Sunday, April 28, 2013

GBDeflicker Plugin - Using Two Layers Fixed Severe Flicker

GBDeflicker can't fix all flicker problems... however, with special techniques many of the most serious flicker problems can be fixed.

In this post, I'll show you how working with multiple layers fixed a severe flicker problem. The "key-frame shift method" is also a successful tool, and you can learn more about that one here.

A customer was having trouble de-flickering a time-lapse video and asked me have a look. His clip had some serious flickering of a kind I hadn't seen before. It was shot using a Nikon D7000 and Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lens. Apparently, the lens iris was not operating smoothly, causing significant differences in exposure between frames and leading to a great deal of aperture flicker.

The flickering was so severe, GBDeflicker applied with its default settings couldn't fix it. But, I was able to get a good result by de-flickering the sky and foreground separately, and combining them together using a layer mask.

Watch this demo to see how I did it.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Mike, have you tried this technique to reduce the natural flicker from passing clouds (which is not particularly aesthetic to look at)? ie mask out the flickerless sky and apply GBDeflicker to the ground only?

Anonymous said...

Hi mike, can you also show us how to combine those layers using layer masks in AE? I can't find any tutorial regarding to this. Thanks.

tlapse said...

Sorry, I am not an After Effects expert. Please search for a tutorial on creating a layer mask in AE.

tlapse said...

Ian, reducing natural flicker is more of a philosophical question. In my opinion, it's not really flicker. It's a property of the subject you are filming - the subject is changing between frames. Any attempt to reduce it would just corrupt something else in the image. However, you may try something like frame blending to smooth out frame by frame variations.