How to deflicker video without After Effects

Ask online how to remove flicker from a video and someone will point you to After Effects. It's a capable tool, but it's a subscription, it has a learning curve, and you don't need it to deflicker a clip. Here are the real alternatives, what each one is good at, and when it's simpler to do the whole thing on your phone.

Option 1: the Flicker Free plug-in

Flicker Free by Digital Anarchy is a dedicated deflicker plug-in. Despite the After Effects association, it also runs inside Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro, so you can use it in whichever editor you already have.

It's aimed at exactly the problems in this guide: flicker from artificial lights in high-frame-rate footage, plus time-lapse flicker. You apply it to a clip as an effect, start from one of its presets, and adjust from there while watching the result.

• Good for: editors who already work in one of those apps and deal with flicker regularly.
• Keep in mind: it's a paid plug-in on top of your editor, and like any effect it needs rendering time on your computer.

Option 2: DaVinci Resolve Studio's Deflicker effect

DaVinci Resolve includes a Deflicker effect in its ResolveFX Restore group. It's a Studio feature, so you'll need the paid Studio edition of Resolve to use it for your exports. Studio is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription.

The basic workflow:

1. Import your clip and put it on a timeline.
2. Go to the Color page and open the Effects panel.
3. Find Deflicker under ResolveFX Restore and drag it onto a node.
4. Pick a starting preset. There's one designed for fluorescent light flicker and one for time-lapse.
5. Play the clip back, adjust if needed, then render from the Deliver page.

• Good for: anyone already editing or grading in Resolve. It's powerful and sits right in the color workflow.
• Keep in mind: Deflicker is heavy to process, so expect playback to slow down while it's on. Resolve also takes a while to learn if you've never used it.

Option 3: ffmpeg's deflicker filter (free)

ffmpeg is the free, open-source command-line tool behind a huge amount of video software. It includes a deflicker filter that compares each frame's average brightness with the frames around it and evens the differences out. If you're comfortable in a terminal, it's a quick, free way to treat simple whole-frame pulsing.

ffmpeg -i input.mov -vf "deflicker=size=10:mode=pm" \
  -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -preset slow -pix_fmt yuv420p \
  -c:a copy output.mp4

What the parts mean:

• size is how many frames the filter averages over. The default is 5; values between 5 and 15 are a sensible range to try. Larger values smooth slower flicker but are more likely to flatten real lighting changes.
• mode sets how the average is calculated. The default is am (arithmetic mean); there are also geometric, harmonic, quadratic, cubic, power (pm) and median modes. Try a couple and compare.
• -crf 18 keeps the re-encode high quality, and -c:a copy keeps the original sound untouched.

Its limits are worth knowing before you start:

• It works on whole-frame brightness only. It won't remove rolling bands or flicker that differs across the frame.
• It re-encodes the video. The command above produces a standard 8-bit H.264 file, so iPhone clips recorded in HDR will lose their HDR look and may shift in color unless you set up a more involved HDR-aware command.
• You have to get the file onto a computer first, and send the result back to your phone if that's where you want it.

A note on other editors

Some editors include options with "flicker" in the name that target a different problem. Premiere Pro's Reduce Interlace Flicker setting, for example, is meant for interlaced footage where fine horizontal detail shimmers, not for the pulsing that LED and fluorescent lights cause. If a setting like that doesn't help, it's not you; it's the wrong tool for light flicker.

Option 4: fix it on your iPhone

If the clip was shot on an iPhone, the simplest path is often not to move it at all. Deflicker reads the video straight from Photos, removes the flicker, and saves the fixed copy back.

• No round trip. No exporting, transferring, importing or rendering on a computer.
• Keeps what matters. Your clip's resolution and sound come through intact. Only the brightness is corrected.
• Handles more than pulsing. The on-device Smart method works area by area, so it treats banding and patchy flicker as well as whole-frame pulsing, and it's private: nothing leaves your phone.
• A stronger option when you need it. Fusion tracks every pixel across frames and rebuilds the light on our GPUs, for the deepest LED and fluorescent flicker. Only the clip you choose is uploaded, and it's deleted within 24 hours.

The on-device fix is free to try with a watermark. Deflicker Pro removes the watermark and includes Fusion clips. Step-by-step instructions are in how to fix flickering slow-motion video on iPhone.

Which should you use?

Whichever you choose, the same advice applies: work from the original file, deflicker before you grade or add titles, and compare before and after on a large screen around anything that moves. To understand what you're correcting, read why slow-motion video flickers, and for LED-specific advice see removing LED and fluorescent flicker.