Build a Variable Anamorphic Lens for an extremely low cost that provides great results. See Part 2 for a full Demo:    • DIY - Variable Anamorphic Lens for Di...  

This new Lens design allows recording in the anamorphic format, direct to Digital Media, at the highest resolution possible. There is no loss of horizontal resolution resulting from Post 'Anamorphic unsqueezing'.

Much like the early days of 3D where some people built their own Rigs now you can easily build an Anamorphic Lens with a few simple parts. This design's 'Flat Field of View' allows for easy alignment and an additional benefit is that it requires no double-focusing, just focus as you normally would with your Camera.

No intermediate recording to Film and subsequent 4K Scan is required.

There are a few short 'Demo Clips' so you can judge the quality of the results obtained when using my newly designed Lens. A Cell Phone was used to show that better results can be expected with better equipment.

Here's someone else's attempt on EBay, the Photos may be helpful: http://m.ebay.co.uk/itm/OPTICAL-ANAMO...


Theory of Operation:

Every Anamorphic Lens I have seen is designed for Film, it squeezes the recorded images horizontally. When the Film is projected the Projector unsqueezes the images and restores the correct aspect ratio.

Using an Anamorphic Lens designed for Film and recording images digitally results in a significant loss of horizontal resolution. This new Lens design solves that problem. This Vertical expansion Lens preserves full horizontal detail.

While specifically designed for 'Digital' (to eliminate all horizontal resizing resolution loss) there is no reason that this Lens would not work with a Film Camera.

To obtain the same resolution with a Digital Camcorder as you would when using Film with a standard Anamorphic Lens you would need to have rectangular Sensor Pixels (to avoid the 'pixel doubling' resulting from unsqueezing a 2X Anamorphic Lens' Digital Video recording).

With no 'pixel doubling' and smearing from resizing you get better beams, streams, streaks, flares and bokeh, all presented in high resolution.

Note that I left a lot of 'light leakage' in this first version of the Lens. It can easily be toned down a lot in the final version of this Lens.


This is raw footage from a Cell Phone. The only Post Processing is Digital Image Stabilization, the addition of some Audio Tracks and placing the raw Clips end to end. Clinical and sterile, no extra effects were added.

The Cell Phone was hand held, no Dollys, Booms, or Cranes were used during the recording of this Video. The 'high shots' were made by 'shooting blind' (overhead) and the smoothness is from Digital Image Stabilization (using DeShaker).

This is an early version of this Lens, after practicing only a half dozen times with it. If you use a better Camera than a Cell Phone, practice more, and spend more money than I did then you should get even better results.

I had the Parts available to make this Lens, but they could cost about $30 if I had to buy them. Top quality glass Lenses, with AR coating (that you may not want), would increase the cost to a few hundred dollars.

The ability to alter the 'Lens squeezing' enables you to vary the aspect ratio from 1:1 (normal) to well over 4:1 (more adjustment range than any other Lens available).

This Lens can be adjusted and the size of the resulting black bars in the Video LetterBox can be altered before recording. This saves the cost of a few whole sets of Anamorphic Lenses (often priced over 20K each).


Search For More Info: https://encrypted.google.com/#q=Anamo... .

If you do not want to build your own and want a ready made solution you might look at the Cinomorph by Prismasonic at http://www.prismasonic.com/english/a_... which is designed for Projectors and not for Video Recorders; it may need some Mods. especially to fit on your Rails.


Music by Zendaya: More Info about the Songs and a Full Demo is available at the first Link, Part 2 of this Video.