Hi

In my first attempt at wide-angle filming on my Canon XM2 (0.5x Red Eye Lens), I am generally pleased with the results in the large, spacious areas of my interiors - but closer shots are a different story.

The 'barrel' effect is very noticable in some shots, particularly in those with straight lines! (Such as door frames).

I use the old Liquid Edition 6 because I am familiar with it, though I am capable of upgrading to Avid Xpress Pro in the near future.

Can I fix the 'barrel' effect on my footage within either of these editing packages, hopefully Liquid Edition? Or can any other editing software or gadget do it for me?

Nearest thing I can find is the 'Magnify' effect in Liquid, which I have used to create a barrel-like effect in the past. However after fiddling with the settings, i cannot seem to get it to 'invert' (or apply a 'pincushion' effect) to reduce bulging of the image and 'bring it in' from the centre. There seems to be no way to rotate the effect itself by 'turning the magnifyer over'.

Any help, or suggestions much appreciated.

Cheers

Just tried to do this in vegas, cant find a way to do it convincingly.

Going wide inevitably means distortion.

Only work around I can think of is to crop the image lightly to remove the extremes of distortion around the edges - but that rather defeats the object.

A 0.5x convertor will always give massive barrel distortion - tray a 0.7.

The best soloution involves serious cash - a camera with a removable lens and a real WA lens, £10,000 new - not an option I suspect....

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Thanks for your reply, I'm not having much luck with this one over the weekend - you have made a few things very clear however.

I also tried Pinch/Punch and Sphering effects in Sony Vegas - promising results when the footage was frozen on one frame, but once it moves it just does not look right at all.

You would think an application or plugin for one of the editors would be available to deal with this obviously very common problem... something programmed with the maths to try and reverse the magnification/bulging effect throughout the whole picture. Something you could just increase/decrease the size and intensity of until you have cured the particular problem created by your lens size. The Vegas options are obviously not designed for this.

Cheers and regards