Flicker from ceiling fan

[Chris Babbitt]

I tried the flicker filter in FCP. I’m not sure what it’s for or what it’s supposed to do, but it didn’t change anything.

[Scott Anderson]

The problem, as I see it Chris, is that you may have a flicker coming from a ceiling fan light, but unless that’s the ONLY light in the shot, the other lights are either not flickering, or flicker at a different pace.

Even if you were able to correct the flicker by perfectly dimming the shot up and down every other frame (something you can do with the Flicker filter), the background would now be flickering.

Let’s say that the fan light is your key, but there’s fill light from outdoors bouncing onto the side of your subject’s face. You correct for the key light, but now your fill light flickers from the correction you added.

That’s why there’s not an easy fix, and perhaps no fix at all, depending on the shot.

[Kristin Leys]

I’ve had the pleasure of fixing several similar ‘flickering’ shots.

It’s hit and miss but I’ve had success using the GenArts Sapphire plugins.

They have two flicker filters, one works in luminance only, the other in rgb.

Sometimes it’s a quick fix, others not. At the extreme end, I’ve had to roto out different parts of a shot and apply the filter separately to each.

But it has saved entire sequences from a documentary I was cutting. In that case it was fluorescent light flicker, it affected each colour channel differently so Sapphire’s RGB flicker filter worked a treat.

Worth a look.

[Petteri Evilampi]

There is a free little software called JES Video Cleaner down loadable from web. It has a process called “Varying Br”, that says it will “remove periodic brightness variation”. I have never used it so i don´t know how it works but you could give it a try. I have used this little application for noise removing with great success.