Fix AI video shimmer and boiling, denoise footage and clean compression artifacts in After Effects

DISKO Unboil, one of the DISKO Motion disks: $7.99, or the box set for $59.99.

DISKO Unboil fixes AI video shimmer and boiling, denoises noisy footage and cleans up compression artifacts in After Effects and Premiere Pro. It lines up neighboring frames with neural motion analysis and combines them, so it can tell what belongs to the picture from what changes every frame. One effect, three modes: Unboil (AI video), Denoise and Decompress.

An AI-generated overhead shot of a car, as rendered: the outline wobbles like jello from frame to frame.

The car tracked and zoomed in: the original on the left, DISKO Unboil with Shape Lock on the right.

The whole frame after Unboil: the car holds its shape.

Three problems that look like one

AI video models redraw fine detail on every frame. So foliage, fabric, skin and skies shimmer, or boil, and the exposure drifts while you watch. The hedge in the background looks like it's breathing, like the thing in the basement of a late-night creature feature.

Camera noise is the older version of the same problem: grain and speckle that change every frame, plus the blotchy color noise compressed camera files are so fond of.

Then there's the clip that has been through the wringer: low bitrate, re-encoded, downloaded. Blocks, ringing and mosquito noise around edges, keyframes that pump, and banding in the sky.

How Unboil works

All three modes start the same way. Unboil aligns the frames around the current one with neural motion analysis on the GPU, then combines them, which is how it tells the picture from the stuff that changes every frame. Motion Protection rejects content that didn't line up, so moving objects don't ghost, and cut detection keeps each shot to itself. Then the mode decides what to fix.

Fixing AI video shimmer and boiling

Unboil mode holds texture and brightness steady in two bands. Detail Lock steadies the boiling texture, Stabilize Brightness removes the exposure flicker, and Detail Size sits beside them. Moving objects are protected, and Preserve Grain can put the original grain back, so the shot doesn't come out waxy. Shape Lock, new in 1.1.0, locks each outline to its shape across the window, so a car tracked through an AI shot stops wobbling like jello.

Denoise

Denoise measures the noise of your footage itself: by brightness, for detail and color separately, including the blotchy color noise of compressed camera files. No manual profiling. It removes noise across frames first, and within the frame only where motion leaves no history to borrow from. Noise Level, Luma Reduction and Chroma Reduction take it to taste.

Before: grainy low-light camera footage of a redwood trunk, shown at 200%.

After: the same frame cleaned up by Unboil's Denoise mode.

Decompress

Decompress is for low-bitrate, re-encoded or downloaded video. It finds the codec's block grid, in luma and chroma, and smooths the block edges. It cleans ringing and mosquito noise around edges, steadies keyframe pumping, and removes banding with fine dither.

A heavily compressed 720p coast clip, rocks enlarged 2x with the shadows lifted the same on both sides so the blocks show: the original on the left, Decompress on the right.

The controls that matter

• Mode: Unboil (AI video), Denoise or Decompress.
• Shape Lock (Unboil mode): locks each outline to its shape across the window, so the jello wobble of AI video stops.
• Preserve Grain: in every mode it feeds the footage's own grain back, finest first. 0% is clean, 100% is all of it, without the color speckle.
• Temporal Radius: how far either side of the current frame Unboil looks.
• Detail Lock, Stabilize Brightness and Detail Size: the Unboil mode controls.
• Noise Level, Luma Reduction and Chroma Reduction: for Denoise and Decompress.
• Motion Protection: rejects misaligned content, so nothing ghosts.
• Analysis Quality: Fast, Balanced or Best motion analysis on the GPU.
• View: Confidence, Difference and Low Band views, to see what it's doing.
• Detect Cuts, Cut Sensitivity, Source FPS and Pixel Values, where Auto follows the project's color settings.

Good for

• AI-generated shots, before they go into the edit
• Noisy low-light footage
• Compressed camera files with blotchy color noise
• Downloaded or re-encoded clips that somebody sent you as the master
• Skies with banding

Requirements and price

DISKO Unboil runs in After Effects 2024 or later and Premiere Pro 2024 or later, on macOS 12 or later (Apple silicon and Intel) or Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. It needs a GPU: Metal on macOS, or Vulkan 1.1 on Windows with a current graphics driver. Frames can be up to 16 megapixels. It follows the After Effects project's color settings, linear or video, automatically, so you never have to tell it which one you're working in.

Unboil is $7.99, once. It's also one of the disks in the DISKO Motion V1 box set, $59.99 for the whole set. There's no subscription, every 1.x update is free, and when V2 arrives it will be a paid upgrade you can skip, because V1 keeps working.

The trial is the whole effect, every control included. Renders carry a DISKO MOTION TRIAL watermark until you enter a license code in Effect Controls > Options (in After Effects, Window > DISKO Motion License.jsx works too). Codes work offline, on up to three computers you use.

Unboil is one disk on the DISKO Motion shelf. The overview has the rest, the box set, and why any of this comes on floppy disks.

Steady texture, steady light, and the grain still where you left it.