Reducing flicker in a time-lapse sequence with Adobe After Effects

- When shooting time-lapse, flicker is kind of a typical problem, particularly if you're dealing with the sun that keeps getting interrupted. As a cloud passes in front, it's going to block it temporarily and this can create instability in the lighting levels. Even if shooting indoors under safe fluorescent lighting, you might see shifting from one shot to the next. Fortunately, there's a couple of ways of fixing this. - [Instructor] This particular shot has a very visible flicker. We've minimized it a little bit because we did some frame blending, but the high winds and the clouds having a lot of movement definitely led to some very pronounced flicker. I'm going to show you how to use Flicker Free from Digital Anarchy. First up, I suggest you make another adjustment layer. And this time let's put it on top and we'll name it. So I'll choose layer, solid settings, and we'll call this flicker reduction. Now you'll notice that I double clicked on it so it switched to the layer itself. Let's go back to composition view. Now what I'm going to also do is adjust this timeline and set this to 100% so I can better see the shot itself. I want to really view this in full. Now with the adjustment layer selected, I'll choose effect and I'm going to load the tool. This is a third party filter, so it does cost additional. I'll choose Flicker Free. This loads the new effect, and you'll find several presets available. Now what I'm looking at are different options. Generally speaking, for time-lapse you can go with the time-lapse preset. But if you have a lot of slow motion you can also look at some of the slow motion presets. This will adjust the radius, which is how many frames forward and backwards it looks, and the threshold if needed. You can also adjust the global sensitivity here so it's more or less aggressive. If you think that some of this might be caused by motion, then you could do a higher quality analysis here. And I'm going to tell it to deflicker. You'll notice that it automatically starts to preview. After Effects will generally start to load a RAM preview for you. In order to really see this, it's a good idea that your RAM preview is set not to skip any frames and work at full quality. You can also press the space bar if you want to force that to start loading, or press the play button. In order for this to all load it'll take some time, but eventually it does a good job of processing it. Now, in this case, the flicker was pretty pronounced but it still was able to compensate and remove most of it. Now Flicker Free did a nice job there. Overall, I'm going to go back to just the standard time-lapse preset and let it run one more time. There we go. And while there's still a little bit of flicker in the scene from the light changing, it doesn't seem dramatic anymore and more just matches the clouds passing in front of the sun. - This is a great tool if you need to fix time-lapse flicker. Now, some of you're probably saying, well, why isn't that built into After Effects? Let's think about that. This is an incredibly niche product. Fortunately, the After Effects and Premier Pro ecosystem are big enough to support the use of third party plugins, so this is an affordable way to solve a very dedicated problem. But I'd recommend that you just download the trial version and see if it works for you.