I shot video of a projection screen - can I remove the scan lines?

I shot video of a projection screen and it has the scan lines creeping up it from the frame rate of the projector being off from that of my camera. Is there a way to remove those in FCPX? Or with a plugin?

Also what is the technical term for that? I wasn't sure how to Google it and the results I got didn't help.

It was video of a power point presentation, so all the images on the screen are still and my camera didn't move. Thus I can think of a few DIY ways to minimize the lines... grab still frames, masking, etc. But is there a more pro way to do it?


Shot at 1080p 24fps
FCP 10.2.2
El Cap
Macbook Pro Retina Mid 2012 2.7, i7, 16GB RAM

Hey Chris,

That can indeed be a nasty problem, due to mismatching shutter speed and projector refresh rates. Actually the DYI solution is about the most "pro" way of solving this, because most plugins that have been created to remove scan flickering (Flicker filters, BCC Denoise, Red Giant Denoise, FurnaceCore deflicker etc...) don't really work well, or they are so expensive that you better do it yourself.

There has been a long thread about this somewhere long ago, and I noted one DYI solution that seems to work pretty well:

Duplicate the footage layer a few times, offset each duplicate by a frame, turn down opacity of the layers according to the number of layers. Example: 4 layers, 25% opacity on the top 3, 100% always on the bottom. This has a risk of adding fake motion blur, but sometimes that can be reduced afterwards with sharpening.

Of course, as these are all stills and your camera was locked, you might as well freeze the content and mask out the lines.

Or you might take a look at this free FCP X clone effect from Simon Ubsdell:

www.fcp.co/forum/9-free-fcpx-plugins-and...ee-fcpx-clone-effect

- Ronny