v2.x Digital Anarchy Flicker Free

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.

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. And take a look at this video series on creating time lapse!

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!

Examples

Fixing Rolling Bands Flicker

LED lights, computer monitors, and TVs can cause a particular type of flicker that we call Rolling Bands flicker. You can see a couple examples in this video and see how well the Flicker Free plugin handles it:

Eliminating Flicker from Drone Footage

With aerial drones, if the mounted camera is shot at a particular angle with regard to the sun, the propellers on the drone can cast shadows on the lens that create a unique and very annoying banding flicker. In this video, we show what this flicker looks like and what Flicker Free can do to help reduce and even eliminate the flicker entirely:

Operating Systems

• – Mac iOS High Sierra and later
• Windows 10

We now support Apple Metal GPU and After Effects’ Multiframe Rendering

Hosts

• Adobe After Effects CC2015+
• Adobe Premiere Pro CC2015+
• Final Cut Pro X 10.5 and higher
  
• Avid systems that support the AVX2 plugin format
• Resolve
• other OpenFX host apps.*

*This may not be fully compatible with all OpenFX hosts apps at this time. It’s been tested in and should work with Resolve. Please try the demo in other host apps before purchasing.

What’s new in Flicker Free 2.2.4

• a number of fixes and small improvements

What’s new in Flicker Free 2.1.6

• now supports Multi-Frame Rendering

What’s new in Flicker Free 2.1.4

• FCPX -This Flicker Free version is for compatibility with FCP versions 10.5.x. All versions before this will not load into FCP, if you are on a computer that has an Apple M1 Chip.
• Adobe – Compatible with Apple M1 Chip; CC 2015 and later; and Mac OS 10.11 or later (El Capitan).

What’s new in Flicker Free 2.1.3

• Added Avid Media Composer Compatibility

What’s new in Flicker Free 2.1.2

• FCPX- for FCP 10.1 to 10.4.x. Only compatible with FCP 10.5.x on Intel Machines.
• Added Davinci Resolve Compatibility

What’s new in Flicker Free 2.1.1

• added Compatiblity with Apple M1 Chip

What’s new in Flicker Free 2.1

• support for M1 and Big Sur added
• a number of other fixes and small improvements

Note: For Intel Macs these are release builds and you should install them. For M1 machines they’re beta. Partially because most M1 builds of the host app software are in beta. (e.g. Premiere M1 doesn’t load third party plugins currently)

What’s new in Flicker Free 2.0.1 (for FCPX)?

The upgrade mostly fixes a few crashes and includes updated GPU render processing. A couple things to note:

1. Leave Background Rendering off when using Flicker Free. This can cause slow downs or occasionally crashes
2. Flicker Free is _really_ taxing on FCP. If you’re rendering out of FCP, you’ll probably have to stop working while it renders. The alternative is to send the render job to Compressor. Compressor will render it and you should be able to continue using FCP.

What’s new in Flicker Free 2.0?

Our de-flickering plugin is now GPU accelerated for faster render speeds! Flicker Free 2.0 fixes footage with lots of movement or moving subjects. Motion Compensation and Detect Motion make it possible to repair footage that was previously unfixable!

What’s new in Flicker Free 1.1?

Bug fixes, support for Adobe CC 2015, improved support for 4K+ in FCPX

What’s new in Flicker Free for FCPX v1.0.3?

This solves a big issue with using 4K and above files in FCP. There’s a bug in FCP when dealing with these types of files and we finally found a workaround. This vastly improves the speed of FCP when trying to de-flicker 4K (or larger) footage. This was a problem in particular with time lapse sequences as those are typically comprised of 6 – 8K images.