Troubleshoot here, and take particular note of section 9: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/faq-why-does-my-rendered-video-look-bad-troubleshooting-quality--103361/

Thanks Nick,

The email notification your post generated had a link to the forum which was disabled or didn't work. It took me 10 minutes to find this post. Nor did the email contain a general link to this forum, I had to google for it and was then redirected from the Sony to the Magix site. This is chaos.

I trouble shot & discovered the grids / lines appear after I added a Digital Anarchy 'flicker free' plugin which was designed to complement Vegas, it doesn't seem to.

Any specific advice as to the use of this plugin please?

Thanks again.

Ric

The email notification your post generated had a link to the forum which was disabled or didn't work. It took me 10 minutes to find this post. Nor did the email contain a general link to this forum, I had to google for it and was then redirected from the Sony to the Magix site. This is chaos.

I've never seen such a link generate an email notification. For me those links just open up a new tab in Firefox with the linked page. Do all links on the forum do that or just that one?

I trouble shot & discovered the grids / lines appear after I added a Digital Anarchy 'flicker free' plugin which was designed to complement Vegas, it doesn't seem to.

Any specific advice as to the use of this plugin please?

Have never heard of that until now. What type of problem exactly are you trying to fix with it?

Thanks Nick.

It is confusing, I have had to create two different password accounts, one for Sony then one for Magix. I got here through the 'profile' link in the email notification which works, then navigated to the forum from my profile page.

I have just been informed by Digital Anarchy - 48 hours after downloading the trial filter - that the lines are a 'demo watermark', and that's after hours of googling to try and identify what was going on. I have since demoed the same filter in Boris FX which has a clearly labelled demo watermark. Both deflicker filters seem to work in Vegas. I will now have to go back and trial both against each other. Initially, Digital Anarchy appears simplest while Boris FX is the more challenging to apply.

One thing I noticed in Vegas was that you get flashes of bright colour in the preview window - after adding an effect - but the flashes are mercifully absent from the rendered file. What are these flashes? I render everything because I am not sure how to preview in Vegas - like a screen size preview please?

Ric

"I render everything because I am not sure how to preview in Vegas - like a screen size preview please?"

If you only have one monitor:

strike this icon above the small preview window. Start and stop payback with the Space bar.

That's cool, thanks :) Two monitors are a possible, I have a spare.

Still interested to know exactly what type of flickering you mean. There may be other ways to solve that without needing those plugins. Maybe you could share a sample of the flickery video on a cloud service like Google Drive/Dropbox/WeTransfer/mega.nz etc.. And how/where do you plan to publish the video?

The flicker.

This occurs in the sky. I would call it 'hot spot flicker'. This has resulted from the original cine footage being underexposed. To compensate I increase the light source in the projector but this gives me 'hot spot' in areas which are already light.

When I DIY transfer footage which is correctly exposed I do not get hot spot flicker, since I am using an optimal light source throughout the transfer.

When I have finished a short I upload it to the Tube. In this short you will notice the White Horse of Uffington pulse-flickering [2.34-3.12] , again it is hot spot syndrome since the horse is white. This was an old, awkward, complicated transfer method, I have refined what I do a lot since it was made. I allow it to stand as it is because it is a document of 'how things were' at the time of completion, my films are like a visual diary in that respect.

Many thanks.

If you have the time and inclination, you might take a look at this thread on the doom9 forum: The power of Avisynth: restoring old 8mm films. It's pretty heavy stuff and not simple to set up, but AviSynth opens up a lot of powerful (and free) capability for this sort of thing. You'll find many contributions there from John Meyer, who uses Vegas and used to post frequently on this forum.

Thanks. There is a dedicated deflicker filter used with Vdub which is often mentioned in association with Avisynth. I have used it in the past. It decreases contrast by smoothing out the peaks and troughs of light & dark. Granite Bay author a kinder filter. The Boris FX and Digital Anarchy filters are also kinder to imagery than the Vdub filter. Here is a DIY transfer of 8mm 'found footage' which I transferred to dv several years ago, it was automatically correctly exposed (my Bolex H16 has no meter) and so there are no flickering hot spots. I use the H16 because it is clockwork and practically nothing can cause it to fail. Battery operated cine cameras with built-in light meters - if they are still working now - will fail eventually, the circuitry just declines after many years, there is nothing you can do about it.

The clip was obviously hand-held footage

I did draw this thread to John's attention and he emailed me the following with regard to your sample and said I could pass it on. He also said he's happy to help further if you want but probably easier on that doom9 thread I linked to, because he's more active there.

"I couldn't tell much for the video posted. He said that his transfer system wasn't very good, and I certainly agree with that. There is definitely a hot spot on some portions of the transfer. Film transfer hot spots can be reduced using the VirtualDub Hotspot filter. Actually, you can do the same thing in Vegas. The "trick" is to find a frame (usually on the leader) that should have uniform exposure from edge-to-edge, but which should show the hot spot. You then use this as an exposure correction template. You can actually do the exposure adjustment with two tracks in Vegas, if you set the compositing controls correctly, but the VD filter is easier to set up and use.

I didn't sense too much flicker in his sample, but you can usually eliminate most film flicker using the Deflicker AVISynth plugin. If that doesn't totally fix the problem, then you can also use the MDegrain2 plugin that is part of MVTools2 and set the DCT parameter equal to 1. This makes it very slow, but when combined with the Deflicker plugin it completely nails the flicker.

I've queued up one of my before/after clips to a section that has a little bit of flicker (there is another clip with flicker about 30 seconds later which shows someone docking a Chris-Craft). The flicker elimination was done with just he Deflicker plugin. I obviously did a lot of other things to each clip in order to get the results you see: