I have this almost looking good, however, the render times are high. 1920 is taking 10 minutes per frame, so this 3-second clip took 16 hours. What’s causing the flickering and how do I get rid of it? What’s the best way to slow this down in post-production? I have After Effects.
did you render with bf/lightcache? if so you need to use camera path in light cache and save that one cache to file then render animation with use from file.
Yes, all defaults. I’ll try saving the LC and reuse it. I remember doing that a few years ago, even to speed up my exteriors. Any tips on smoothly slowing it down in After Effect? I extended the time, but it isn’t smooth.
No there isn’t, it requres a plugin something like Oflow but its in nuke, they might have an ae verion:
https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/8.0/content/user\_guide/temporal\_operations/oflow\_retiming.html
The reason for flickering is that if gi is recomputed each frame then it might produce a different solution and so different result (flicker) its age old problem. Luckily we have use camera path that essentially compute one gi map for entire thing and read it across all frames so produce a stable solution.
The recommended settings for animation for the light cache are 3000 subdivs and 8 for the retrace threshold (they are mentioned in the tooltips). The default settings (1000/2) are good for still images but may cause flickering in animations.
Best regards,
Vlado
Also the latest stable_4.2 builds over at https://nightlies.chaosgroup.com/mai…ble/stable_4.2 have some additional flickering reduction for the new hash map based light cache.
Best regards,
Vlado
Vlado with high retrace though its like doing bf/bf almost no?
If it’s something like 100 or 200, then yes. But 8 is ok for animations, even if it’s a bit conservative. If you have the time to experiment, you could try 4 or 6.
Best regards,
Vlado
Why not give this a go - should be no trouble at all on these kinds of clips.
After Effects has it`s own built-in (ie. free) effect called Timewarp. Results aren`t always optimal in any of these effects though as it tends to be a balance between ghosting from blend frames or warping from using vectors. The slower the source move the better it will be generally. I grabbed your movie from youtube and tried Timewarp on it with default 50% slowdown and it holds up pretty well, aside from the GI flicker.
Perfect, that’s what I was looking for.
Expensive. I’ll give the built-in timewarp a try first.
Agreed. Timewarp should be sufficient, especially on a slow pan like this. You should easily be able to double the framer ate at a minimum I would think. FYI, Timewarp has to be set to “Pixel Motion” (it is the default) in order to interpolate the inbetween frames. Additionally you can add some motion blur in timewarp to soften some of the movement. In my experience you have to set the motion blur to Manual rather than automatic though.
Yes, it worked great!
DAGNABIT! I originally built this in V-Ray, but prior to the latest update, I couldn’t render them out so I had to move to Corona. The latest NEXT solved the issue I was having, but converting back to V-Ray, from Corona, messes up almost all of my materials. From V-Ray to Corona was seamless. I guess I have to find out from Corona how to get rid of the flickering.
Ah ok, sorry re the Twixtor pointer; I assumed you’d tried the AE native stuff. Glad you sorted it anyway 
Instead of converting back, if you have the original unconverted Vray scene, can you merge the new scene back into that and replace the merged materials with the originals or did you change a lot ?
I’ll give that a try. Most, if not all, of the materials, have the same name.
No, the majority of the materials are renamed. I thought it was going to be seamless, back and forth, between Carona and V-Ray. Wasn’t that a V-Ray NEXT sales point?
And the reflections are totally wrong. Look at the faucet and the chairs.