[Adam Banks]

Just started working with Premiere CC 2015 and got this same problem. Random flickering, like the Adjustment Layer’s effects are dropping out in certain frames. I’ve tried turning options on and off, makes no difference. Will keep trying but it seems crazy that this has been happening for so long without being fixed – makes it a gamble to use Adjustment Layers at all.

EDIT: I tried moving the fx from the Adjustment Layer to the clip itself and it didn’t help. So the Adjustment Layer wasn’t the problem after all. Turned out to be Auto Color that was causing the flicker, used in conjunction with other fx.

I’d thought twice about using Auto Color because of the obvious problem in something that analyses each frame and adjusts accordingly, when what you want is the same adjustment applied through the clip (or sequence). To address this, Auto Color has a Temporal Smoothing option that spreads the analysis over multiple frames. Don’t try setting this to the length of the whole clip: when I tried 5 seconds the preview render estimated several hours to complete, on a clip barely more than 5 seconds long in total. Crazy.

Anyway, when I set it to half a second it fixed the problem (slowly). But I think the moral is don’t use Auto Color. The only direct way I can find to achieve the same effect is to manually adjust the white and black points for each RGB channel individually in a Levels fx. The UI for this is horrible, and there’s no option to set the sliders automatically based on the current frame in the scope, which surely would be trivial. It would be great if you could do that, actually, because then you’d have the speed and pop of Auto Color with the facility to tweak, rather than overlaying other fx to get the resulting colour to where you want it.

If I’m missing an obvious better quick way to fix clips where the RGB parade is off kilter, advice welcome. I generally fix black and white points using Fast Color Correct but there’s no way to separate the channels.