Fisheye correction - any better solutions?

DDDyson wrote on 6/5/2012, 2:42 PM

I'm struggling to get proper, correct, rectilinear fisheye correction done in Vegas Movie Studio. I'm using the VIO POV.HD camera and its footage is pretty heavily curved.

The Sony Spherize plugin (suggested by some) is more or less useless for this. It MIGHT work if I was able to stretch its effect way outside the video frame. I tried shrinking the video itself just to see if it works, but... meh.

Someone tipped me off to the Sony Deform plugin (Top/Bottom/Left/Right curve). Yes, it works to an extent - but it's impossible to get proper correction from it, there is always odd curving and warping regardless of the values I use.

The NewBlue Lens Correction plugin has the same problem as the free Barrel Distotion VirtualDub plugin (by Emiliano Ferrari): there's weird curvature, regardless of what Alpha and Beta values you use. Maybe there are correct values that produce a rectilinear image, but even after hours of tweaking I just can' find them.

--> However: the Defish AviSynth plugin (by David Horman) does a PERFECT job. When I set the FOV to the right amount (101 degrees), the result is perfectly rectilinear. Excellent! Looks like there is a solution.

The problem is, I can't feed AviSynth to Vegas. Media players read the .avs files just fine, but Vegas doesn't. I actually tried this tutorial:
http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-47194.html
... but my problem turned out to be that VFAPI doesn't support QTInput (my source videos are in .mov format), and freaks out with MP4 files (the other format POV.HD can record to). Time to give up.

Yes: I can always defish the video by just re-encoding the video with VirtualDub w/AviSynth. But that introduces an intermediate re-encoding step which is lossy (or creates a massive lossless intermediate file) and takes a long time, and is a pain to batch operate. It will take me literally days with multiple passes to create a stereoscopic, edited video. I'd prefer the whole process queue to be in one program, one pass so that I can edit and render everything in one pass without intermediate steps.

Are there any ways to do this I might have missed? (save for forking out the cash for After Effects.... a leetle beet beyond my budget, that....)

Sony guys, would it be technically feasible to make Vegas able read those AviSynth .avs files? (media players don't seem to have problems with it)

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DDDyson wrote on 5/19/2013, 10:32 AM

I gave the Spherize plugin another shot. Basically it almost does what it should do, because action cam fisheye distortion is also spherical.

If I disable the Spherize plugin's "Proportional" checkbox and give it the correct 16:9 aspect (horizontal: 0,5625, vertical: 1,0), with the Amount -0,130 it looks more or less rectilinear.

In the middle of the picture, that is... everything outside the boundary is still fisheyed.

If only Sony made a new version of the Spherize plugin that could expand outside the boundaries of the image to do a correct defish warp. That would be pretty awesome. Because having to run my every video through a re-encoding phase in the AviSynth Defish -> VirtualDub x.264 chain just plain sucks.

DDDyson wrote on 5/19/2013, 10:45 AM

I was able to get Spherize to defish the footage in Vegas Movie Studio!

You need to do the following:
1) All the events/clips need to be shrunk with Event Pan/Crop to half their size. Click the "Event Pan/Crop" on each video clip, and set the Position Width to 3840 and Height to 2160 (twice the Full HD).

2) Add a Spherize plugin to the track that contains the action cam footage. Give it Amount -0,5, uncheck Proportional checkbox, Horizontal = 0,5625, Vertical = 1,000 (for 16:9 aspect ratio)

The video now looks stretched out in the corners - but the fisheye curvature should be reduced.

3) Create a new video track. Make the action cam footage track the Compositing Child of this new track

4) Click the Parent Motion button on the parent track, and stretch the footage to fill the frame again. (Lock Aspect Ratio, Scale About Center, stretch the rectangle until the stretched corners are outside the frame and the black is cropped outside)

This gives a more correct result than the Sony Deform plugin.

DISCLAIMER: the result is not perfectly rectilinear. Your results may vary, depending on the FOV of the action camera you're using.

DDDyson wrote on 5/19/2013, 10:56 AM

Caveat: the process is lossy. Vegas doesn't apparently Collapse Transformations, like After Effects does. When you pan/crop the event to half its original size, it actually loses half its resolution.

Well, duh!

DDDyson wrote on 5/19/2013, 1:24 PM

I tried Emiliano Ferrari's Barrel Distortion plugin in VirtualDub again. Looks like you get better results if you uncheck the "Aspect-ratio" checkbox.

I guess I need to find a really straight grid pattern (like a square tile wall) and capture a clip of that with the VIO (it doesn't take still images), then just spend a while tweaking the Alpha and Beta values unless I get the right results.

Barrel Distortion in VirtualDub is a lot faster to use than Defish via AviSynth, even though the latter gives perfect results much more easily.

I also sent an email inquiry to NewBlueFX about their Lens Correction plugin (Video Essentials II). They have an aspect ratio bug in it: if the image's aspect ratio is 16:9, you'll get a 16:9 lens distortion effect, which gives the wrong results, because the actual lens is circular, not elliptical. Hope they'll fix this bug. If they do, I'll buy their plugin kit and stop whining. :)

musicvid10 wrote on 5/19/2013, 10:53 PM

Completely off-topic, but the old Fisheye plugin in AviEdit is still wonderful!
Adds a convincing fisheye effect, doesn't remove it.
;?)

DDDyson wrote on 6/2/2013, 1:21 AM

NewBlueFX haven't replied.

It seems like an easy fix to make: just always use 1:1 circular aspect ratio in the Video Essentials II Lens Corretion plugin, regardless of the aspect of the source footage. Or give the plugin an adjustable aspect ratio parameter.

Why don't they fix it? There are no other fisheye lens correction options available for consumer level video editing programs like Magix and Vegas Movie Studio! They could take over the plugin market what comes to lens correction, and there's a huge number of GoPro and other action camera owners out there who own PCs, and would love to have a convenient way to remove lens distortion from their footage. (for Mac there's a plugin option available, but I don't want to buy a whole new computer just to get a single software feature, duh)

And why is Prodad Defishr stand alone only instead of a plugin,so it requires s lossy (or huge lossless) intermediate pass?

I would pretty much instantly buy either one, if the dealbreakers weren't there.

Whyyyyyy? :(

altarvic wrote on 6/2/2013, 9:17 AM

proDAD has another tool for GoPro users - ProDRENALIN. Fisheye removing is among other features and the price is two times cheaper than Defishr

DDDyson wrote on 6/3/2013, 4:05 PM

Thanks for the tip. Seems like a good value for money. I'm using VIO POV.HD cameras though, and this looks custom made for GoPro, not sure if they've tailored the fisheye to exactly match with the GoPro, so that it won't work quite right with VIO.

Also, it appears this program is also stand-alone, so you'll have to spend hours re-encoding your footage into a lossy or huge intermediate file, then editing. With a plugin you could go directly from source to destination without time and disk space consuming (and/or lossy) intermediate steps.

relaxvideo wrote on 4/20/2015, 12:13 AM

If you use newblue fx lens correction, say with -10 value, in the fx chain apply a negative crop to the image. So you will not loose parts of the edges. But this crop should be the first, you can ad newblue to 2nd in the chain.

First newblue, and second crop (which can do even better sharpness) doesn't work. Why?