In a small booth in the Plug-in Pavilion at NAB 2010, CoreMelt, creators of a large package of effects plug-ins for Final Cut Pro and After Effects, were showing an update to their stabilizer Lock & Load. Lock & Load, which lists for $149, offers several advantages over FCP’s built-in Smoothcam. First, it’s faster than Smoothcam; it only analyzes the part of the clip in the timeline and you can continue to work while it is analyzing. CoreMelt was showing a free update to Lock & Load X that adds rolling shutter reduction to help fix the skewing of objects in the frame that can occur when shooting with CMOS-chipped cameras like the Canon DSLRs. As a topic of discussion, rolling shutter comes up a lot in forums and posts about DSLR shooting. In practice, however, it doesn’t crop up as much as one might think. But when it does it’s pretty annoying. It’s especially nice to see this added as a free update to the products. I grabbed this quick video on the NAB floor (shot and edited with an iPhone!) of CoreMelt’s Roger Bolton talking about the product.

The rolling shutter reduction is easy to use: have Lock & Load X analyze the clip for rolling shutter only, or in addition to stabilization, then pick your camera type and have it analyze the clip:

If you use these types of tools with realistic expectations you’ll get good results. No tool can fix the most poorly shot video, so there’s no substitute for planning and a good shooter. But when you don’t have that it’s nice to have affordable tools like Lock and Load X. You can grab a 15-day free demo and try it out for yourself.