Enhancing motion picture lens performance by digital calibration and correction

Woollard, Christopher (2011) Enhancing motion picture lens performance by digital calibration and correction. In: Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition (SMPTE 2010). Curran Associates, Inc, NY, USA, pp. 135-143. ISBN 9781617821790

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Abstract

To some degree, all lenses used by the motion picture industry exhibit certain distortions which can detract from the ideal viewing experience. This paper presents a lens calibration and correction system which enables these problems to be resolved digitally.
Lenses such as the Cook 4i and now 5i provide the necessary metadata on focus and aperture settings to enable digital post corrections to be applied. Many other lenses however may be adapted to provide the necessary metadata by means of an encoder. The paper presents how this is achieved followed by a presentation of the digital correction system for enhancing such scenarios as extreme focus pulls, chromaticity etc. Using digital high definition camera systems the calibration of each individual lens is presented along with the automatic derivation of the
required lens database. The full post production work flow through correction to final image generation is presented.

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