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NEW Anamorphic Lens from Freewell for the DJI POCKET 2 // Real-World Review // Best cinematic lens?
Freewell just released a NEW anamorphic lens + ND filters for the DJI Pocket 2! I will not only review this new lens but also talk about what makes anamorphic lenses so special in general. What makes this lens for the DJI Pocket 2 so special is that it also support ND filters to get natural motion blur. Anamorphic lenses are known for their light leaks and this lens from Freewell is no exception! The big question is: will this combo (lens + ND) make you footage more cinematic? Thanks @ for letting me test your new lens!
🎥More test footage https://youtu.be/hyM3f_oF_ao
🎥ND filters explained https://youtu.be/EY4kOFHPilo
🔗 BUY Freewell Anamorphic + Wide Angle + ND Lens https://geni.us/anamorphic-wa-nd
🔗 BUY Freewell Anamorphic + ND https://geni.us/anamorphic-nd
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- DJI Pocket 2 Review https://youtu.be/j35Xy3ibRxc
- Capturing the stars with the DJI Pocket 2 https://youtu.be/cKYHj26coE8
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📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
01:03 - Why Hollywood uses anamorphic lenses?
01:34 - How does an anamorphic lens work?
02:01 - Why use an anamorphic lens?
03:54 - The Freewell Anamorphic lens
04:08 - ND filters
04:57 - Biggest problem!
05:29 - Autofocus & vlogging
06:22 - How does it perform!
06:52 - How to de-squeeze the footage?
10:10 - Image quality & lens flare
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#anamorphiclens #frewellgear #djipocket2
- 0:00 Introduction
- 1:03 Why Hollywood uses anamorphic lenses?
- 1:34 How does an anamorphic lens work?
- 2:01 Why use an anamorphic lens?
- 3:54 The Freewell Anamorphic lens
- 4:08 ND filters
- 4:57 Biggest problem!
- 5:29 Autofocus & vlogging
- 6:22 How does it perform!
- 6:52 How to de-squeeze the footage?
- 10:10 Image quality & lens flare
Oof i was super lucky about this one! Last night when filming some b-roll with the unreleased anamorphic lens from freewell for the dji pocket 2, I dropped it in the snow. We found it and it's perfectly fine but yeah in this video let's make a review of it and also talk about what our anamorphic lens why Hollywood like using so much these types of lens and if it's a great lens for your DJII Pocket 2. For those of you who are new to this channel, I'm Loïc Bellemare-Alford, a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at this art. Freewell reached out a few weeks ago and offered me to review the new anamorphic lens for the dji pocket 2. I never used anamorphic lens before so I was really curious to see if this would fit my filmmaking style. Freewell doesn't get to see this video, doesn't pay me so you get my full unbiased review of this new lens. Have you ever wondered why it's so hard to reproduce the Hollywood look? Well the one of the reason is that they use anamorphic lenses. You might not have heard about anamorphic lenses before because they're crazy expensive when i say expensive i'm talking about well over ten thousand dollars for a good anamorphic lens now the big question is why are those lens so special you know the annoying black bars you have on films at the top and volume well this very large format is called cinemascope it usually has an aspect ratio of around 21 by nine what an anamorphic lens does is take that footage and squeeze it on a smaller sensor so let's say 16/9 then when you go and video editing you take that footage and de-squeeze it and this process of squeezing and de-squeezing the footage is what creates the very unique look of an anamorphic lens now the question is why would you go through all the trouble of using anamorphic lens the first reason is for the looks that it creates so usually an anamorphic lens has a very sharp and detailed center of the picture but there's a little bit softer edges and also a little bit more distorted edges and this can create a really cool look when you use it well inside of a film another reason is that the background so the blur in the background creates oval bokeh so if you don't know what is bokeh it's basically the blur in the background and on most digital cameras including your cell phone you usually get really round uh blur backgrounds in the back where it's more of all using the anamorphic lens because you're stretching out the image and this can create a pretty cool look another reason is probably the most common reason why people use anamorphic lens is for the lens flare that it creates so usually when you have a dslr or your cell phone and you point something like a flashlight to your camera it's actually going to create a flare that goes all around in a circle because your lens is circular but here because it's touching out the image it's actually going to create light streaks that are horizontal and this can create a very stylistic look that is very interesting it's especially interesting if you're shooting things like music videos or if you're doing a short dream or something like that where you want to have a much more stylized look in the end the last reason why it's so useful to use an animal fit lens is that you don't lose as much information when you have a wide format so usually when we add the black bars at the top or the bottom we're cropping inside of the footage and this means you're getting less detail inside of your shot in the end because you're cropping some information at the top and the bottom but here because you compress and then decompress this image you actually end up having much more information and much more pixel density inside of your final image which is also great when you want to use the maximum capacities of your camera wow that was a lot of information now with all of this in head let's talk about the freewell anamorphic lens for the dji pocket 2. if you're wondering how it looks i've been using it since the beginning of this video so you should have a pretty good idea up to now of if it's working well or not my favorite feature from this lens is actually that comes with some nd filters or neutral density filters nd filters are like sunglasses but for your camera and they're super useful to get a more snout-like image because they also control your shutter speed and get some motion blur inside of the image so by combining some nd filters and also the anamorphic lens you get the most cinematic image possible from the dji pocket too i have a full video that goes in depth to talk about what are endless filters and how they work on the dji pocket too so i'm going to put the link in the description down below if you're interested to learn more about that what is super clever about these nd filters is that they hold to the back of the lens by using only some magnets so they're super easy to put and remove and you can easily change them as you need once this is on you simply have to put the lens on the camera and you're good to go and shoot some footage my biggest problem with this anamorphic lens is that the magnets don't always hold it super securely on the dji pocket too so yesterday i lost it i also lost it this morning in the snow so it's twice that it fell down when i had it on the camera so this is a prime because you need to be very careful when you have it on that you don't drop it by accident because it's so small that it's really easy to lose it if it falls down from the camera one thing that really scared me with this lens was how it was going to affect the autofocus system on the gi pocket too up to now the anamorphic lens doesn't seem to be affecting at all the autofocus which is pretty great and how does it look right now because i'm using little focus and it's a pretty challenging background if i bring it closer does it work better does it work worse uh i'm pretty sure it's just fine right now and it works perfectly fine another thing i want to talk about is that this is probably not your best lens for vlogging so you definitely can vlog like i'm doing right now using the camera but because of the really wide format it's a pretty weird format for when you're vlogging because you usually want to have something that is taller not something that is wider when you're vlogging so it's maybe not the best lens for vlogging scenarios but it's definitely a good lens if you want to get more cinematic type of shots now the big question is how does it actually perform and how does the image actually work up to now it seems to be working really well and you also get really good images that are sharp there's not much distortion and the light leaks are pretty cool the light leaks might be just a little bit too intense for my taste but that's just a thing of taste uh it doesn't mean that they're bad or anything like that now let's go inside so i can show you how to de-squeeze the footage and so we can analyze in more detail exactly uh the images and see if they're any good or not okay so now let's talk about how we can describe the footage for this i'm going to be using premiere pro because that's my favorite editing program but you can use whatever else other program whether it's imovie lumafusion adobe rush or really any other program that allows you to change the height and width of your footage so for this we're going to jump into the project right here that i have and we're going to select all the content and just drop it on the timeline right below now if we play the footage we're going to see that it's pretty weird because actually my face is really squished and that's because the content was squished if we wanted to squeeze it we're going to have to come inside of the effects controls right here so we're going to come in the effects and we want to change the scale of the height the problem inside of premiere pro is that you cannot change the height and the width separately when you have uniform scaled enabled so we're going to disable this and now we're going to be able to change the height and the wave independently of the clip now if you're not sure what to enter we need to look at the specification of the lens and freewheel says it's a squeeze factor of 1.15 that means that the horizontal when it's desquished is going to be [115] percent but we want to change the height not the width because when the width to stay the same and for this we're going to need to do a little bit of math so we're going to multiply 1 times 100 to get in percentage and then divide it by 1.15 which is going to give us about 87 so if we come right here we can enter 87 click enter and we're going to see that right away it looks a lot better the problem is that it doesn't work exactly like that because the factor how it switches the content on the middle and the size isn't exactly the same so i found that in my test actually 92 percent is what works the best to get a natural form inside of my face then if you didn't know this little trick that you can do inside of premiere pro because you don't want to be entering 92 on every single click is to come inside of here and then just right click on our settings that we want to save and we can save it as a preset so now we can enter our preset name right here and we're just going to call it um snip scope freewheel and and we're going to click enter to save it and now if we come on our effects tab right here and we go inside of preset we're going to see that we have it right here so if we select all our clips all we have to do now is select this effect drag and drop it under the clips and now all our clips are correctly de-squeezed so that was how easy it was to do now we have another little problem instead we want to get rid of the black bars at the top and the bottom instead of premiere pro it's pretty easy to fix so if we go inside of sequence sequence setting we can then change the horizontal height so here i had a 720p uh clip just because it's a proxy file that i'm using right now so we're gonna have to use uh the calculator for this to be able to know what's the new height so if we do 92 of uh 720p so we're gonna just change the height it's gonna give us 662.4 so i'm just going to enter 662. click enter click ok and now we're going to see that we got rid of the black bars that were at the top and the bottom so now if we come we can do command m to export the clip and we're going to be able to explore the clip without any of these annoying borders and now we have our new format for the clip and i want to talk about the image quality of the freewheel anamorphic lens i really enjoyed that the lens is sharp all over around the image even if the corners which is sometimes a problem with cheaper lenses for the dji pocket too another really great thing with the freewell anamorphic lens is that the distortion isn't very distracting so the sides are still pretty vertical which is really great because a lot of cheaper lenses again are going to create some distorted energies which is really annoying one thing that annoys me just a little bit with this lens is that the squeeze factor doesn't seem to be the same at the center and the sides so it's a little bit hard on post-processing to find the right height or things like that to make sure that everything looks natural instead of the image but it's a problem with anamorphic lenses not just the one from freewheel the last thing we talk about is color tasks and there's a slight color cast but that's not a big deal for me because it's really easy to fix it afterwards it's almost unnoticeable the reason you have that color cast is because of the coating they have to put on the lens because the anamorphic lens doesn't actually stretch enough the image to create the light leaks so they add something on top to create the light leaks afterwards when the lights pass through by the lens this is very similar to how they do it on a phone so it might not be the nicest like leaks but it's definitely what you're used to seeing when taking videos with anamorphic lens on a phone or on the dji pocket too the big question is should you buy the freewell anamorphic lens for the dji pocket too in my opinion if you want to get the light leaks inside of your video it's definitely an option worth considering if you want to buy it to get a little bit more sonic results it's still a good option but you're not going to be getting that very wide a cinema scope look you're still getting a different aspect ratio and you're still getting some of the benefits of anamorphic lens but it's definitely not as high quality as real professional lens but that's why you're not paying that crazy high price talking of prices i think that the best option when buying the anamorphic lens is actually to buy it inside of the pack that i have right here we have a wide angle lens and also the anamorphic lens that work with the same nd filters this is a kit that costs 100 us dollars we can also buy each individually with the nd filters for 60 each but i think it's just better to buy both at the same time and get two lenses plus nd filters in a whole package for a pretty good price especially when you consider that the dji official nd filters and when i go lens cost over 110 dollars to get them and they don't even work together if you're interested in buying the anamorphic lens or the wide angle lens from freewell for the dji pocket 2 go check out the links in the description down below they might be affiliate links but this is a good big deal for both of us because when you buy the lens using the link you're actually helping my channel in the end a few days ago i published another video testing the freewell anaphoric lens with the dji pocket 2 in low light so definitely go check that one out if you want to see more test footage as usual if you enjoyed this video please leave a like below and also consider subscribing to learn more about photography and filmmaking i'm also going to be releasing a video on the wide-angle lens with the nd filters from Freewell so definitely subscribe if you want to learn more about that see you in the next one bye
Video Links
- 🎥More test footage
- 🎥ND filters explained
- 🔗 BUY Freewell Anamorphic + Wide Angle + ND Lens
- 🔗 BUY Freewell Anamorphic + ND
- 🔗 Freewell Wide Angle + ND
- 🔗 BUY the DJI Pocket 2
- DJI Pocket 2 Review
- Capturing the stars with the DJI Pocket 2
- Framerates explained
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- TikTok
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
Freewell just released a new anamorphic lens for the DJI Pocket 2, and I was lucky enough to test it—though I'll admit I dropped it in the snow. But it survived, and it's given me a solid opportunity to explore what makes anamorphic lenses so compelling for filmmakers chasing that coveted Hollywood aesthetic.
In this video, I'm breaking down the fundamentals of anamorphic lenses and why they've been the secret weapon of cinema for decades. The basic concept is elegant: an anamorphic lens squeezes a wide image onto a smaller sensor, which you then de-squeeze in post-production. That squeeze-and-unsqueeze process is what creates the magic. Hollywood uses anamorphic lenses because they deliver a specific look—sharp, detailed centers with softer, slightly distorted edges. They produce those distinctive horizontal light streaks (instead of circular flares) and create oval-shaped bokeh in the background. Plus, you retain more image information and pixel density compared to simply cropping black bars into a 16:9 image.
What I find most compelling about the Freewell setup is that it comes packaged with ND filters—neutral density filters that act like sunglasses for your camera. They let you control shutter speed and achieve natural motion blur, which is essential for cinematic footage. The ND filters attach magnetically to the back of the lens, making them quick to swap out. That said, the magnets aren't bulletproof; I've already lost the lens twice because the connection isn't perfectly secure.
Performance-wise, I'm impressed. The lens is sharp across the frame, distortion is minimal, and the light leaks are eye-catching—though they might be a touch intense depending on your taste. The autofocus on the Pocket 2 isn't affected, which is great. I walk through the de-squeeze process in Premiere Pro so you can see exactly how to process the footage and remove those black bars. One quirk: the squeeze factor varies slightly from center to edges, which makes finding the perfect de-squeeze percentage a bit of trial and error—though I found 92% works well in my tests.
Is it worth buying? If you're after anamorphic aesthetics and lens flares, absolutely. If you're expecting professional cinema-quality results at this price point, keep expectations measured—but for the cost, it's a solid option. I'd actually recommend the bundle pack that pairs the anamorphic lens with Freewell's wide-angle lens and shared ND filters, which is better value than buying everything separately. Head to the description for the links if you're interested.