From the course: How Do I Do That in After Effects

Removing flicker in After Effects - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: How Do I Do That in After Effects

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Removing flicker in After Effects

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- There are a variety of causes that can create flicker with your footage. Maybe you're shooting with a high frame rate. For example, for slow motion under fluorescent lights. Or you're capturing a time-lapse sequence, and there's time of day changes or you have the camera settings wrong. Well, there's lots of ways that flicker can get introduced, and only a couple of ways to remove it. You can see here on this time-lapse shot that the flicker is pretty fierce. This is caused by being in an automatic mode on the camera that was adjusting to some of the light as it changed overhead as clouds passed over. This can be really problematic, but you'll see flicker like this from a variety of reasons, and lots of different shots not just time-lapse. Well, there's a ultimately two ways to fix this. There is a built-in tool that you'll find in the effects panel that can be used to stabilize the footage a little bit for color. However, it's not perfect. Let's choose the color stabilizer, and apply it to the footage. What you now need to do is set a black point, and a white point. So I'm going to turn the effects off for a second. Click with the target and navigate to an area that should stay black. Then we need to choose a white point. This is a little trickier because the footage is moving, and the clouds don't really stay put. So I want to find something in the surface itself that's close to white. This is pretty close. You can increase the sample size as well, and then enable the effect. Now, what you want to do is try different methods here. Notice brightness versus curves. Brightness is being the most gentle, and that's just looking at a black point here. Now, what we can do is adjust this until it finds a more accurate point. Let's go ahead and move that around a little. And that seems to be pretty good right about there. Now, I'll play this. And it's better but it's still problematic. And that's really the challenge here with the color stabilizer. So let's step up. There's a whole wealth of third-party plugins for After Effects. The two that I recommend are GBDeflicker, which is from Granite Bay, and Flicker Free, which is from Digital Anarchy. The Flicker Free one is a little more robust, tackling different types of flicker, while the Granite Bay software is more designed just for time-lapse. Both work well. And I'd encourage you to download a demo. In this case, let's select the footage here, and I'm going to apply the effect. I'll choose Flicker Free. From the preset, you'll see it supports different styles. I'm going to go with time-lapse here, and let it preview. The sensitivity includes how broad it's going to look. And I'm going to tell it to use the slower method here, and adjust the sensitivity. Well that helps. It's definitely getting better. Sometimes it actually takes two passes if there's a lot of flicker. So what I'm going to do is select the effect, and press command or control D for a second pass. And this time, I'll do the regular time-lapse method. Let's preview. Well, that worked well, but let's try again. Sometimes the flicker is different in its style. So it's worth trying out multiple passes. Instead of the time-lapse preset, I'm going to go with the simple rolling bands, the default. I'm going to increase the sensitivity here though, and the time radius so it analyzes a broader area. That definitely helped. Let's do a second pass. Now, with a little bit of experimentation, it seems to have done the trick. In this case, I increased the sensitivity and had it look over a broader number of frames to stabilize, that's because the flicker was pretty pronounced. I also played with a second pass so it was able to analyze and improve that. Let's go ahead and set this here to half quality. And you see it's really done a nice job of smoothing that out. Getting rid of flicker does take some trial and error. So be sure to experiment with different presets. In this case, I found that the rolling bands motion setting for motion two worked pretty well. That's because it's a very slow-moving subject, and it was pretty slow flicker. Plus by doing a second pass, it definitely cleaned it up even further. Notice here that the two pass flicker reduction effectively removes it completely. This sort of processing does take some time. So I always suggest trying to shoot it right but if you're shooting high frame rate, or time-lapse under certain conditions, it can be really difficult to get it right in camera. The use of a dedicated de-flicker plugin is a good thing to add to your arsenal. Just like I'd suggest, making sure that you have a de-noise plugin, these are both common problems that will pop up, and it's worth having a dedicated tool around that can speed up the processing.

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