Tag Archives: arena lights

The Problem of Slow Motion Flicker during Big Sporting Events: NCAA Tournament

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Shooting slow motion footage, especially very high speed shots like 240fps or 480fps, results in flicker if you don’t have high quality lights. Stadiums often have low quality industrial lighting, LEDs, or both. Resulting in flicker during slow motion shots even on nationally broadcast, high profile sporting events.

I was particularly struck by this watching the NCAA Basketball Tournament this weekend. Seemed like I was seeing flicker on  half of the slow motion shots. You can see a few in this video (along with Flicker Free plugin de-flickered versions of the same footage):

To see how to get rid of the flicker you can check out our tutorial on removing flicker from slow motion sports.

The LED lights are most often the problem. They circle the arena and depending on how bright they are, for example if it’s turned solid white, they can cast enough light on the players to cause flicker when played back in slow motion. Even if they don’t cast light on the players they’re visible in the background flickering. Here’s a photo of the lights I’m talking about in Oracle arena (white band of light going around the stadium):

Deflickering stadium lights can be done with Flicker Free

While Flicker Free won’t work for live production, it works great for de-flickering this type of flicker if you can render it in a video editing app, as you can see in the original example.

It’s a common problem even for pro sports or high profile sporting events (once you start looking for it, you see it a lot). So if you run into with your footage, check out the Flicker Free plugin for most video editing applications!