Abomerration

Chromatic aberration is a lens failing to bring every wavelength to the same place. Photographers spent a century and a great deal of money getting rid of it. This puts it back, wires it to the music, and then carries on well past anything glass could do.

One idea runs through the whole plugin, and it's why it doesn't look like the usual RGB-offset effect. A lens focuses every wavelength at a slightly different magnification, and the coloured fringe you see is the whole visible spectrum smeared along that path and then added up by the sensor. So this displaces the picture once per wavelength sample and sums the results through spectral weights. The familiar hard red/blue split is the same loop asked for three samples, because the three-sample weight table is the identity, so there's no separate mode or code path for it. That's why one control runs from a cheap 1990s channel offset to a proper prismatic fringe with nothing else changing.

Four geometries decide which way the spectrum gets smeared. Radial is what an uncorrected lens does: nothing on the axis, worst in the corners. Linear is a prism held in front of it, or a three-strip camera slipping out of registration, with no optical centre at all. Tangential rotates each wavelength about the centre instead of pushing it outward, which no lens does. Turbulent takes its direction from a drifting noise field, and it's the abomination the plugin is named after.

The music can drive it four ways, all switched off by default, so dropped on a layer with nothing routed it's an ordinary manual aberration lens and behaves like one. A beat pulse locks to the host's transport on any division from a quarter beat to two bars. An overall level pump follows the mix. A band split sends bass, mid and treble to their own channels, so the picture comes apart along with the music rather than just pumping. And manual channel trims sit on top of the lot. Depth is carved out of the amount rather than added to it, so at full depth silence gives you a clean picture and the beat gives you the whole effect.

Real lateral aberration is invisible in a flat area, because displacing a patch of constant colour gives you back the same patch, so an Edges control weights the dispersion by local contrast, and at zero you get the misregistered-camera look instead. Show Field paints the dispersion over a dimmed picture with four meters along the bottom for bass, mid, treble and beat. A flat area with an enormous displacement looks identical to one with none, and “is it hearing anything at all?” is otherwise impossible to answer inside Resolume.

It's also an OpenFX plugin for DaVinci Resolve, Vegas Pro, Nuke and Natron. The dispersion field, the spectral weight table and every parameter curve come from the same source files in both builds, so a preset can't mean one thing in Resolume and another in Resolve. The reactive controls are left out of the OpenFX build rather than shown doing nothing: OFX has no beat information and no audio input, and a dead control that looks live is worse than one that's missing.