Why is there this annoying flickering in this video?

[Bencuri]

It seems to be there in the original as well. This was rendered from Vegas, no effects added. The flickering is especially disturbing on the fretboard of the guitar. It looks as if some white haze would appear and reappear. Any method to reduce it?

[jagabo]

Change your lighting setup so they don't reflect off the fretboard.

[Selur]

The Mosquito noise? (personally, the black halo in the source is more annoying to me )

[Bencuri]

The Mosquito noise? (personally, the black halo in the source is more annoying to me )

What black halo you mean?

[rrats]

where is the flickering. i have good eyes and I can't see it

[Selur]

What black halo you mean?

(screenshots taken from source)

Cu Selur

[Bencuri]

For me that's not a big problem now.

[rgr]

The Mosquito noise? (personally, the black halo in the source is more annoying to me )

For me bad deinterlacing...

[jagabo]

Also, lowering the black level and increasing the saturation will help. But the only real way to eliminate the desaturated browns on the fretboard (a specular reflection of one of the lights) is to fix your lighting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specular_highlight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specular_reflection

Darker, halo reduction, antialiasing:

[rgr]

I take back what I wrote - the original is progressive. But marked as interlace...

[Bencuri]

Also, lowering the black level and increasing the saturation will help. But the only real way to eliminate the desaturated browns on the fretboard (a specular reflection of one of the lights) is to fix your lighting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specular_highlight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specular_reflection

Darker, halo reduction, antialiasing:

Nice and better but I can still see the flicker there. However, what strange is that I checked the video frame by frame zoomed in, and on the frames no flicker error could be caught. What I am talking about as flicker is that the color of the strings change sequencially as the movement goes on, but it can also be seen at other places, like around the guitar. As if there would be a ghost image appearing and disappearing for a moment. But if you check the frames, they are perfect, no error, but as soon as you speed up jumping the frames, even just manually, by pressing the forward button fast, the flicker starts appearing. I noticed something that may be the source of it, not sure though. If you zoom in, and go frame by frame, very often you can observe that the sharpness of the stings for example, goes in and out of sharpness. Sharp dull sharp dull. I think the constant changing of this results in the perception of the flicker in my case. I took photos of 3 neighbouring frames. You can see this what I try to explain: the sharp and dull change. Could this be omitted somehow?

[jagabo]

Your screen caps appear to be poorly deinterlaced. Try turning off the deinterlacer in your player (the video is encoded interlaced but the frames are progressive). Or changing the deinterlace method.

But basically, you have vibrating strings on a moving guitar, a camera that's oversharpening the video, and encoding interlaced. Of course the strings flicker a little on playback!

[poisondeathray]

The "ghost image" or "in and out of sharpness" is mostly motion blur - it's a normal phenomenon. The slower your camera shutter the more blur . The faster the motion (object or camera) , the more blur.

Shutter speed is usually indirectly affected by FPS on most cameras . Shooting at a higher FPS will usually have a faster shutter setting (you're recording at 25FPS, the normal shutter would be 1/50. Shooting 50FPS, the normal shutter speed would be 1/100) . So if you can , shoot a higher FPS, and have a manual setting adjust the shutter speed even faster, you will reduce that effect. A high speed camera would eliminate the blur completely

[Bencuri]

Your screen caps appear to be poorly deinterlaced. Try turning off the deinterlacer in your player (the video is encoded interlaced but the frames are progressive). Or changing the deinterlace method.

But basically, you have vibrating strings on a moving guitar, a camera that's oversharpening the video, and encoding interlaced. Of course the strings flicker a little on playback!

Sharpening was indeed set on the camcorder (Canon HFM41), it was on the max. Maybe it is due to that?

The photo is from AVS Pro Mod. The source comes from Vegas through Frameserver, the Vegas project is set as Progressive, the file is set as progressive in the timeline, I don't understand how it can be deinterlaced. Also in the avisynth script there is no deinterlacing and also AssumeFPS(25) is added to the script. Isn't it possible you see bad deinterlacing because of resizing that I also added in the script when shooting this? I forgot to remove that, I did not think it can be an issue.

But I can shoot new ones to see, but I don't know how to open an .mts (the original) with Avisynth? What plugin and code do you need for that?

[Bencuri]

The "ghost image" or "in and out of sharpness" is mostly motion blur - it's a normal phenomenon. The slower your camera shutter the more blur . The faster the motion (object or camera) , the more blur.

Shutter speed is usually indirectly affected by FPS on most cameras . Shooting at a higher FPS will usually have a faster shutter setting (you're recording at 25FPS, the normal shutter would be 1/50. Shooting 50FPS, the normal shutter speed would be 1/100) . So if you can , shoot a higher FPS, and have a manual setting adjust the shutter speed even faster, you will reduce that effect. A high speed camera would eliminate the blur completely

This one was correct, I always set it to 1/50 when recording at 25p.

Isn't there a way to improve this now, after recording? Somehow bringing the dull - sharp images closer to each other in look, to even out the difference?

[rrats]

You should disable the sharpening first

[poisondeathray]

Isn't there a way to improve this now, after recording? Somehow bringing the dull - sharp images closer to each other in look, to even out the difference?

A time machine ?

There are experimental methods, motion blur removal . Single image and video algorithms . Most commercial are single image for photography (e.g. Adobe), but you can get imbalanced results on video (looks good on single image, but results are not temporally consistent)

Video motion blur is more balanced, because they analyze adjacent frames . It's still an experimental area

eg.
https://github.com/zzh-tech/ESTRNN

[Bencuri]

I skip that then, it is too much for me at the moment, I am not that expert.

[Bencuri]

You should disable the sharpening first

Next time when recording.

In the end I need this video in DVD size, which resize method should I use to avoid making the flicker effect more serious by sharpening during resizing? At the moment I am using Spline16Resize.

[jagabo]

Bilinear. You may have to blur more too.

[Bencuri]

Bilinear. You may have to blur more too.

Now this is interesting:

If I take the original video, set it Progressive in Vegas in Project and Timeline settings, then send it to Debugmode Frameserver and render in HCEnc, when using BilinearResize, there is no flicker. Or much less. Even if I set Sharpening in Sony to 0.5. If I use Spline16Resize, the flicker is there. What is strange is that the flicker is there when playing the original file. It is totally confusing. Also when rendering from Vegas, even with sharpening off, there is flicker. Here is the HCEnc one attached.

[Bencuri]

Bilinear. You may have to blur more too.

I have been working with this video ever since to finish my project, and I noticed something very interesting. I made the final video, the same one where the sample in this topic was taken from (attached in first post). We have a new 4K TV, I never checked my own videos on it yet. So I gave it a go, tested this one. The video as in the sample is PAL DVD 25P, 7000 Kbps. Flickerwise, it is surprising what happened.

So as mentioned before:
- This video originally flickers a bit (at least this is what I percept) as it comes off the camera (.mts)
- After cutting and converting to PAL DVD, without sharpening added there is some flicker
- If I add sharpening during converting, the flicker is already noticeable on my laptop (that does not use auto sharpening).

The latter one, the sharpened video is always worse on TV. Because it adds extra sharpening of its own. BUT! Not on the new 4K TV! I was surprised to see that this one upscaled the video, and sharpened it, yet, the video doesn't flicker even a tiny bit! It is a nice sharp mpeg video playing.

So it seems you can get rid of this thing somehow if you have the proper method. And no blurring needed.