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Although flicker has had its uses in experimental film, in video flickering can induce epileptic seizures – although it’s mainly just unsightly. Removing flicker is often easy, but can also be quite vexing with certain combinations of out-of-sync lights, electricity, and cameras routinely used recording time-lapse and slow motion footage.
For discussion of some of the issues concerning luminence flicker (not video field flicker) and how to avoid it, see for example About flicker problems by David Satz, Flicker-Free Lights, and Why They are Important to You from B&H Photo-Video, and Rough Guide to Flicker-Free HD Shooting by Art Adams (more 1, 2) here on PVC.
A good short guide on the problem is Reducing flicker for stop-motion animation and time-lapse photography by Benjamin Markus on the AE team blog, written before the release of two powerful plug-ins. Also useful are general shooting tips from Granite Bay Software to eliminate or minimize time-lapse flicker:
- Avoid flourescent lighting – It’s just too prone to flicker.
- In artifical light, use a long exposure – If you have to use artificial light, make sure to use a shutter speed that is much longer than one power cycle (i.e. 1/60 of a second). Use a shutter of 1/2 second or longer so your exposure captures many power cycles and the fluctuations average out.
- Avoid clipping – Pay attention to the histogram before you start. If it is anywhere near clipping, back off the exposure by -1/3 or -2/3 EV. Make sure the blue channel isn’t clipping.
- Use a higher f-stop – Your camera might give less variation at higher f-stops.
- Remove the flicker later in software
In Creative Cloud, you may be able to fix flicker, depending on shutter speed and frame rate, by simply duplicating the footage and dragging the top layer over one frame later in time then adjusting opacity. This technique was demonstrated by Philip Bloom in Premiere Pro CC in his video Die flicker! Die! How to remove that nasty high shutter speed/ high frame rate artefact in your NLE. It should be easier than the earlier advice from Dave LaRonde, though adding layers at various time offsets and lesser opacities may still be required on some shots.
After Effects has built-in plug-ins designed to remove the flicker common to varying lighting conditions exposed by time-lapse photography and stop-frame animation. The old warhorse is the Color Stabilizer effect, which “samples the color values of a single reference frame, or pivot frame, at one, two, or three points; it then adjusts the colors of other frames so that the color values of those points remain constant throughout the duration of the layer.”Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, and Auto Color can be used too. In another direction, on one forum in 2012, Chris Wright said “AE has warp stabilizer for motion and auto levels, auto color for flicker, but I’ve had the best luck with my auto white balance flicker removal project I made a long time ago. 25% on the textbox is the sweet spot for clamp.”
Richard Harrington explained the old Color Stabilizer effect more recently in his After Effects tutorial Stabilizing exposure with the Color Stabilizer effect at Lynda.com.
There are a variety of dedicated flicker removal plug-ins available. Some are in plug-in bundles like Genarts and Boris FX, which available for NLEs and vfx software on various operating systems. Here’s Boris Flicker Fixer in action.
LRTimelapse uses Adobe Lightroom, and grades by changing frame metadata in their app.
There are also some freeware solutions mainly for Linux and Windows, like Virtual Dub and MSU Deflicker. Timelapseworks.com did a DeFlicker Comparison Test with MSU DeFlicker for VirtualDub, Donald Graft’s DeFlicker for VirtualDub, and DeSeRt:
There are also several well-maintained, inexpensive, yet more industrial-strength commercial solutions for Premiere Pro and After Effects CC.
Granite Bay GBDeflicker has been around since 2007, and is available as a Windows standalone app or as a Premiere Pro-After Effects plug-in on the Mac & Windows. GBDeflicker offers advanced controls which were discussed on their blog.
Flicker Free from Digital Anarchy (long associated with After Effects) is a newer but highly-regarded plug-in. It’s said that Flicker Free “solves an issue that’s common to anyone that does time lapse or shoots slow motion (high frame rate) video. Flicker happens due to many reasons, exposure variations, electric lights, or just old film.” It seems to eliminate interference and flourescent strobing effectively.
RE:VisionFX also got into the game with DE:Flicker, improving a workflow that previously used a combination of RE:VisionFX ReelSmart Motion Blur and Smoothkit to stop strobing caused by a lack of time samples. DE:Flicker consists of 3 plug-ins for auto-levels correction, high frame rates, and timelapse video.
Please note that this roundup is for quick review and comparison. There is almost always vital information from the originating authors at the links provided — and often free presets, plug-ins, or stock footage too.
Please note that this roundup is for quick review and comparison. There is almost always vital information from the originating authors at the links provided — and often free presets, plug-ins, or stock footage too. – See more at: https://www.provideocoalition.com/spirals-in-after-effects#sthash.FzPlTlqG.dpuf
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Presets for an Easy Workflow
They make it easy to get the right settings very quickly, without reading a huge manual. Plugins should just work. There are several presets for different types of video footage. These are settings we've found to work well in our tests. At best, they'll instantly solve your flicker problems! (this happens a lot… so try one of the presets, it may be all you need to do) Otherwise, they provide a good starting point and you shouldn't need to make too many tweaks. Every piece of video footage is different, of course, but the types of flicker tend to be the same. So the presets usually work quite well.
Easy to Understand
Video plugins should make your life easier. The software should be doing the hard work behind the scenes so you can get work done quickly without watching hours of training videos. Flicker Free is a critical video plugin when you have footage with flicker problems, but hopefully you won't need all the time. It's good to know you can just pull it out of your toolbox and it'll just work. There's no need to re-learn complicated parameters every time you use it.
Analyzes on the Fly
Flicker Free doesn't require any 'pre-analysis' to work. Just apply it to your footage, render a couple seconds as a test and you're ready to render your entire project. It analyzes the frames as it's rendering so you don't have to wait around before you can get to work.
Deflicker Time Lapse Footage
A time lapse video requires taking a photo every 1 second or 1 hour and combining them to make the video. This can result in beautiful videos, but the problem is that the lighting changes. This causes the camera to adjust the exposure and you get flicker. Flicker Free was designed to deal with Time Lapse flicker and works beautifully on it.
Slow Motion Footage
Many lights will cause flicker in slow motion footage. Normal lights running on AC (Alternating Current) can fluctuate in brightness as the electricity fluctuates (the 'alternating' in AC). These fluctuations in brightness can affect your footage if the camera is shooting 120fps or faster. The higher the frame rate of the footage the more apparent it is. This can happen regardless of whether you're shooing with a Phantom Flex, Sony FS700U or GoPro HERO3 Black (shoots 240fps). Flicker Free will smooth out the fluctuations and make the brightness consistent throughout the video clip. There are lights that don't flicker. They're more expensive and probably well within your budget if you're using a Phantom. However, with many high speed cameras available in the $5-10K range (Sony FS700U, Edgertronic, etc), budgeting another $4K for lights might not be feasible. So, go grab some $25 tungsten shop lights from Home Depot and use Flicker Free!
LED Lights
Most people don't realize that many LED lights have a refresh rate similar to that of a computer monitor. If you're camera isn't in sync with the refresh rate, you'll get rolling bands going through your video. This is one of the more common flicker problems we've seen as many places have switched to LED lights but it's not obvious to production people when shooting. You don't discover they're LED lights until you get the footage into post and see all the flickering. Luckily Flicker Free is there to help! It saved some of the shots on this music video by the Bloody Beetroots and Tommy Lee.
Archival Footage
If you're restoring older footage, flicker comes from a few sources. 1) The film may have degraded over time, 2) The camera was hand cranked making it difficult to maintain a consistent exposure over the course of the shot, and 3) older lights were more prone to flickering. If the problem comes from Exposure, which would've been in the original, then it’s a similar problem to time lapse. It effects the whole frame and should be easy for Flicker Free to fix. It'll look better than it ever did!
System Requirements
-Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 (64 bit)
-Host applications : Adobe After Effects CS4, CS5, CS5.5, CS6, CC
Language : English
Homepage :http://www.digitalanarchy.com/Flicker/main.html
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