How to polish a film without changing a single cut in it
Tell Vizard Agent the edit is locked and only the picture may change. The work is then motion smoothing between cuts — which requires knowing exactly where the cuts are, because interpolating across one produces a ghost frame that is far worse than the jitter you were fixing.
What is the short version?
You have a finished film with jittery motion, and the story, the timing, the music and the scene order are all settled. You want it to move better and you want nothing else touched. Vizard Agent treats the cut list as a boundary rather than as something to improve.
- Tell Vizard Agent the edit is locked.
- Let it find the real cut points before any smoothing.
- Check the ending and any fades specifically.
What do you need before you start?
The film and an explicit statement of what may not change. "Polish it" invites an editor to shorten a slow scene, and on a locked film that is the opposite of help. Listing the untouchables — scene order, timing, dialogue, music, speed — is what makes this a picture job rather than an edit.
Also say what the output has to be. A film going back into a delivery pipeline has a required resolution, frame rate and bitrate, and those affect which smoothing method is even affordable. Vizard Agent will benchmark against the target rather than guessing at one.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
State the rule first and the wish second. The constraint is the load-bearing part of this brief, and putting it after a paragraph about how you want the film to feel invites it to be read as a preference.
Do not add, remove, shorten or rearrange anything. Smooth the motion and reduce the jitter, keep the intentional camera moves, and do not create slow motion.
That "do not create slow motion" clause matters more than it looks. Frame interpolation and slow motion are the same operation with different output timing, and without the constraint the smoother version can quietly run long.
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
It maps the cuts before it touches a frame. Optical-flow smoothing invents intermediate frames from the two frames either side, which is right inside a shot and catastrophic across an edit — you get a ghost of one scene dissolving into the next. So the cut list becomes a set of boundaries the smoothing is not allowed to cross.
In that session the order was:
- Surveyed the scene order and cut structure of the source.
- Measured the cut points to establish safe interpolation boundaries.
- Separated true cuts from lightning flashes, which register as cuts to anything detecting them by frame difference.
- Benchmarked several optical-flow settings, because the full-quality pass did not finish in a workable time.
- Rendered a short preview at full resolution and inspected it for artefacts before committing.
- Rendered the complete film, then re-rendered only the artefact-prone windows at the original frame cadence.
The lightning is the detail worth remembering. A flash frame is a huge frame-to-frame difference in the middle of a continuous shot, and treating it as a cut fragments the smoothing exactly where the motion most needs to be continuous.
What does the result look like?
The same film, moving better. Same length, same cuts, same audio, same composition — with less jitter in the character motion and less flicker between frames. Vizard Agent measures the final duration against the source, because a smoothing pass that changes the runtime has changed the edit.
Audio comes back at source level. In that session the loudness was restored to match the original without re-encoding the video, so the polish did not cost a generation of picture quality to fix a level.
When does this not work well?
When the jitter is in the content rather than in the motion. A face whose structure changes between frames is not a motion problem, and interpolation averages the two versions into something worse. Vizard Agent will say when a defect is in the source frames rather than between them.
It also has a cost ceiling. High-quality optical flow over a full film at 60fps is slow enough that the practical choice is often a lighter setting everywhere plus a heavy pass on the few windows that need it. That is what happened in that session, and it is usually the right trade.
And it cannot fix a cut you dislike. If a transition feels wrong, that is an edit, and a locked-edit brief rules it out. Say so explicitly if you want to reopen it.
How do you fix a result that came back wrong?
Give the timestamp and say what you see, in whatever words you have. Ghosting, a doubled edge, a stutter and a softness are four different artefacts with four different causes, and Vizard Agent re-renders that window rather than the whole film.
If something at a transition looks damaged, check whether it was in the source. Late in that session a brief black transition and a fade to black were both compared against the original before anything was done, and both turned out to be exactly as delivered. A fade is indistinguishable from an interpolation failure if you only look at the output.
If the whole film feels too smooth, that is the setting rather than a fault. Interpolated motion at 60fps reads as video rather than film to a lot of people, and Vizard Agent can dial the effect back or keep the original frame cadence in the scenes where it matters.
How does Vizard Agent compare to doing it yourself?
The tools for this are widely available and mostly one-click, which is the trap. Run frame interpolation across a whole film in a consumer tool and it will smooth straight through every cut, and you will find the ghosts later, in the scenes you were least worried about.
What Vizard Agent adds is the boundary map and the selective pass. Establishing where the cuts really are — and that a flash is not one — is what makes a whole-film pass safe. Re-rendering only the windows that came back badly is what makes it affordable.
Common questions
Will the runtime change? No. Vizard Agent measures the final duration against the source specifically to confirm that.
Does the audio get re-encoded? Only if it has to. Vizard Agent restores level without re-encoding the picture.
What frame rate should I ask for? Whatever your delivery needs. Higher is not automatically better and it costs render time.
Can it smooth only some scenes? Yes. Name them and Vizard Agent leaves the rest at original cadence.
What is a ghost frame? An invented frame blending two different shots. It is what happens when smoothing crosses a cut.
Why do flashes matter? Because they look like cuts. Vizard Agent separates them so the smoothing stays continuous.
Can it fix flickering faces? Partly. A face whose structure changes between frames is a source problem, and Vizard Agent will say so.
Will the grade change? No, unless you ask. This is a motion pass.
How long does a full film take? Long enough that Vizard Agent benchmarks settings on a slice first rather than starting the full pass blind.
Can I see a preview? Yes. Vizard Agent renders a short full-resolution preview before the complete pass.
Does stabilisation crop the frame? It can. Ask Vizard Agent to use it only where necessary and it will keep the composition.
What about intentional camera moves? They are kept. Say so and Vizard Agent distinguishes them from jitter.
Can I get both versions? Yes. The source is untouched and Vizard Agent delivers the polish as a new file.
Does this work on live footage? Yes, though live footage usually needs stabilisation more than interpolation.