Hey. My name is Matt Johnson, and today I'm going to make a big claim because I'm
going to show you a guaranteed way that you can remove flicker
from your videos in Premiere Pro Final Cut DaVinci Resolve.
Basically any video editing software.
This tutorial is going to show you two methods for flicker removal, with the
first method being a quick and easy trick for removing flicker that may help you.
And the second method being a more advanced way to remove
really stubborn flicker But the first method can't help.
If method number one doesn't work, I guarantee you that method number two will.
Let's get the first flicker removal method out of the way really fast.
And this is something that you may have seen other people talk about
because the vast majority of Flicker removal tutorials on YouTube
cover this technique.
I'm going to show you how to do it in Premiere,
but you can use the same technique in any other video editing software
and it will work the same.
The quick and easy way to remove Flickr is to simply take your video clip
that has Flickr hit play on this clip here, and you'll see a lot of Flickr,
especially on the outfits of these people as they're dancing to fix it.
Simply take your video clip that has Flickr.
Hold down the alt key and drag up to duplicate that clip.
Press plus to zoom in. Move over one frame,
zoom back out,
and then set the opacity of your upper clip to 50%.
Hit play.
Check it out.
Flickr is removed, and the only side effect here
is that there's a slight amount of increased motion blur in your footage.
Pretty easy, right?
But what if this doesn't remove the Flickr?
What if you try and you notice that the lights are stubbornly still flickering
Check out this example here.
We've got a couple dancing and a lot of Flickr.
We've got two lights back here in the background flickering at different rates.
There's flickering on the bright stress it's a lot of Flickr and it's everywhere.
I'm going to try to fix it like we just did with the previous clip
by copying the clip,
dragging it over the other clip, and then setting the opacity to 50%.
But when I hit play that really didn't fix anything.
It still looks bad, and now it's just a lot of flicker with motion blur.
This is where Flicker removal method at number two comes in and
this is my method for removing
really stubborn flicker that doesn't want to disappear.
And here's the good news with this method, I have never had it fail.
I have always been able to remove the flicker using this technique.
Does that sound cool? Kind of magical.
Okay, here's how it works.
First, let me get the bad news out of the way.
You are going to need to buy a plug in called Flicker Free from a company
called Digital Anarchy.
And at the time of making this video, this plug in costs 149 bucks.
Yes, I'm sorry.
Unfortunately, this technique is not free, but this is a plug in that I use
multiple times per year.
And I'm betting you will as well.
And I think that it's completely worth it.
Plus, it works with Premiere Pro, Final Cut, DaVinci, Resolve, etc.
So it should work with your video editing software.
I will link to this plugin down below as another plus.
They do offer a demo of the plug in on Windows.
So if you're not sure whether you're going to be able to remove
your Flickr from your videos and you're using Premiere or resolve,
you can download the demo, put it on your clip, test it out
and make sure the flicker is removed before you put your money down on it.
Sorry, final cut users, they don't have a demo for you.
Also, for the sake of ethics here
really quick, I want you to know this video
isn't paid or sponsored by Digital Anarchy or anyone else for that matter.
I've bought this plugin with my own money and I'm talking to you about it
because I love it.
Okay.
Bad news about the cost of the plugin out of the way
Let's get to the awesome stuff.
Download the Flickr free plugin and install it.
And then whenever you have a video clip with very bad stubborn Flickr
that does not want to be removed like this clip here.
Open up your effects control panel where you can find the Flickr
plug in drag flicker free over to your video clip.
Hit play and wait a second.
The flicker is still here.
What the heck?
Well, out of the box,
flicker free can be a little finicky, so let's dial in some settings.
There are two critical settings for Flicker Free
that make the most difference.
The first thing you're going
to need to pay attention to here are these presets, and by default
the preset is set to rolling bands, which usually works pretty well.
If that doesn't work,
I would recommend going through and selecting some of these other presets
and seeing if that makes things look better.
One of my favorite presets is the slow motion preset,
which, as its name implies, should work well with slow motion footage.
Let's select slow motion and hit play again.
And it looks like the slow motion preset has fixed some of the flicker
in this clip.
But notice now that there's this weird ghosting effect on the motion.
In the clip, it looks like the couple's arms have a motion trail to fix that.
Check this motion compensation box and check it out.
Ghosting is gone in the couple's motion looks a whole lot better.
But look over here, and we still have this pesky flicker
that isn't being fixed by the plug in
because this light is flickering at a different rate than the other lights.
So here's a trick.
You don't have to apply flicker free just once.
You can apply it multiple times.
That said, though, I would not recommend
just dragging the Flicker free effect onto your clip again or nesting the clip.
This can confuse the plug
in, and I found that it usually crashes or makes Premiere super slow.
Instead, I would apply one pass a flicker free just like we did.
Then take your video clip and render it out as its own standalone
video file, then re-import this new video file back into your video
editing software and you'll see here
that I've re-imported it with this demo dot MP for clip
to play on this and see we've baked in some of this flicker removal
and now we only have this light over here on the left to deal with.
Now let's deal with the rest of this flicker.
First, we're going to go back over to Effects,
grab the flicker free plug in and drag it back over to this new clip.
Then let's set the preset to slow motion again.
And I'm also going to go here and change the threshold from 20% to 100%.
You can think of the threshold
setting as how sensitive the plug in is to light flickering.
If it's a big flicker going from very bright to very dark like this light is,
then setting the threshold higher will make the plug and detect
it Let's test this now and look at that ding.
The flicker is gone.
You would not even know there have been flicker in this clip.
Is that cool? That's really cool. But hold on a second.
The couple is now looking super ghost with a lot of motion trails.
No problem.
Let's go back over here.
Turn on motion compensation.
Hit play and dang it, we fixed the motion blur, but now the flicker is back.
Time to fix this once and for all.
The last thing that you need to know about Flicker Free is that you can choose
which parts of your clip that you want to apply the effect to.
In this case, I just want to apply to this flickering
light on the left and completely ignore the couple.
So let's uncheck motion compensation, and then I want you to click on the mask
pin tool and change the fit to 25%.
So we have much better view around the clip.
I'm going to click five times once here, once here,
once here, once here and once here.
Then I'm going to change the mask feather kind of soften out
this mask here a little bit and check this out.
Hit play and the flicker is gone and the couple are not ghosting.
Do you remember how bad this clip looked initially?
This is incredible.
I love it.
It's completely fixed.
Do you see how powerful this plugin is? All right.
So if you have any flicker in your videos, I would first try removing it
by using this simple trick of duplicating or clip on top of itself,
moving it over one frame and setting the opacity of 50%.
But if you have a very stubborn flicker that isn't being removed,
or if you aren't happy with the added motion blur
that you're getting using this technique,
investing in the flicker free plug in can save your video clips.
In fact, check out the original clip that I fixed at the start of the video.
Here's the clip being fixed by duplicating.
And here's the same clip, but I used Flicker Free with the motion
compensation box checked.
There's much less motion Blur with that.
Thank you so much for watching this Flicker removal tutorial.
I've linked down below to the Flicker Free plugin as well as a link
to my color presets that I use to color the clips in this video.
It would be a huge help to me if you would consider liking this video
and subscribing if you want to see more videos
about filmmaking and video editing in the future.
Thanks so much for watching and have a great day
So if you're editing a video that was filmed with cheap
LED lights that are causing a flickering effect in your videos today,
you're going to completely eradicate that flicker once and for all.