The Foundry releases Rolling Shutter for After Effects & Nuke

The Foundry today released Rolling Shutter, a new plug-in available for After Effects and Nuke.

This plug-in cleverly reuses one of The Foundry’s strongest bits of intellectual property - optical flow as utilized in effects in the Furnace plug-in set including Kronos, as well as licensed by Adobe for use in the Timewarp effect for After Effects - in order to solve a problem particular to video cameras containing CMOS chips, which require an interval of time to scan an entire frame, line by line, and generally top to bottom.

In cameras with a speedy frame refresh rate, such as RED One, the effect is rarely noticeable other than under extreme conditions, but it is more commonplace when shooting with the Canon 5D Mark II and completely ubiquitous with consumer level cameras such as the latest iPhone.

Because a given shot typically contains multiple planes of action, correcting rolling shutter artifacts involves more than simply un-skewing the image. The problem is similar to that faced when compositing a 3D shot, and The Foundry has added similar technology to Nuke to make it a leader in 3D compositing.

Rolling Shutter will help not only to make an image look better but also to make it possible to matchmove the shot in 3D, which would otherwise be a nightmare with an unevenly scanned shot. As long as the movement of the camera is unidirectional - whether sideways, forward or backward, this plug-in will correct for it; more chaotic handheld shots with circular or otherwise inconsistent motion might be beyond its abilities.

Rolling Shutter $500 for Nuke or After Effects,  direct from The Foundry website. A demo version is also available for download.

AEScripts.com revamped as a comprehensive script destination site

Lloyd Alvarez, creator of aescripts.com as well as some of the most useful After Effects scripts available, released a new version of the site that may finally put an end to the need to google for the best available After Effects scripts. All of the scripts listed from the half dozen top current developers are freeware except for one - Immigration, which also appeared in its final version today as the first script shareware product.

Scripts have moved from a marginal, obscure and difficult-to-create feature introduced in After Effects 6.0 to an outlet for After Effects artists who are also coding nerds to add what might otherwise be considered new features to After Effects. One key to this change has been that many of the most useful scripts, among them Immigration and BG Renderer, appear in the After Effects UI as regular panels.

Immigration transforms what was a major After Effects deficit - difficulty importing and replacing image sequences via an import dialog that does not recognize them as such - and created one of the best sequence-handling interfaces available in any software in its place. Not only can Immigration tell how multiple sequences in a folder are grouped, it can automatically scan existing sequences already present in an After Effects project and intelligently replace updated versions all at once.

The cost for an Immigration license is $20, marking the first time a script has been offered other than as freeware. Is this an ominous trend or a fair way to compensate innovation, coding effort and time savings? Immigration is an excellent test case, as it offers clear added efficiency for those who want it and want to pay for it. It also helps compensate Lloyd for releasing the most valuable script of all time, BGRenderer, which literally can replace a Nucleo Pro license (not available for CS4 until Tuesday, August 4) or even obviate the need for an extra rendering workstation on a big project.

Why, I have a BGRenderer terminal session running even as I type this.

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