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 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. The slow-motion clause matters too: interpolation and slow motion are the same operation with different output timing, so without it the smoother version can quietly run long.
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.
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 Vizard Agent turns the cut list into boundaries the smoothing may not cross. In the session behind this article it:
- Surveyed the scene order and cut structure, then measured the cut points to set 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 full-resolution preview and inspected it for artefacts before committing.
- Rendered the complete film, re-rendered only the artefact-prone windows at the original frame cadence, and restored the loudness to match the original without re-encoding the video.
- Compared a brief black transition and a fade to black against the original, and found both exactly as delivered.
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. High-quality flow over a full film at 60fps is also slow, and it cannot fix a cut you dislike, because that is an edit.
Common questions
Will the runtime change? No. Vizard Agent measures the final duration against the source specifically to confirm that.
Why do flashes matter? Because they look like cuts. Vizard Agent separates them so the smoothing stays continuous.
Can I see a preview? Yes. Vizard Agent renders a short full-resolution preview before the complete pass.