Earlier this year, HD Studio reported on The Foundry's experiments with technology that would remove the rolling-shutter artifacts often associated with images captured by CMOS sensors. The procedure was expected to help shore up the performance of The Foundry's motion-tracking VFX software, which could be stymied by the appearance of wobbly CMOS artifacts, but response to early technology demos at NAB was so strong that the company quickly worked up RollingShutter ($500), a new plug-in for After Effects CS3/CS4 and Nuke 5.1 or later.
Rolling-shutter artifacts occur because CMOS chips don’t update an entire frame at exactly the same time. The image is captured line by line, moving across the sensor in one direction, meaning that the picture may suffer from temporal artifacts. For example, a straight horizontal line may appear skewed as the camera pans past it, since the camera has actually swiveled some distance between the time that the top lines in the frame were captured and the time that the bottom lines are recorded. The effect can be seen to varying degrees on everything from cheap cell phone cameras to footage captured with pro cameras.
The Foundry's RollingShutter plug-in aims to remove or minimize the effect, correcting skewing and distortion in a given scene by correcting the motion of individual objects in the frame. Frustrated cinematographers may be interested in running their footage through the software, but it's really geared to VFX artists who need to remove those artifacts in order to effectively track motion in CMOS footage.
Interested? If you want a copy, it may be best to buy it now — through August 31, The Foundry is running a buy-one-get-one-free RollingShutter sale. With two copies, you can use one in After Effects and one in Nuke, or one on a workstation and one on a laptop.
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