Removing video flicker

[Joshua Van]

I ran into this same issue, here is what I did to clean a Florecent flicker issue I encounter shooting on the sony fs700 at 240 fps. In post I used AE CS6 and Boris FX – BCC DeNoise.

settings:
Value Range – 98.58
Mix with original – 32.00

Video Before/After:
https://vimeo.com/64510913
pass: boris

Seemed to work ok. Hope this helps..

JoshuaVP.com
vimeo.com/joshuavp

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[Haik Kavookjian]

Hey,

I’m not seeing BCC DeNoise as one of the effects. I’m running CS5. Is it only available on CS6?

[Seth Olson]

Poor man’s solution:

Duplicated the footage layer a few times, offset each one by a frame, turned down opacity of the layers according to the number of layers. Example: 4 layers, 25% opacity on the top 3, 100% always on the bottom. This has a risk of adding fake motion blur, but sometimes that can be reduced afterwards with sharpening. Also, you need extra heads and tails.

[Tim Selander]

Seth! Holy Cow — that works incredibly well!

Yesterday, client gave me an interview shot under 50hz fluorescents, with a 1/60th shutter speed, also a lot of outside light coming in windows which toned down the flicker a bit, but it was still quite noticeable. Tried 4 tracks at 25-50-75-100% opacity — worked great with some motion blurring. Three tracks at 33-66-100% also worked great and lessened motion artifacts. So I tried just two tracks, 50-100% — and even THAT took care of the flicker, with minimal motion artifacts in my opinion.

Can’t wait until someone gives me a similar shot, only without the outside window light, to see how well your trick works with really obnoxious flicker! (Since half of Japan runs the electric at 50Hz, flicker filled video is a constant problem here.)

Many, many thanks.

Tim Selander
Tokyo, Japan

[Richard Robin]

Thank you, Seth and Tim! What a life-saver! And free! Like Tim, I had footage shot at 60 fps in Russia under florescents at 50 Mhz next to a window with sun coming in. Usually, my camera (Panasonic GH2), set on full auto, eventually figures things out and compensates. But not this time. Tim’s 2-track method didn’t work, but 3 tracks at 100% – 50% and 50% opacity did the trick, albeit with some motion blur. But this was mostly a fairly motionless talking head. So the only time you see the blur is when the subject waved his hand. The varying sunlight is still a problem. The camera was probably too confused by the flicker to handle the exposure changes needed for the sun. To correct *that*, I’ll have to assign a spot, follow the waveform output and adjust keyframes manually. …Unless anyone knows of a filter that would allow me to assign a spot in the frame as a reference point and hold the luminescence level the same throughout the clip.

[Demetris Christodoulides]

Thanks for this amazingly helpful topic. Unfortunately, in my case (fluorescent in europe + camtree led lights 72) with canon 7d and 1/100 shutter speed, iso 800, indoors, f5.6, created a horrible flicker which i didn’t catch in time for some shots; i tried everything you suggested with no success because moving the frames one by one to the right and gradually increasing the opacity created horrible artifacts and motion blur to me, ’cause i shot fast moving people and objects within a gym for a gym promo. Duh to me ;; ) , but except for:

RED GIANT KC DENOISER in AFTER EFFECTS

i have it in auto, no tweaking and it works wonders! All the flicker went away with no ghosting or anything, just some weird-looking but very subtle fuzzy artifcact on some edges around sharp objects or faces, a bit of video smoothing but it’s nothing compared to the destroyed, useless original flicker. I am very excited, glad to have found this topic!

Life saver indeed.

Cheers

[Nancy Kiang]

Oh, man, Seth, you’re a genius! What a simple, elegant solution. It’s effectively a weighted moving average filter. Man, am I glad that I shot at 29.97 fps (in a 50 Hz country), so now I might actually achieve ~24p with this fix!

Thanks, Seth!!!

[Peter Berdovsky]

Seth, you are the man!
I am working on a very rough, simple project, where I needed to record a TV on my SLR camera.
The flicker was rough.
But duplicating my layer, and offsetting the top by 1 frame, then making it 50% opacity – FIXED THE ISSUE COMPLETELY for me.

This is a miracle 🙂

[Shaun Kurian]

Wow- that was a miraculous save. Totally. Thank you. The lesson here for sure is: fixing in post is not the first order in the planning of a production, but when you have to fix it in post, exhaust all possibilities, understand the problem at hand, and see if there are ways to solve it beyond the obvious. Bravo on this fix.

[Jim Tierney]

When you can’t reshoot and the layer trick doesn’t work, which happens frequently, we’ve developed a plugin, Flicker Free, for getting rid of flicker from a variety of sources. It’s very easy to use and solves most flicker issues… time lapse, 50hz, LED/fluorescent lights, slow motion, etc.

There’s a free trial, so you can check it out before purchasing.

https://digitalanarchy.com/Flicker/main.html

cheers,
Jim Tierney
Digital Anarchy