VID · Video tools

Pinhole Video Effect

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Settings are written to the URL as you change them. Nothing differs from the defaults yet.

Turn a clip into footage from a pinhole camera: a box with a hole instead of a lens. Nothing is in focus and nothing is far out of focus, the corners fall into darkness, and the blacks never quite reach black.

Softness everywhere

Every point in the scene projects as a small disc rather than a point, so the whole frame carries the same softness. Optical Softness sets the disc size as a percentage of the short edge. Values between 0.6% and 1.5% read as pinhole; above 3% the clip turns into shapes and light.

Falloff and image circle

Light reaching the corners travels further and strikes at a steeper angle, so illumination drops fast away from the center. Light Falloff sets the depth of that shading and Image Circle sets how far out it reaches full strength.

Grain and fade

Grain stands in for the noise of a long exposure and is redrawn on every frame, 30 times per second of source time. Shadow Fade lifts the black point the way flare inside a home-made box does. Subjects with strong light and clear shapes survive the softness best; small detail and text are the first to disappear.

Frequently Asked Questions

A pinhole's light falloff follows roughly a cos⁴ law, much steeper than a lens vignette, and the whole frame is soft because there is no lens to focus. This effect blurs the entire frame first, then applies the falloff.

It sets where the falloff reaches full strength, measured against half the frame diagonal. At 82% the corners go dark before the frame edge; above 100% coverage is even and only the extreme corners darken.

Shadow Fade raises the black point on top of the falloff. Lower it for black corners.

It is copied into the export unchanged when the container can hold its codec, and re-encoded when it cannot. A note under the export button says which happened.

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