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.