Fix exposure flicker and auto white balance in After Effects, without the pumping

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

DISKO Balance is an auto white balance and exposure flicker fix for After Effects and Premiere Pro. It measures each frame and its neighbors, then corrects exposure and white balance toward neutral, or toward a reference frame you pick, smoothed over time so the correction itself never pumps. A warm and skin guard keeps faces from going gray.

A walk out of a hollow sequoia into full sun: DISKO Balance holds the exposure and the warm look of one reference frame through the step from dark to bright, with no keyframes.

The problem: the light kept changing

You set exposure and white balance for the shot, and then the shot had other ideas. A cloud crossed the sun halfway through the interview. The camera's auto exposure hunted every time someone walked past a window. The light went warm, then cool, then warm again while you were rolling. In the edit it reads as a flicker or a drift, and one correction for the whole clip is right for exactly one part of it.

Correcting frame by frame sounds like the answer, and it's how you get pumping: the fix chases every little change, and now the correction is the thing that flickers. Like the motel sign in a late-night thriller, except it's your interviewee's face.

How Balance fixes exposure flicker and white balance

Balance measures every frame together with the frames around it, so the correction follows the light rather than every wobble in it. It moves exposure and white balance toward a target: neutral, or a reference frame you choose, the one that looks right. Smoothing, from 0 to 3 seconds, sets how gently it follows, and its weighting is cut-aware: a neighboring frame that looks very different, like the first frame after an edit, counts for less. That's a judgment call, not true cut detection, so for the cleanest result put Balance on each shot rather than across a cut.

Two guards keep it honest. Max Exposure Change limits how far exposure may move, in stops, so a correction can never run away with the shot. Protect Warm / Skin Saturation keeps warm tones and skin from being neutralized into gray.

It's deterministic: the same clip gets the same result on every render, so the version you approved is the version you get again. And it follows the After Effects project's color settings, linear or video, automatically.

Before: the walk as shot, stepping out of the trunk into full sun.

After: Balance matched to one reference frame picked inside the trunk.

The controls that matter

• Balance Amount: how much of the correction you want.
• Target: neutral, or match the Reference Frame you choose.
• Smoothing: 0 to 3 seconds, with cut-aware weighting.
• Max Exposure Change: the limit on how far exposure may move, in stops.
• Protect Warm / Skin Saturation: keeps faces from going gray.
• Analyze Left, Top, Right and Bottom: measure only part of the frame, so a blown-out window at the edge doesn't steer the whole correction.
• Pixel Values: Auto follows the project, or set Video or Linear yourself.

Good for

• Interviews where the sun came and went
• Run-and-gun footage shot on the camera's auto exposure
• Shots that drift warm or cool while the camera rolls
• Pulling a drifting shot back toward the frame that looked right
• A neutral starting point for a run of clips before the grade

Requirements and price

DISKO Balance 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 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.

Balance 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.

Balance 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 light, whatever the clouds were doing.