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Participant
February 1, 2024
Question

How to remove flickering caused by LED screen

  • February 1, 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 7236 views

Hello there 🙂

I provided a shot of a video where you can see light flickering in the top left corner, caused by the led screen, which is also flickering.

This shot was taken with a GoPro Hero10, wide mode, equalized in Blender to remove the fisheye, shot in 50 fps. 

What can I do to cure the flickering? I already tried to duplicate the layer twice, moved the middle frame (66% transparency) one frame forward, moved the top layer (33% transparency) two frames forward. But this didnt solve the problem.

 

Any recommendations or even payed pugins to remove this?

Thanks for the help!!

 

Best,

Georg

 

 

3 replies

Inspiring
August 27, 2024

I just discovered that my newer LED Dracast light panels are causing a flicker on green screen footage.  The flicker was not apparent on any of the studio monitors and shows up mainly on skin tones.  Tested, Digital Anarchy's Flicker Free 2.0 as an AE plugin and it worked immediately.  Since I need a high shutter speed to reduce motion blur on green screen footage, and since I really don't have time to screw around with reshooting talent or figuring out what the Dracast frequency really is, this saved a ton of time and worth the $149 price.   

Community Expert
September 2, 2024

If the flicker only happens in the skin tones after applying the kay, you might be able to use a duplicate copy of the footage that has been color-corrected to enhance the green and display only the Combined Matte instead of the Final result. You could then use the Black and white layer as a Luma Track Matte for the original footage. Check out this thread: Re: Struggling with Keying Hair Details in Challen...

 

If the flicker in the faces shows up before any other effects are applied, you will need to use some kind of de-flicker trick. The most efficient one depends entirely on the problems in the shot.

 

Community Expert
February 3, 2024

Georg2703, did you see my solution and the project files?

Mylenium
Legend
February 1, 2024

Don't bother. Mask out the display, re-create an artificial overlay with tracking and all that. Plug-ins like DEFlicker (https://revisionfx.com/products/deflicker/) can even out exposure, but not fix your LED display, anyway.

 

Mylenium

Georg2703Author
Participant
February 1, 2024

Hey Mylenium,

thanks for the quick answer! Masking out and tracking the display is no problem!

Is there any other or cheaper way (cheaper Plugin) to redure flickering on thze ceiling?

 

Best,

Georg

Community Expert
February 1, 2024

You will have flickering if your camera's frame rate does not match the screen's refresh rate. There is no sync available with a GoPro.

 

The only hope you have is to match the frame rate to half the frequency of the electricity (50 Hz in Pal countries, 60 Hz in NTST-most of the world) and have anti-flicker in the camera set to the proper Hz. You can mitigate the problem by choosing slower shutter speeds. 

 

A lot of those kinds of LED displays have very odd refresh rates. Reader boards at airports and train stations can be anything from 10 or 15 Hz to 50 or 60.  I don't know of any de-flicker software available that would fix your shot. The flicker is not uniform, and I didn't see any frames with a full image. It looks like about 1/3 of the display is lit up at a time. That's not uncommon in that kind of display.

 

Your problem fascinated me, and I was able to solve it fairly well by following this workflow. 

  1. Create a comp from the original footage and add Mocha AE
  2. Open Mocha AE and create a spline that covers the left corner of the display and the right corner (Ctrl/Cmnd + g to add to the spline)
  3. Track Translation, Scale, and Rotation and then select the surface tool and expand it on the first frame to fill the frame, save and return to AE
  4. Duplicate the footage layer, add a "Stabilized Null to the timeline, select the Copy of the Problem Shot with mocha applied and tne null, and Pre-compose moving all attributes to the new comp
  5. Collect the tracking data from the Stabilized Track, invert it, and apply it to the Stabilized Null
  6. You should have a Stabilized shot of the footage where the sign does not move
  7. Return to the main comp, Pre-compose moving all attributes, name the comp "Blended Sign," and open it
  8. Draw a mask on the layer to include only the sign, then duplicate the layer twice
  9. Set the bend mode of the top two layers to screen, go to the first frame, then slide the second layer one frame to the left and the top frame one frame to the right so they are slightly out of time with each other
  10. You should have a sign that looked pretty good. Return to the Main comp and enable time remapping, then stretch the time a few frames to help blend frames. Setting frame blending to Pixel Motion seems to work best
  11. Turn off the Invert checkbox in Mocha AE/Tracking Data and apply the tracking data to the Blended Sign comp

 

That's it. You should get something like this:

The last step is to add Effects/Color Correction/Shadow Highlight to the Blended Sign layer to bring back the natural lighting highlights in the sign.

I hope this helps. It took me just a little longer to do than it did to write this post. I've uploaded an AE 2024 project file and the rendered fixed movie.