rolling-shutter

The smart engineers over at The Foundry (makers of Nuke and lots of cool vfx plug-ins) have just released their newest creation RollingShutter. It’s a plug-in for Adobe After Effects (and Nuke as well) that is designed to reduce the rolling shutter skew that can happen when shooting with a CMOS camera (that’d be you Canon 5D which may be the worst) and having a lot of fast motion in the frame where vertical objects are present. The skewing is usually associated with fast camera moves but can also happen when vertical-type objects move quickly through a static frame. From The Foundry’s website:

The Foundry’s RollingShutter plug-in tackles skew and wobble problems from the VFX artist’s perspective. Although the plug-in will often vastly improve the look of distorted footage, by either minimising or eradicating image distortions, its main purpose is to enable software trackers to work effectively on a wide range of affected footage.

I don’t do a lot of vfx work and motion tracking so I’ve never experienced the rolling shutter problems from that perspective but I have worked on one particular Canon 5D job where several crucial setups were unusable as the rolling shutter was too distracting.  This plug-in would have been a savior! Just watch the You Tube demonstration and pay particular attention to the shot with the bus:

Pretty amazing stuff. The plug-in is available for After Effects for $500 or it can be rented for a $100 minimum. Check out the Foundry’s website for more details.