From unwanted flicker and grainy footage to under and overexposed shots, we’ll show you how to fix some of the most common video problems!
Chances are you’ve probably had to deal with less-than-perfect footage at some point in your career.
Today, we’re going to look at several other common issues you may encounter when working with footage, as well as how to resolve the problems with After Effects. Let’s get started!
1. How to Stabilize Shaky Footage
It’s no secret that dealing with hand-held footage can be a challenge, especially when you’re the one responsible for the compositing and visual effects work. One way to get around this is to shoot a VFX shot locked-down on a tripod, then add camera shake in post.
If you didn’t have that luxury, have no fear! Before you start motion tracking, give the Warp StabilizerVFX effect in After Effects a shot. Simply search for “Warp Stabilizer VFX” in the Effects Panel, and drop it onto your clip.
Smoothing out the camera movements can help when it comes time to track your footage, and it can also give you more control of the overall style of the shot, as well. The video below covers how to use this technique, as well as a couple others we’re going to look at, so take a minute to check it out!
2. How to Remove Blur from Shaky Footage
If you’ve got a shaky camera to contend with, you’ve more than likely got a significant amount of motion blur as well. Simply stabilizing this footage is great, but if you don’t apply another effect, your footage may look like a poor camera desperately searching for an auto-focus point.
The video above also describes a fantastic way to reduce the blur in an unstable video: the Camera-Shake Deblur effect. Camera-Shake Deblur looks at blurry frames that may be adjacent to your playhead, and blends them together with the clip’s sharper frames to help the footage remain in focus for the duration of your clip. For better results, change the “Deblur Method” in the effect from Standard to High Quality.
As mentioned in the video, another tip is to duplicate the effect on your layer for improved deblurring.
3. How to Fix Overexposed and Underexposed Shots
Lumetri Color is a great option for quickly restoring lost detail from an overexposed or underexposed shot. Apply Lumetri Color to your effect, then head to Window>Lumetri Scopes.
Of course, each shot is unique in the adjustments that may need to be made, but the video below shows how you can apply several basic adjustments in Lumetri to repair your footage. It also provides a bit of theory behind how to use various scopes in the Lumetri Scopes window.
4. How to Fix Color Banding in After Effects
You may have an awesome scene with dramatic lighting, or a shot that includes ambient fire or candle lights, only to realize that lighting is emitting an ugly gradient banding across surfaces in the background when it’s imported into After Effects.
Simply changing your comp’s bit depth can help tremendously, and the video below shows you how to do it! You can also add a minor amount of noise to eliminate the banding issue, similar to dithering a .GIF in Photoshop.
5. How to Remove Flicker From Video Footage
It can be incredibly challenging to shoot in a room with fluorescent lighting or computer monitors, because if your shutter speed isn’t set appropriately you can encounter distracting flicker. You can also run into flicker when shooting at a high frame rate for slow-motion capture.
Fortunately, the fix for video flicker is an astonishingly simple one. What’s great about this technique is that it can remove flicker not only in After Effects, but also in Premiere Pro, Final Cut X, HitFilm, and Media Composer. Basically in any video editing software where you can stack two clips, add opacity, and offset the top clip, you'll be able to try this technique out.
Bonus: How To Reduce Noise From Footage Using After Effects Denoise
Here's a scenario you've likely faced (or will soon face). You just finished a late night shooting an awesome action sequence with your actors, and after dumping the footage, you make the horrible discovery that not only does your footage have noise...but it has a lot of noise.
So here you are, searching for ways for noise reduction in After Effects. We got you!
You can remove noise from footage using one of After Effect's denoise effects, like 'Remove Grain'. The video below dives into using Remove Grain, and how you can optimize this After Effect's denoise effect to fit your footage.
Maybe your footage is exceptionally noisy, and the trick in After Effects didn’t quite cut it for you. Thankfully, there are still great options out there for removing noise in your video, and they’re actually quite a bit better than After Effect’s denoising capability - although there is an added cost.
The nice thing about Neat Video is that it can operate not only within Premiere Pro and After Effects, but also across a wide array of other VFX software like Nuke, HitFilm, Vegas, Catalyst, and more. Just make sure you purchase the version you need specific to your program of choice.
Denoiser is part of Magic Bullet, and one of its major selling points is that it boasts the best, fastest, and most reliable video denoising experience available.
If you decide to go this route, just make sure your GPU meets their compatibility requirements. Maybe you’re torn between both of these options. Justin Brown from Primal Video breaks down the differences between the two plug-ins in a great comparison below, along with some great tips on working with video noise.
We hope you found these tips helpful for fixing common video issues, and that you’re also able to salvage that noisy footage using these noise reduction After Effects techniques and tools!
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