smoothing out changes between frames to avoid jittery sketch and cartoonize effects

[Chris Wright]

does it fail on 60p footage or just 24fps? that would answer your question.

[Greg Sage]

Any frame rate… and it’s not just one plug I’m talking about. Essentially any effect that redraws based upon threshold rules, so any of the cartoonize (inside AE or external) fx that draw cartoon lines around things, or convert the picture to sketch (running through PS), or any of the brush or paint dab fx, etc.

Essentially, I think I need some sort of frame averaging de-noising with a deep setting, but I don’t think that’s going far enough. Is anyone using something like this, but then with some particular combination of settings, or in combination with something else to smooth out any motion with minimal blur?

For instance, if you’re slowing something down below the actual frame rate, Twixtor interpolates the frames and at least tries to redraw the image at various interpolated stages to fill in the correct motion between the known frames.

Is there some sort of intelligent frame averaging that does something similar, but with actual footage that’s not being time stretched, so it looks at actual frames, yet shifts them around a bit to give best fitted curve to all motion based on surrounding frames?

If not, what’s the most advanced frame averaging effect that can denoise intelligently and give a nice clean output with minimal blur? That’s at least a start.

Surely anyone that’s ever used any sketch effect or anything like it has had the same thought, that it’s a bit chaotic and would be much nicer if the motion was slower and smoothed out… I’m just trying to figure out how to actually dial that in.

[Chris Wright]

for the edges, i doubt any of the plugins compare adjacent frames which means that you would need to blur edges with find edges effect alpha matte or use timewarp’s shutter blur or reelsmart motion blur. I would also use Neatvideo for the actual noise.

for the jittery, if increasing the framerate before adding the effect doesn’t work, consider frame averaging after the effect. an example would be timestretch the layer 50%, then add timewarp 50%. This will create a net effect of some newly created optical flow frames to be discarded.
it smooths camera movement so might smooth stutter.

[Greg Sage]

Interesting trick about stretching and back. Hadn’t heard of it. Might be just the ticket (in conjunction with frame averaging to simplify and denoise each frame). Just to be clear, you’re talking about making it half speed, then back to normal, right? Just using the built in AE tools to do so? No 3rd party plugs to dial in the process?

I’d think that would be better off BEFORE the effect since any jumps in threshold would have already triggered jumpy lines by the time the stretching is done. Point is to smooth it out so those jumps don’t occur if possible.

Also, I came across RE:Vision plug called DE:Noise Frame Average which seems to be what I was describing about taking out any chatter that’s not persistent across x frames. Any particular reason NeatVideo would be better?

[Chris Wright]

yes half speed whole frames, 200% increase speed optical interpolation frames to get original speed
timewarp comes with with AE.

I haven’t used denoise so couldn’t say. it looks more like film restore than jitter removal. I
could be wong about that.

I wrote a luma smoother for AE. dunno if that would work either. It removes grain but I don’t know how well that would
work temporally.

skin and noise repair AE cc 2015
https://f1.creativecow.net/10816/skin-and-noise-repair

[Michael Cassidy]

I started doing all of my images in Flash, importing them into PS and then into AE…. Seems like doing it this way, at least on my machine, get’s rid of all of these sketchy chops between frames

[Chris Wright]

flash will do tweening(interpolation) that’s why.

thanks for posting solution.