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Stop frame animation deflicker?
Hi folks,
I’m looking for a quick fix for a ‘problem’ with some stop frame animation. Simply, it’s a HUGE project with a tiny time scale, so normal frame by frame re-alignment of the video levels to get around lighting changes (or more often, when the luminosity of the scene changes when rigs have, then haven’t been used – or when shadows from said rigs are changing the backfground of the scene) just aren’t feasible at all.
I’m running FCP 6.05 with various plug-ins, including the latest Sapphire set, and Furnace from The Foundry (on advice that their de-flicker plug-in would go a long way to fixing the problem). However, I can’t seem to find anything that works to even out the scene and stop there being flickers of light change.
This has to be a post solution rather than a ‘Get the animators to do stuff to help’ – as a) They’re already doing 100% to help in inside the same time constraint I have, and b) All the stuff I’m having problems with has been animated, and won’t be re-shot.
Any advice from anyone with a similar experience would be really apprecaited. It’s a gorgeous looking show, and the only problem with it seems to be these changing light flickers. Like I said, I could keyframe an effect each time it changes, or I could rotoscope out all the action with a clean background if I had all the time in the world, but I don’t have any time at all – so if there’s another option that someone could suggest while I’m trying to find the solution myself, I’d really appreciate it.
John
John Steventon
JKL Editing
http://www.jklediting.com
“Success is merely a failure to imagine more…” -
4 Replies
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Flickering is a word used to describe frame rate and field rate issues, not exposure changes due to your crew’s (likely sloppy) photography. Perhaps there is a plugin for Photoshop that you could use on your still images.
There are no automatic tools of which I am aware that can make those kinds of corrections without setting the parameters frame-by-frame. There are a few compression applications that will create custom color look up tables based on uncontrollably gross averaging of the pixel content but they are not intelligent; there’s no way to tell Compressor to change a gray area to the better gray but to not perform on averaging operation on that good gray area. And, of course, your idea of “gorgeous” will require a bit of change.
I hope you get appropirately helpful advice from someone here who knows of some obscure plugin that will save your project. There’s a book called “Fix it in post.” See amazon.
bogiesan
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This is a tough one, you could create an action in photoshop and batch the whole stack of images to select the sky and re-set it’s levels to a baseline, and that may soften the worst of it, but everything in the frame gets altered by the change in sunlight, so it won’t get rid of all of it.
I’m not going to rag on the photographer this time though, because in time lapse there aer tims you leave the auto-iris on and times you don’t, and its a judgement call based on many factors.
I’m thinking to really repair this is going to take going into Apple Color and making some “power windows” that even out the sky and ground separately over the course of the whole thing. But I’m just talking out loud here, I don’t yet know how to do that myself. Would make an excellent tutorial for Harrington to do some time, though, I bet he could fix this.
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Mark, using color is a cool idea, one I would not have thought of, never even opened it.
Thanks for chiming in and I, too, resisted the temptation to go on and on about the photographer.
bogie
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Thanks for the reply guys. I’ll look further into a solution. Part of the problem is that it’s not a wide scene with tiny animated subjects with a sky and ground that flicker though. It’s all close-ups on big action – which has big rigs attached to hold them up. And it’s more the removal of these rigs that cause the problems (shadows and luminosity changes) rather than any errant photographer set-ups.
Sure, there’s the odd lighting change, but it’s never an auto-iris issue or anything like that. In the main-run, the photography is exactly what I’d look for. It’s just the huge rugs that’s the problem.
Thanks again.
John.
John Steventon
JKL Editing
http://www.jklediting.com
“Success is merely a failure to imagine more…”2.26 Dual Quad Nehalem Mac Pro / 2 x 23inch Apple Displays / FCP 6.05 / Decklink HD Extreme 3 + Multibridge / JVC HD Monitor / Atto Celerity Fibre Channel with Infortrend 6.5tb Raid 5 Storage / And a smile.
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