Flicker removal in Premiere Pro and After Effects

Although flicker has had its uses in experimental film, in video flicker can induce epileptic seizures – although it's mainly just annoying.

Removing flicker is often easy but can also be quite vexing with certain combinations of out-of-sync lights, electricity, and cameras found in time-lapse and slow motion footage. For discussion of some of the issues, tutorials, and 3rd-party plug-ins, see Flicker removal in Creative Cloud and beyond at Pro Video Coalition.

In the meantime, here's some Philip Bloom in Premiere Pro CC:

Vimeo Video School

Vimeo Video School provides bite-sized spoonfuls on video-making topics, organized in categories. Tutorials come from the staff and members of Vimeo; the discussions of Timelapse are good and come from familiar sources.

Nick Campbell of GreyScale Gorilla is featured for an initial After Effects tutorial.

GSG Cast: Intro to After Effects from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.

Combining Multiple DSLR Exposures in AE

No Film School noted Combining Multiple Exposures for HDR with DSLR Video by Robin Schmidt, who writes further on his blog El Skid. A few simple masks in After Effects can make for some much better shots, though of course motion may add difficult wrinkles.

SKIDVID6 - COMBINING MULTIPLE EXPOSURES FOR HDR WITH DSLR VIDEO from Robin Schmidt on Vimeo.

Soviet Montage posted some nice demos earlier without details, except that the image was fed via a beam splitter. Richard van den Boogaard says that Soviet Montage worked with E3D Creative, who have rigs for Motion HDR (their demos used AE CS4 for "some tricky luma key"); see Exploring HDR Video – The Real Future of 3D Video.

HDR Video Demonstration Using Two Canon 5D mark II's from Soviet Montage on Vimeo.


Update: FilmmakerIQ notes a video in which "MiLapse shows you how to setup a HDR timelapse shot using the Dynamic Perception Stage Zero Dolly, MX2 DollyShield and Pentax K7."

How to shoot HDR Timelapse from Dynamic Perception on Vimeo.

Video Copilot offers free stock elements

Video Copilot has a free download of 100MB of stock elements for Free Stock-Pack Appreciation Day:

"This random collection of 20 stock elements and textures range from a night at the Air Show, to a burning Fuse and some stunning Time-Lapse clouds. Not to mention a little payback! Well… actually, video clips of money from around the world."

Just a token, but it comes with less apprehension than those mysterious free stock DVDs everyone has been offering.

Update: Weynand Training shares notice of a 7-Day Free Trial to VideoBlocks.com, for download of 20 clips a day during with access to over 30,000 video clips, backgrounds, effects, etc.

And of course Artbeats has free clips, currently new weekly.

Time-lapse and dynamic pans

Drew Geraci aka TheVoder.com posted Creating Dynamic Pans in your Timelapse (below via Lester Banks), which shows how to:

• batch process your images to save system resources
• create a dynamic link between Premiere and After Effects
• create a camera and null object within After Effects to apply to your time-lapse
• create a pan (or zoom) in your time-lapse

See also Creating Timelapse Movies in After Effects, with an example by Ross Chang and a similar tutorial from Rich Harrington. [update: targeted more to Photoshop users is QuickHit #8: Creating Time-Lapse Movies in AE (Pt. 1) from Colortrails.]

By the way, After Effects has a filter called Color Stabilizer to fix flicker in time-lapse (see also the "auto effects"). Granite Bay has a nice guide on causes and cures to fix it, and a video on using their AE plug-in GBDeflicker. There's also GenArts Tinder DeFlicker which has about six ways to remove flicker to do multiple passes, but there's no CS5 version yet.

Here's Drew Geraci's tutorial:

Creating Dynamic Pans in your Timelapse from Andrew Geraci on Vimeo.

Update: see also Vimeo Video School's section on time-lapse and Combining Multiple DSLR Exposures in AE.

Creating Timelapse Movies in After Effects

If you liked Running on Empty by Ross Ching (a timelapse of scenes of empty LA freeways) or the timescapes by Tom Lowe, you may want a peek at Creating Timelapse Movies in After Effects by Richard Harrington, who shows you the basics in AE of how to use time-lapse photographs to create pan & scan video clips.

Update: see also later posts, Time-lapse and dynamic pans, Time-lapse: Real is the New Virtual, and Color Stabilizer, GBDeflicker, or Tinderbox T_Deflicker

Keying, Time Remapping, & Stills in Premiere CS5

The latest from Jason Levine is embedded below.

Note: the Time Warp effect from CS3 and CS4 was removed from Premiere CS5, but there's always Pixel Motion and Time Warp in After Effects if you need better results.


DSLR Workflow in Premiere Pro CS5 - Keying, Time Remapping & Stills from Jason Levine on Vimeo.

Update: Karl Soule added another on DSLR,

BBC 'Life': 2-year timelapse, 96 layers in After Effects

The 'Plants' episode from the BBC nature series, Life (with David Attenborough), features a making-of segment that shows a 2-year timelapse of plant growth that is composited in After Effects (via @tomguilmette). Here's that segment and a preview that discusses how other state-of-the-art techniques help capture extraordinary images:




Life - A preview of the series. from Documentally on Vimeo.

Yenaphe's free timelapse footage

In addition to unique posts on his blog, Sébastien Périer is adding a section for free Scripts & Stock Footage, and recently posted 2 free HD clips (clouds and melting ice) in a variety of formats.

Transform your Canon point-and-shoot into a super camera

Among the hacks in Lifehacker's roundup Battle of the Hardware-Boosting Hacks is Turn Your Point-and-Shoot into a Super-Camera:

"If you're using a consumer grade point-and-shoot Canon digital camera, you've got hardware in hand that can support advanced features way beyond what shipped in the box. With the help of a free, open source project called CHDK, you can get features like RAW shooting mode, live RGB histograms, [longer exposure times and faster shutter speeds,] motion-detection, time-lapse, and even games on your existing camera.

...CHDK can run small scripts that will allow your camera to perform a set of actions based on the conditions of the script. Tons of scripts are available, and they provide functionality like motion-sensing photography (which reportedly works for lightning strikes) and unlimited interval time-lapse photography."

Update: Prolost (6-22-09) notes the Magic Lantern firmware hack for the Canon 5D Mark II that enables: Onscreen audio meters, Zebra stripes, Crop marks, Manual audio level controls, Lower noise than stock firmware, etc.

HDR Time-Lapse movies

Via PrepShootPost and KGO-TV/SF are HDR time-lapse movies made by TimeTraveler. Chad Richard of TimeTraveler has even posted his DSLR-based work flow as well as his experiments:


Twin Peaks San Francisco Sunrise from Chad Richard on Vimeo.

Also, TimeTraveler notes a cool blog called Abducted By Design that features various inspirations, like Motion Experiments from Norway's Klipp og Lim:

Hi-Def San Francisco

This is sort of interesting, though really just a stock footage project:

"Hi-Def San Francisco is project of CloudView Photography. The camera is a 3 megapixel StartDot Technologies Netcam XLmounted in a weather proof enclosure high in the hills of Sausalito. Images are captured every 15 seconds cropped from the full resolution to 1920x1080 and uploaded in 480, 720 and 1080 resolution to the web server. Periodically the software (running on a FreeBSD server) creates a time lapse that collapses the prior 24 hours into 240 seconds of video."

The Mystery of Chaco Canyon

Google has the tiny version of the documentary The Mystery of Chaco Canyon, narrated by Robert Redford. This doc has well-integrated 3D animation and examines the archaeoastronomical enigmas amidst the extensive "prehistoric remains found in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. It is the summation of 20 years of research. The film reveals that between 850 and 1150 AD, the Chacoan people designed and constructed massive ceremonial buildings in a complex celestial pattern throughout a vast desert region. Aerial and time lapse footage, computer modeling, and interviews with scholars show how the Chacoan culture designed, oriented and located its major buildings in relationship to the sun and moon."

In addition to the great graphical explanations of earth-based astronomy, the fun is the mystery of why Chacoan sites were abandoned, whether explained by undetermined dark forces, climatic instability and deforestation (David Attenborough in "State Of The Planet"), or cannibalism.

Color Stabilizer, GBDeflicker, or Tinderbox T_Deflicker

(May 2015) this article was updated on Pro Video Coalition as Flicker removal in Creative Cloud and beyond.

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DV Guru reported on a new AE/Premiere-compatible Windows filter, GBDeflicker, to reduce flicker in time-lapse footage (see video below). Besides the free beta, Granite Bay, makers of the filter, also have a nice guide on what causes flicker in time-lapse as well as cures to fix it.

AE Pro [RIP] already has a filter called Color Stabilizer to fix this sort of problem. I'm not sure how results compare, or if other filters like Tinderbox DeFlicker [now Sapphire] used in NBC's 'My Name is Earl' are even better.