The main change to Flicker Free 3.0, Digital Anarchy’s plugin to de-flicker rolling bands and other flicker problems, is adjusting the algorithm to deal with a wider time range. This improves de-flickering of rolling bands and high frame rate (slow motion) video.
If you’d rather watch a video than read about it, here’s a tutorial going over the changes and how to use them to fix your flickering video footage.
What does a ‘wider time range’ mean?
In FF 2.0 you were limited to a Time Radius of 10. Which gave you a max range of 21 frames… 10 frames before the current frame, 10 frames forward, and the current frame. So about 2/3rds of a second, at 30fps. Mm
In Flicker Free 3.0 the Time Radius limit has been increased to 19, so a total of 39 frames, 19 back, 19 forward, plus the current frames. About 1.333 seconds at 30fps.
Also, there is now a STEP parameter which has a limit of 5. This tells FF to skip to every nth frame. So with Step set to 5 and Time Radius set to 4, it’d look at Frame 1, 6, 11, 16, instead of the normal 1, 2, 3, 4. You’re still using 4 frames (max of 19) but they’re spread out. This means FF 3.0 (time radius = 19) can look at a maximum of 6.5 seconds to try and correct the flicker. (at 30fps)
What does that mean?
1) it allows us to solve some instances of flicker, especially slow rolling bands and very high frame rate video that we were unable to fix before.
2) 6.5 seconds is a really loooong time if your video has a lot of motion (handheld camera, sports, dancers, etc). So the parameters for dealing with motion (Motion Compensation, Detect Motion) become REALLY important.
The long time range makes deflickering without adding artifacts problematic. Usually you see this as ‘ghost’ pixels or blurring. It can also show up in weird discoloration. But check out the next section for some tips on how to determine if the footage is fixable at all and how to fix or improve it without artifacts.
Presets: There are, of course, new presets, mainly for rolling bands but you can also try for other types of flicker. The Medium Slow Rolling Bands presets and Slow Rolling Bands have variations or parameter settings we’ve seen to be successful. However, you may want to tweak the settings.
Make sure you save your project before fiddling with the presets! Some of the settings can be pretty resource intensive, especially on 4K footage. If you don’t have a pretty beefy GPU, Flicker Free may cause the card to run out of memory and hang or crash your system. With Time Radius <10 this is less likely to be a problem. But if you crank the settings up, be careful.
We do not recommend applying Flicker Free directly to footage larger than 4K. You should apply Flicker Free to the resolution you’re delivering at. This will render faster and reduce the memory requirements (and risk of running out of memory and crashing!)
Check out the Flicker Free 3.0 Manual for more details!
Flicker Free 3.0 is available for Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Davinci Resolve and Avid Media Composer.