Great benefits of the Flicker Free Video Plugin

Effective Flicker Removal Presets

Flicker Free offers several presets for different types of footage. They make it easy to get the right flicker removal settings very quickly, without reading a huge manual. These are the settings we've found to work well in our tests. They often remove flicker instantly or require very minor tweaking. Either way, the presets make excellent starting points to save your footage. Learn how to use the Flicker Free presets for an easy de-flicker workflow in this video tutorial.

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 not a plugin you need to use all the time, but when you do have flicker on video footage there's no need to re-learn it every time you use it.

Analyze Flickering on the Fly

Flicker Free doesn't require any 'pre-analysis' to work. Just choose your de-flicker preset , drag and drop it on top of your clip. While there are many different types of flicker, the strobing will be pretty much the same throughout any given piece of footage. If Flicker Free works on a couple of seconds of your video, it’ll work remove flicker on the rest of it.

Motion Compensation and Detect Motion

Flicker Free 2.0 uses optical flow algorithms to detect and delineate independently moving objects, even in the presence of camera motion. These integrated motion-estimation algorithms are highly effective for repairing footage that was previously unfixable.

Remove All Types of Video Flicker

No matter what’s causing the flicker, Flicker Free can fix it. It was designed for Time Lapse videography, but works on slow-motion footage, rolling bands caused by the camera being out of sync with LED or fluorescent lights, drone footage and more. Check our Examples for tips on how to remove different types of flicker with Flicker Free.

GPU Acceleration

Working with 4K or larger resolutions? Flicker Free 2.0 comes with dramatic GPU-accelerated performance gains of more than 300% over the previous version. Rendering speed will vary according to your computer. GPU, operating system and How GPU the Video Editing App you’re using. If you need more info please email us at cs@digitalanarchy.com .

Deflicker Time Lapse Footage

A time lapse video requires taking a photo at intervals (1 sec., 1 min., etc) and combining them to make the video. This can result in beautiful videos, but the exposure tends to change between frames. When played back this shows up as flicker.

Flicker Free was designed to deal with Time Lapse flicker and works beautifully on it. If you, like us, are a connoisseur of shooting Time Lapse we suggest taking a look at just how powerful Flicker can be creating these types of videos.

Repair handheld footage and shots with moving subjects

Fixing flicker on footage with lots of movement and moving subjects is only possible if you can detect and delineate independently moving objects, even in the presence of camera motion. Simply applying the effect will minimize the problem, but also cause a lot of ghosting, which are echoes from other frames Flicker Free is analyzing as it tries to remove the flicker.

The good news is... Flicker Free’s optical flow algorithms for Motion Compensation are highly effective in separating those moving subjects, for example, and repairing poor quality video or footage that was previously unfixable.

Fix Slow Motion Video

Many lights will cause flicker in slow motion footage. Normal lights running on AC 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 FS700, GoPro or iPhone 6 (shoots 240fps).

Flicker Free will smooth out the fluctuations and make the brightness consistent throughout the video clip. Take a look at how Flicker Free makes this possible. Since slow motion often requires a lot of light, this makes it possible to use inexpensive lights. Even Home Depot shop lights!

Remove LED Lights strobing effect

LEDs are one of the more common flicker problems we've seen. Cheap LEDs or ones that have been dimmed can cause severe strobing or rolling bands. 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. Check out our examples here for a glimpse at what Flicker Free can do.

Adjust Archival Footage Exposure

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.

Most of these problems are easy for Flicker Free to fix. Your footage may look better than it looked when it was originally shot!

Eliminate Aerial Drone Flickering Bands

Drone footage can have flicker caused by a couple problems. Shadows from the propellers can get cast on the lens causing flickering bands. Secondly, you can get compression artifacts in areas with a lot of detail (e.g. a grass field), which creates a very regular (e.g. every 8 frames) shift in pixels which causes flicker. Unfortunately, these can make otherwise beautiful birds-eye-view shots of expansive landscapes unusable.

Luckily, Flicker Free can be used to lessen or eliminate prop flicker or the GOP compression problems to make your aerial footage fit for client delivery or personal use. Using a two pass method our plugin is able to get excellent results and gets you out of having to commit to reshoots!

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