Removing video flicker

[Benj Roche]

thanks, reshooting is an option as this is no budget.

We shot on a 5D at 30fps. There was a digital billboard in the background. I am not sure if digital billboards are everywhere like they are in Los Angeles, but its basically a giant video screen shaped like a billboard…

I was aware of the flicker happening so I also shot with different shutter speeds and have a few shots that are flicker-free, but my favorite billboard shot was at 1/60

I’d still like to test out some flicker removal techniques – the shots that need to be de-flickered are mostly 1 second shots….

any filters I should read up on?

[Benj Roche]

Hey the only format for this video is Web.

The footage was converted to Apple ProRes (Proxy) before editing.

Does AE have a built in method for removing flicker?

[David Bogie]

[Benj Roche] “Does AE have a built in method for removing flicker?
“

Depends on what you mean by “flicker” and I can’t tell from your posts. Mismatches in refresh rates between a screen and a shutter cannot be fixed easily. If there are moving images on your screen you must decide whether frame blending and forced motion blur are acceptable.

If you step through 20 individual frames, what are seeing that bothers you and what frames?
Try to be very specific when you say flicker.

bogiesan

[Jeycob Sonofcarl]

Check out Tinderbox’s FurnaceCore deflicker plugin. it’s AMAZING. will only deflicker the parts of the frame that are flickering and leaves the other’s alone. better than Sapphire, Tinderbox, and any others I’ve tried. Blew my mind.

[Mathew Lisett]

do you know of a video thats hows this, or ould you be able to do a short one .

[Jake Fantom]

I am far from an expert and I am not a professional videographer. However, I have spent the last five days obsessively researching this problem, and I found an answer that worked for me. I had some footage of a beautiful event (new mom and baby) that was ruined by horrible fluorescent light flicker. I tried literally every one of the various plugins, filters and tricks recommended in these pages and elsewhere. None of the BorisFX or GenArts or built-in AE effects worked worth a damn. The Furnace plug in might work. I tried the trial version. But it was going to take 24 hours to process about one minute of video on a fairly high-powered Mac, so I bagged that. The only plug in that worked was Magic Bullet Denoiser. I used this in FCP, but I believe it was also available for AE. It worked like a charm, completely eliminated the flicker, and added a creamy texture to skin tones without losing video quality (at least to my naked eye). The bad news is, apparently this filter is no longer available from Magic Bullet because the company they licensed it from was bought by Google. They are promising an updated version in the near future. I will be first on line for it.

[Haik Kavookjian]

Hey Jake,

What settings did you use in Magic bullet Denoiser? I’ve been messing around with it and it definitely works better than the Furnace plugin, but I’m still seeing some flicker. When I crank things up too high, my moving subject starts to jitter quite a bit.

Any thoughts?

I had another idea that would be a huge pain, but someone please let me know if you think this might work. I noticed that the flickering is caused by dark bands that run across the frame. The first frame has a dark band at the top and one in the middle. As you move through each frame, the bands transition down the shot and after the third frame, the pattern repeats itself. So… here is my thought:

-Export the sequence as a series of jpegs (each frame is a new jpeg)
-Use Photoshop to batch correct each frame, selectively using an exposure filter to lighten the dark bands
-The tricky part is that the band pattern changes. So I would need to apply one filter to the 1st frame, 4th frame, 7 frame, etc… another filter to the 2nd frame, 5th frame, 8th frame, etc… and another filter to the 3rd frame, 6th frame, 9th frame.
-Then create a new sequence with the edited jpeg frames.

Someone please tell me this is crazy and won’t work so I don’t waste hours giving it a shot.

[Nir Aaron]

I had the same idea with Photoshop (Ulead Media Studio is better) to edit each frame.
But I am sure that there is a working plugin for it.

This is my problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axOde5HjDFQ

Any ideas?

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[Haik Kavookjian]

Nir,

It looks like we have a similar problem, although I don’t know how your footage ended up like that because it is outside. I was shooting under fluorescent lighting at 60fps in Europe. (I’ll never make that mistake again).

I still haven’t given my potential fix a go because the entire process seems so daunting. A plugin or script that did everything would be great, but I haven’t seen it yet.

[Kamil Iwanowicz]

Hi guys,

I was also fighting with flicker in one of my shots but as the shot is not easy to mask it was driving me nuts. The issue is a monitor partly hidden by person’s arm which is flickering like crazy (the monitor, not the person :P).

But just a while ago I realised that as it’s a very slow pan and almost no movement, I just slowed it down by 50% and used twixor to go back to the original lenght. Worked like a charm. Hope this will be useful for someone, it definitely saved me a lot of pain.