Face Refinement tool causing flickering

I applied this to several clip. I ran analyze, and the only adjustment I made was to set Shine Removal to 1.0 (maximum value).

That has resulted in a slight, but obvious flickering inside the mask as footage is playing (after caching).


I don't get the flickering when I modified some of the other Face Refinement settings - just Shine Removal.

I'm able to get decent results the old way, with mask tracking and other color controls.

Footage is Canon 7D AVC 4:2:0, 8-bits, 59.94 in a 23.976 timeline.

I applied this to several clip. I ran analyze, and the only adjustment I made was to set Shine Removal to 1.0 (maximum value). That has resulted in a slight, but obvious flickering inside the mask as footage is playing (after caching).

What happens when you go in the Skin Mask settings for Face Refinement and click "Use Face Mask" (if it's not already on) and also "Show Mask"? Is this in Resolve 17 or 18?

Play the selection and see if the mask is also flickering. If it is, then there's a tracking problem. Manual shine removal is not that hard: qualify the shining portions of the face, soften the key to blend in well, track a window on it (manually) if necessary, then slightly blur the image with minus-Midtone (-MD), defocus, soften/sharpen, or Y-only SNR. A little Log Highlight adjustment may also help; one or more of those will work. Beauty work is tricky, and sometimes doing it by hand is better than relying on automatic tools, though it takes more time.

Note that -- as with a lot of things -- the results will be worse with H.264 material than it would with (say) high-quality Canon or Red or Alexa or Sony Raw files. Also note that anything that Face Refinement can do, you can also do manually... it just takes a lot more time and effort.

MixingLight has done some pretty good tutorials in the past on Beauty work inside Resolve, and I'd recommend them highly.

What happens when you go in the Skin Mask settings for Face Refinement and click "Use Face Mask" (if it's not already on) and also "Show Mask"? Is this in Resolve 17 or 18?

Play the selection and see if the mask is also flickering. If it is, then there's a tracking problem. Manual shine removal is not that hard: qualify the shining portions of the face, soften the key to blend in well, track a window on it (manually) if necessary, then slightly blur the image with minus-Midtone (-MD), defocus, soften/sharpen, or Y-only SNR. A little Log Highlight adjustment may also help; one or more of those will work. Beauty work is tricky, and sometimes doing it by hand is better than relying on automatic tools, though it takes more time.

Note that -- as with a lot of things -- the results will be worse with H.264 material than it would with (say) high-quality Canon or Red or Alexa or Sony Raw files. Also note that anything that Face Refinement can do, you can also do manually... it just takes a lot more time and effort.

MixingLight has done some pretty good tutorials in the past on Beauty work inside Resolve, and I'd recommend them highly.

I truly appreciate you took the time to write this out, Marc.

I was able to reduce it to almost imperceptible by maxing out the Denoise Mask slider. Your suggestions helped here. I hadn't played the clip with Show Mask enabled before, and doing so revealed a noisy mask - the likely cause of the flickering. I maxed out Mask Face Size to reduce the noise further. This created a weird bleed in the resulting image, but I was able to counter that by adding a Power Window around the face on the node with Face Refinement applied.

Thanks again! I'll check out those tutorials.