Im not a video editing expert by any means and use Premiere Pro to edited clips for our Freediving companys Youtube channel.
Recently I ran into an annoying phenomenon where when applying the ‘Shadows and Highlights’ effect to several clips in a video the exported clip flickers (strobes, flashes, call it what you will) uncontrollably. First reaction was to google the solution and it became apparent that this is a long standing and unsolved problem and yes I tried all the ‘set black clip to zero, apply anti flicker, deinterlace etc’ suggestions posted on the Adobe forums.
So not being one to have to go and re-learn how to use levels as a substitute for Shadows and Highlights and redo all my editing I did the most random thing I could think of….ok wait not entirely true, if you are going to try this its important to note that I did indeed run an update just before doing this so it would definitely be in your interest to do that first too, but somehow this didnt do the trick for anyone else so I’m pretty sure my act of randomness is what saved the day…
Ok, so here is what worked for me:
I only use the Manual mode in the Shadows And Highlights effect. If you try Auto and use Temporal Smoothing it will not work (as most of you probably already realised) and besides this, using auto usually just makes it look terrible (especially for underwater footage such as my own).
Run the CS4 (what I’m using) update: In Premiere Pro click: help>updates.
Now, click ‘Save As’ and save a new version of your clip under the title ‘Video blah blah cut to bits’
Then for my trippy fix: After you have finished editing your video to your liking (because you can’t see this flickering in the preview mode as you may have already noticed) and with the shadows and highlights still intact (no need to redo anything!), take the razor tool and cut your video timeline into as many pieces as you possibly can (I cut mine at about every half second).
Sounds crazy huh? So WHY? Simple: you are creating shorter ‘clips’ for the effect to work in (less changes in light per clip) and for some or other reason Media Encoder likes that and the effect stays nice and fluent without any Schizo flickering so BANG problen solved!
Would be cool to see if this works for anyone else 🙂
Posted From A Lonely Planet Way Down South…
