I’ve been playing away in my spare time with both a semi-secret home-“improvement”-project (hint: it involves big images and little to no feng shui) and also been thinking about the VashiMorphic40 preset that was released by VashiProductions and I talked about in the last post.

I mentioned there that there was one thing that I didn’t really go for, and that was the packaging. Well, that’s not entirely true, because I also quickly surmised that it’s a bit resolution-dependent. Apply it to something that isn’t standard 1920×1080 square pixel and it breaks quickly.

720p Gopro footage in 1080p comp

Simply adding the VashiMorphic40 to 720p footage breaks it.

Adding it to a 1080p adjustment layer on top of it makes it a bit better. But not quite what I want

This is what my modification gives when applied on the 720p-layer

So I found myself with some more spare time. And I decided to try and fix that part. This means going through each and every parameter in the BezierWarp-preset that is VashiMorphic40 and making them rely not on one specific set of coordinates but instead on percentages of the layer-size.

First I went ahead and made sure that the top left corner controlled what the other corners were doing. This was fairly simple. Just taking the width and height -expressions and subtracting with whatever it’s mirroring parents properties are set to.

Then came the tricky part. Going through the parameters for the top left corner and making them dependent on percentages instead of absolute pixel-values… while still making sure that when the preset is done, it’s supposed to default to the VashiMorphic40 look.

Well, it took me half the night (my expression-coding is a bit rusty). But now I have made a preset that actually seems to work pretty decently in any resolution. Producing the same curvature… assuming of course that the layer itself is in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio. To get things to work fairly well, I had to add a few sliders that control the percentage of the curvature and how the curvature is done.

Of course, I could have just made it recreate the standard VashiMorphic40, but I wanted to be able to simply do my own versions of curvature based on my own lenses. I’m not all that impressed with my naming-scheme for the sliders, but they will let me do more or less curvature like in the anamorphic lenses that this whole thing started with. And I can also do smile-boxing as in the video-releases of those CineRama-productions of yore.

If anyone wants to try it out it’s in a link below here:

>>> VashiMorph40Synched <<<

Just add it to your user presets folder.

But one thing to note. The percentage-sliders are based on the full width and height of the layers. This means that 50% is halfway through the picture. and 100% is all the way to the other side. So, for normal subtle work I wouldn’t reccomend  pulling the curvature-sliders much farther than 30%.

– Oh, and yeah… that potterthon thing… I will finish it. I swear I will!

I have long been fascinated by the anamorphic image. And no, it’s not the flares, or the oval bokeh, or things as overt as that. For me the biggest fascination has been what these lenses actually do to the image. Because, looking at movies by, for example, Luc Besson in his early days. I noticed that they were distorting in quite a weird way. It’s not really a normal fisheye look. And even though the angle isn’t that wide, it gets a wide feel.

So I set off trying to find out what it was and whether I could replicate it digitally from an image taken with a spherical sensor. I got some answers…

First of all, I’m not the only one with this fascination. Though most people seem to point at Wes Anderson as their inspiration. And most seem to be looking for ways to mitigate that same distortion for effects-work.

This resulted in a lot of testing with an approach that involved shooting in super-wide (8mm Samyang) lens that I then distorted in a rather cumbersome way to keep the fish-eye-like feel while squeezing in the center bit so that it doesn’t look so extreme.

The standard crop on a 8 mm lensed image

The result of what I jokingly call MalmScope

 And while this all did give me sort of what I wanted, it mainly only worked well on really wide shots and of those, really only those that had some great fish-eye-distortion in the first place. The result is only the frame-mis-aligned edges away from looking like a forgotten Cinerama Travelogue, but I found myself not really happy with its versatility.

My own fondness for the classic triple-negative wide format aside. I wanted something that worked on a bit longer lenses. And if possible, something that wasn’t based on 3 scale-transforms with an Optics Compensation in the middle. I tried replicating some of it with various kinds of distortion and morph-filters, but none really worked. So I was kind of stuck.

Then I stumbled on an article on NoFilmSchool.com where this fellow called Vashi had been toiling away with the same set of problems. But instead of going for super-wide fish-eyed lenses. He based his method on just mimicking the curvature of the images that Wes Andersons (there he popped up again in this context) favorite lens (Primo 40 anamorphic) produced.  Seems he did some simple math. The Primo 40 is 40 mm with 2.0x anamorphic distortion. That means it has twice its width. Something more like a 20mm lens. So using footage from 20mm lenses (taking into account the slight difference in actual negative size of 35mm anamorphic film versus the super 35 esque 16:9 sensor of course) he just did a trial and error to replicate the curvature using various distortion-methods before settling on the Bezier Warp. (I am guessing on his approach though, since I’m not him).

So I downloaded the simple project file myself. Shot some footage with my Tamron 18-270mm lens set at roughly 20mm. Filming mostly myself in my apartment since I don’t have other people here at the moment and the results were quite astonishing.

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