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Advanced Lens Controls
These floating windows provide additional controls to the solver, to request that additional lens distortion parameters be determined from your live shot as part of a solve (ie not from a calibration grid). The panel for the current lens type is opened by the more button on the Lens Control panel (which is shown from the lens room and
bottom of the Solver room on larger monitors), or the Window/Advanced Lens Controls menu item.
Each panel allows camera matches to be computed despite more complex lens distortion issues. DON'T JUST TURN ALL THE PARAMETERS ON! Enable calculations ONLY if relevant, and only if they substantially reduce the resulting hpix error, without increasing canary errors from zero-weighted trackers. When the corresponding issue is not present, a deformed solve will result, not a computed null result. That is mathematics, not a bug. See additional guidance in the Anamorphic Shots Guide.
After computing distortion parameters, in most cases you must run the Lens Workflow script to set up the desired export before running any exporters. (This may not be necessary if all your downstream apps and their exporters support projection screens or overscan rendering.)
The lens distortion coefficients affect the display of meshes and trackers throughout SynthEyes, so that the camera match is shown accurately (meshes are distorted to match in the camera view, and the image is undistorted to match in the perspective view). Depending on the complexity of the lens model being used, mesh display in the camera view will be slower. (The Classic model with only a quadratic term has only limited impact.)
IMPORTANT . Lens distortion complicates whether or not a scene can be directly exported to downstream applications. Some application exporters may not handle any distortion, requiring distortion to be removed from the imagery using SynthEyes or a compositing application. Only the Fusion and Nuke exporters can handle the advanced lens models directly, using compatible lens distortion nodes built into the respective applications. The After Effects exporter handles only the Classic lens model, with static or animated quadratic, cubic, and quartic Classic distortion, with the aid of a SynthEyes-supplied plugin; for other models After Effects must use an image distortion map (STmap). In general, accommodating lens distortion can be done within SynthEyes, or by exporting static or animated UVMaps/STMaps or static or vertex-cache-animated projection screens..
SUPER-IMPORTANT . When anamorphic distance is being used (manually or solved), it is not a 2-D “distortion”, but a modification to the fundamental 3-D to 2-D perspective transform. In most cases, until other apps support this, we must simulate the effect of anamorphic distance by compensating tracker and vertex locations. The requisite vertex caches and deforming meshes will significantly impact what you do.
JUST NO . The laws of physics dictate that rolling shutter can't be corrected exactly, and SynthEyes does not attempt to do so. Instead, to match rolling shutter as best possible, use a rendering application that can simulate it, and composite that footage onto the original.
Each advanced lens type can have its own control panel, though in practice several types share the same panel, such as the forward and reverse versions of each model, or the fisheye types all sharing the same panel. Despite the various panel layouts, they all have the same basic fields and settings, so we’ll start by discussing the shared controls and generic operation, then discuss shared parameters appearing on multiple models, and finally the individual panels.
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