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Basic Lens Distortion Workflows
There are two fundamentally different approaches to dealing with distorted imagery:
1) deliver undistorted imagery as the final shot (one pass), or
2) deliver distorted imagery as the final shot (two pass).
Delivering undistorted imagery as a final result is almost certainly the way to go if you are also stabilizing the shot, are working with higher-resolution film or RED scans being down-converted for HD or SD television, or where the distortion is a small inadvertent result of a suboptimal lens.
Delivering distorted imagery is the way to go if the distortion is the director’s original desired look, or if the pixel resolution is already marginal, and the images must be re-sampled again as little as possible to maximize quality. It is called two-pass because the CG footage (generated in your 3-D application, such as Blender, Cinema 4D, Lightwave, or Maya) must be run back through SynthEyes (or a compositing application) to apply the distortion to the CG imagery before it can be composited with the original footage.
SynthEyes’s Lens Workflow buttons on the Solver/Lens and Summary panels provides support for both these options, automatically setting up the image preprocessor. (Note that there are two different scripts, one for the classic distortion model , and one for the newer advanced lens models ; the correct script is selected automatically by the buttons.)
Usually you will want to have the same 8/16/float bit depth for the output imagery as for the input. In the following discussion, you'll see that the default settings will cause this to occur. (In some cases, you may not want it to.)
Important: if you have configured the disk cache preference to always convert all footage to 8 bit for compact storage, that setting will make it impossible to preserve the full depth and you must turn it off. See the section on 8-bit vs native disk caching for information.
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