Defishing video

<p>Men,<br>

In my spare time I amuse myself by stretching out full-frame fisheye images so that they become ultra-ultra-wide rectilinear images viz the following link (scroll down to near the bottom):<br /><a href="../learn/fisheye">http://www.photo.net/learn/fisheye/</a></p>

<p>I use PTRemap, a subset of Panotools. NB other software will do this as well, although PTRemap is free. Defishing is addictive and fun, and the results are always visually striking, even if the subject is boring. It's a great way to capture people's attention without spending a lot of effort, but it's limited to stills photography, which is becoming increasingly old-fashioned nowadays.</p>

<p>Given the existence of full-frame video; given the existence of crop-sensor fisheye lenses; is there a piece of software that will stretch out fisheye video so that it becomes ultra-ultra-wide? This would not have to be in real time. The result would have a Cinemascope-style aspect ratio although I envisage cropping off the edges down to 16:9, which would improve overall image quality a great deal.</p>

<p>I am not an expert on digital video. I imagine that it would be a simple matter if the video could be broken into individual perfect frames, which could then be run through a Photoshop batch process, and reconstituted as with e.g. timelapse photography. But as I understand it most HD video formats as used in current digital SLRs do not lend themselves to this.</p>

<p>The first person who can apply this technique to the field of either advertising or porn will be famous. And given the fact that I don't know how to do it, it probably won't be me. Which is melancholic but there you go. All of the Google returns for "defishing video" are about fishing, i.e. hooking fish out of rivers. I don't want to do that.</p>

<p>Well, that's an interesting question. In my opinion the only solution currently is to split the video into individual frames, as you say, then apply a batch edit job to all of them, and then reassemble the result into a movie.</p>

<p><em>However</em>, I reckon that in February 2010 - just a few weeks in the future - a man called David Horman will write a plugin called "defish" which does the exact thing you require, for AVSynth, and he will announce it in <a href="http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1396228">this thread at Doom9.org here</a>. You do not know this man; he does not know you, and yet you move in a similar motion.</p>

<p>And subsequently you will use this to create possibly the world's first ever defished full-frame fisheye video which you will write about in <a href="http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2010/04/defishing-video-2.html">this blog post here</a>. And the plugin will look like the following image during operation:<br>

<img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ecpW7iDmhG0/S8HQA2TvsxI/AAAAAAAABUs/LuzxGgL2gxY/s1600/Defishbeforecrop.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="482" /></p>