• Adobe After Effects

  Fancy Flickering After Effects Footwork

  Posted by Rebecca Bridge on July 5, 2011 at 9:49 am

  Hi All,

  I’m hoping someone will know the solution to the problem I’m currently having. We have shot some footage of a whole bunch of products that have LED lights and digital displays on in some of the clips. The LED/Digital displays though in the footage are flickering/pulsating in the footage. Turns out the cameraman had the settings set wrong in the camera.

  We don’t have the option to re-shoot this footage and I’m hoping to figure out some magical way to fix it in after effects. Currently randomly playing with effects in AE to see if I can make it any better.

  I’m wondering if anyone else has any ideas that I could try?

  :- ?
  Bex.

  Kevin Camp replied 15 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Tudor “ted” jelescu

  July 5, 2011 at 11:02 am

  The cleanest way though not the easiest would be to track and replace the screens with either a still or an animation for each.

  Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
  Senior VFX Artist
• 

  Rebecca Bridge

  July 5, 2011 at 11:13 am

  I know what you mean, but unfortunatly there are hands and fingers interacting and passing over them. I realllly don’t want to have to resort to that much roto.

  :- ?
  Bex.
• 

  Tudor “ted” jelescu

  July 5, 2011 at 12:05 pm

  I never said it would be easy… but even if you try to figure out the flicker rate and animate some masks for color correction you would still have to roto anything that comes in front of the screen.
  See if you can come up with a clean plate and create a difference matte for the stuff that comes in front of the LCD panels.

  Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
  Senior VFX Artist
• 

  Kevin Camp

  July 5, 2011 at 1:35 pm

  depending on the ammount of flicker, you may be able to get away with some frame blending…

  you can try just enabling ae’s frame blending for the footage and for previews to see what effect it has (ae’s is quite minimal).

  to get more, disable ae’s frame blending and add the timeblend fx. with low amounts, you may be able to reduce the flicker enough to be acceptable. as you increase it, you will start to get a motion trial-like effect… so it will depend how much flicker you need to remove and how much movement is in the frame (faster movement will have more a visible motion trail effect).

  note when using timeblend fx, you’ll need to set it to clear to current frame, and you’ll need to hit ‘clear’ (or edit>purge>all)after every setting change or timeline reposition. this is because the effect uses cached frames, and you must clear the cache as you make changes to have the settings render correctly.

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

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