Correct lens distorsion ?

[Bruce Brent]

At 22 seconds (columns on both sides) into your video is the perfect spot to use for adjusting your lens correction.

[Peter Holt]

Picking up an old thread…

I am using MSP12 and Pro 13, win7-64 and have bought the $99 NewblueFX kit which has the Lens Correction FX.

The camera is a Sony FDR-1000V which when set with stabilisation=on has an angle of view of 120 degrees (170 otherwise – too wide and even more distorted). The waterproof housing reduces the angle by a few more degrees.

In short, NBFX does work but is not a mathematically correct correction; at best a rough approximation.

It does improve the situation but it is clear that the correction equation is not suited to this camera, or maybe any other camera.

I posted a summary with screenshots in this aviation forum
https://www.euroga.org/forums/website/6070-movie-lens-correction-software-for-windows-xp-or-any-other-os/post/115053#115053
(I hope the external link is acceptable but it took me a while to generate this)
and as you can see you can correct very well IF you also crop, and I don’t mean just cropping the voids which are inevitably introduced when a barrel distorted image is corrected. You have to crop quite a bit more, to remove the heavily distorted bits in the corners.

Why NBFX doesn’t offer profiles for common action cams (there aren’t so many) I have no idea. They charge good money for their plug-ins.

I did email them and they said that incomplete correction is to be expected, basically.

The required crop has the effect of reducing the camera angle, obviously, which is sometimes OK but you are wasting material. You are also wasting pixels because if you start at say 1080P then by the time you are done you are replicating pixels; more so nearer the edges of the image so it ends up blurred. I have found that rendering to 768P is better. For a 1080P output one would need to record in 4K and while the current cameras (including this one) do 4K they are really severely limited in various ways.