How to use Flicker Free with other effects

Flicker Free is commonly used in conjunction with other effects which can cause errors and slow renders if you do not adjust your settings correctly. If you’re using Warp Stabilizer, Lumetri color, or any color correction effects in addition to Flicker Free in your editing, it’s possible you’ll want to render Flicker Free separately to avoid frame processing errors, host-app crashes and export problems related to your GPU running out of memory. 

Creating an intermediary render that just has Flicker Free applied, and applying color corrections and effects to the intermediary render can solve a lot of problems. It’s an easy way of solving out of memory errors.

These errors happen because Flicker Free works by analyzing a range of frames on the GPU, and can conflict with other effects that are also using GPU processing. They are even more likely to happen if the effects used in conjunction with Flicker Free require heavy GPU processing, like the Warp Stabilizer effect. For example, if Flicker Free is analyzing 15 frames, Warp Stabilizer has to be applied to all 15 of those frames before FF can look at them. This can creates a huge memory bottleneck. Here’s what we recommend as a workflow to combine Flicker Free with other effects without causing any GPU related issues: 

Always apply other effects after Flicker Free on your clip. (i.e. Warp Stabilizer is applied after FF, so FF just needs to look at the original frames, not the stabilized frames.) This may solve the problems without needing to render another file out. That’s always the first step. However, if you still run into problems, rendering out separate de-flickered clip is the way to go.

  1. Apply Flicker Free to your footage first: ideally video editors should apply Flicker Free to their timeline first, without the use of any other effects. You can then choose one of our presets, and adjust the plugin settings as needed.
  1. Export the video without the flicker: once you are happy with the settings applied and your video has no signs of flicker (yay!), export the clips in your format of choice. You can then import the footage back into the project, replace it into the sequence and keep working on your editing. 
  1. Add any effects and/or start color correcting: now that flicker is no longer an issue, you can focus on using other effects and applying color correction on your video. Since Flicker Free is already rendered, your GPU is free to render all of that without causing conflicts. 

If exporting/reimporting is not possible, again we recommend at least making sure Flicker Free is applied first – at the beginning of the effects chain (it’ll show up as the first effect in the Effects Control panel) – so it renders using just your clip instead of taking other effects into consideration.  It’s also important to check your GPU memory capacity and graphics card specs. If you are still having problems after applying Flicker Free first, you can send your system info plus  a screenshot of your timeline and Effect Controls to cs@nulldigitalanarchy.com. Our tech support team will be able to help troubleshoot!  Before taking the screenshot please make sure to select  the panel with the clip Flicker Free is applied so we can see the Flicker Free settings and any other effects, as well as how the timeline is set up. 

For a step-by-step guide  on how to use Flicker Free with other effects and  simple ways to troubleshoot error messages (and visual glitches!) watch this video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY2a531qGug&t=12s

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