Remove Light Flicker with Fusion VFX
Have you ever found the perfect shot ruined by a distracting, flickering light in the background? Whether it was shot in slow motion or your shutter speed was a mismatch with the electrical grid, flickering lights can instantly distract your audience.
Fortunately, getting rid of that flicker is just a few steps away inside the DaVinci Resolve Fusion page. In this guide, we will walk through a powerful workflow covering stabilized point tracking, painting with the clone multi-stroke tool, and linear compositing to salvage your footage.
Project and Fusion Settings
Before jumping into Fusion, it is crucial to understand how your color and project settings are configured.
Color Management: For this workflow, you want to avoid working color-managed; keep your setting on DaVinci YRGB. We will manage color on the Fusion page.
Default Start Frame: Go into your Fusion settings and set your default start frame to 1001. Having a specific frame number matters when we use the clone multi-stroke tool later on.
Prepping Log Footage for IntelliTrack
AI-based trackers, like Resolve's IntelliTrack, perform best when there is noticeable contrast in your footage. If you are working with flat log footage (like Apple Log Rec 2020 from an iPhone 16 Pro Max), you need to temporarily add contrast.
Turn off the viewing LUT in the Fusion page (the little waffle button) so you are looking directly at the log footage.
Add a Color Space Transform (CST) node right after your Media In node.
Set the Input Color Space to Rec 2020 and Input Gamma to Apple Log.
Set the Output to Rec 709 with tone mapping to temporarily give the tracker a punchy, contrast-rich image to analyze.
Tracking and Stabilizing the Lights
If a target is hard to paint, the best approach is to stabilize it first. By locking the flickering light in place, painting over it becomes incredibly easy.
Point Tracking: Add a Tracker Tool and place the point tracker on the brightest part of the flickering light on your starting frame.
Track the footage: Let IntelliTrack run forward to map the motion.
Fixing Bad Data: If the track goes haywire when the light leaves the screen, open the Spline Editor. Use the "Fit to Fill" button to see your keyframes clearly, highlight the bad data points, and hit delete.
Gradient Extrapolation: To keep the motion path continuing naturally off-screen, right-click in the Spline Editor and select Gradient Extrapolation.
Lock and Stabilize: Lock the track in your tracker list to prevent accidental re-tracking. Then, change the tracker's Operation to Match Move and the Merge type to BG Only. This inverts the data, completely locking that light in place based on your reference frame (usually the start or end frame).
Painting Out the Flicker
Now that the flickering light is stabilized, we can paint it out using a clean frame.
Grab the Paint Tool and select the Clone Multi-Stroke brush from the toolbar. This specific brush is highly efficient because it stores all paint strokes in a single modifier.
Drag the output of your Tracker directly into the Paint node's source toolbox so you can extract the paint later.
Change the brush settings to use a Still Source.
Scrub through your timeline to find a frame where the target light is at its brightest, and input that exact frame number (e.g., 1013) into the Source Time field.
Simply paint over the light. Because the footage is stabilized, you are perfectly painting the bright, non-flickering light from your reference frame over the darker frames. There is no need to option click a difference source position since we’ve stabilized the footage.
Isolating and Freezing the Paint Stroke
To composite effectively, you need to isolate your new paint stroke from the rest of the image and ensure it lasts for the entire clip.
Extract the Stroke: Add a Brightness/Contrast node right after your Paint tool. Enable the alpha channel, and drop the Multiply (Gain) slider all the way down to zero. This completely separates your paint stroke from the background.
Freeze the Frame: The multi-stroke tool only lasts for a single frame by default. To fix this, add a Time Speed node, load it into the viewer, and set it to Freeze Frame.
Performance Tip: Right-click the Time Speed node, go to Modes, and check Disable Update. This tells the node not to update frame-after-frame, saving you valuable render cache.
Restoring Motion
Your clean light patch is currently frozen in the center of the screen. You now need to map it back onto the moving footage and blend it seamlessly.
Match Move: Copy your original Tracker node and paste it after the Time Speed node. Change the operation back to standard match moving (Merge set to Foreground only). Double-feed the Time Speed node into both the background and foreground of this tracker to easily set the proper resolution.
Merge: Use a Merge node to drop your restored, tracked paint stroke over your original background plate. If you have multiple lights, you can feed all of your separated patches into a MultiMerge node before dropping them over the original plate.
Finishing Up
Connect your final output to the Media Out node to head back to the Edit timeline. Turn on Smart Render Cache to ensure smooth playback, and you are now free to jump into the Color page to grade your fully repaired, flicker-free log footage.
