disk.
Note: editing the number of shots per interval results in the camera taking immediate sequences as fast as possible in the span of a single interval. This is really only useful when you're bracketing exposures because the time between shots is biased a great deal.

NKRemote

The other tool available is a software solution. Albeit this requires having a computer in the field, but laptops are the best selling machines in the market. They also have batteries which will usually last an hour or so.
1) Connect the camera.
2) Go to Camera -> Time Lapse
3) Set up the number of intervals and the time between each interval.

Using this method the software will report that it's 'running late', but it will take the full number of programed shots.


Conclusive Remarks:
Using the integrated intervalometer you can do most of you need while working in the field, but you're limited in the way that you can't rely on how long your project will take. The camera changes this based on:

• How long the exposure will take
• How long it will take to write to the disk.
  

This essentially means shooting in Av mode you can't rely on how much time you have before you have to 'restart' your sequence.

With NKRemote you have a little more control over how long the project will take which works a great deal better when your project is taking more time, or occurring in varying light (ex: Sunset) but of course you'll need extension cords, batteries, and a weatherproof PC in the field.