- Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video.
In this video, we're gonna talk about
how you can remove or dramatically reduce
the flickering that comes through in your drone footage.
So it could be that you've actually filmed
the top of your propeller blades
or you're actually getting some reflection from the sun
through the blades onto your lens of your camera
so that you're getting some flickering
through there as well.
We've got an awesome plugin that we've found.
It's called Flicker Free
from a company called Digital Anarchy
and in this video, we're gonna show you how it works.
(exciting music)
The Flicker Free plugin is actually supported by most
of the top video editing programs around.
You can use it on Avid.
You can use it on Adobe Premiere, Final Cut,
DaVinci Resolve, Adobe After Effects.
So they've really covered all the bases with the plugin.
The plugin does sell for $149 US but at that price point,
I really think it's of extremely awesome value
because it's gonna allow you to repair
or dramatically improve any footage
that you thought was unusable.
Flicker Free doesn't only work with drone footage.
It actually is really good at repairing
almost any flickering in any video file.
It could be that you've used incorrect lights
or your lights aren't matched with your shutter speed
and with your frame rates of your videos
that you're recording
so you may have horizontal bands
going through your videos.
It could be that you're using a time-lapse
and you're getting a flicker
from having your time-lapse set to auto-exposure
so the exposure's constantly changing
which is giving you a flicker effect.
Flicker Free is an awesome plugin
to remove any flickers from your videos.
We're gonna jump across now into Final Cut
where we're gonna run through an example
of repairing some drone footage.
Alright, we're over in Final Cut
and here is our drone footage.
It's of Mooloolaba Beach on the Sunshine Coast in Australia.
So what I've done is just added two cuts
to our video footage here
just to show you a sample section
that actually has quite a lot of flicker
from the propeller up in the top right corner.
So I'll play it through.
You can see that there's quite a bit of blade there
in this shot and it's flickering pretty badly
and for this section, it's actually flickering quite a lot.
So I've just cut this little section out
'cause this is where we're gonna apply our effect
just to show you the results that we can get
on this section.
So we come over to Effects
and we go down to Digital Anarchy,
we click on Flicker Free and we drop it onto our clip.
From there, there's a heap of presets that you can look at.
The default here is Time-lapse
and you've got things like Slow Motion,
Halo Removal, Super Slow Motion, Horizontal Rolling Bands
and there's a few presets for those.
Computer Monitors and TV, Old Archival Footage,
Stage Lights, Slow Motion
and another Rolling Bands preset too.
So really, in my experience,
I haven't needed to use anything but these presets.
Sometimes I'll find that the Time-lapse one
will actually work really well
on good drone footage as well.
So really, from here, it's a matter of
clicking and trialing some of the presets
to see the results that you get
without needing to tweak any of the advanced settings.
As a starting point for drone footage,
I'd recommend starting with either Time-lapse
and if that doesn't give you some great results straight out
then I'd jump across to Rolling Horizontal Bands LED Lights.
So if we play that back now,
you will see that a lot of the flicker's actually gone.
It's still a little bit noticeable up there.
I'll play it again.
So the majority is gone just with
the Flicker Free plugin just set with
the Rolling Horizontal Bands LED Lights preset.
We can compare that here to where our clip changes
back to the original with no plugin.
Huge difference.
Now, really, if you wanna refine the effect further
then you can play around with the advanced settings here
for Sensitivity, Time Radius, All Channels,
Threshold, Detect Motion.
So there's a few settings there
that you can play around with to really tweak your results
but as I said, in my experience,
I normally just stick with the presets.
So that's pretty good but in order to remove
this last little bit of flicker up here,
there's just a little bit there,
you can actually add a second Flicker Free plugin
on your footage so that it's gonna process
your already processed footage.
So if we come down here and we copy our clip
with Command c, we then go Edit,
Paste Attributes
and tick Flicker Free and click Paste.
So here's the finished product
with two Flicker Free plugins on.
Let's play it again now.
You can see that the flicker is almost gone
from that top corner.
And here's the original with the crazy flicker going on.
And the repaired version again.
So you can see that it's barely noticeable
especially compared to how it was to start with
which is this.
Now, really, I suppose you could add
the flicker effect plugin in a third time or a fourth time
but just be aware that even adding it on a second time
increased the render times massively
and I'm sure on some levels by applying it multiple times,
you will get a greater quality loss in your video
but really for what we've shown here
in adding the effect twice,
there's really next to no quality loss
or next to no detail loss in our video.
So what I recommend is that you download the plugin
and give it a go.
The demo version will show you what your results would be
without needing to purchase straight away
but you won't be able to export your files
without there being a watermark or it's actually a grid
that appears on your footage until you pay for a license.
If you found this video helpful,
we'd really appreciate a share, a comment or a thumbs up.
It really makes a huge difference.
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I'll see you next time.