How to Desqueeze Anamorphic Footage

Everything you need to know about fixing squeezed anamorphic video and photos, whether you do it manually in your NLE or let software handle it automatically.

What Is Desqueezing and Why Do You Need It?

Anamorphic lenses work by compressing a wider horizontal field of view onto your camera sensor. This is what gives anamorphic footage its distinctive look: oval bokeh, horizontal lens flares, and a cinematic aspect ratio.

The trade-off is that raw footage from an anamorphic lens looks horizontally squeezed. People appear tall and thin. Circles become ovals. The image looks wrong because it is -- it needs to be stretched back to its intended proportions.

That stretching process is called desqueezing. The amount you stretch depends on the squeeze ratio of your specific lens. A 1.33x lens needs 33% horizontal stretch. A 2x lens needs 100%.

Know Your Squeeze Ratio

Before you can desqueeze, you need to know your lens's squeeze ratio. Here are the most common ones:

For a comprehensive list of every anamorphic lens and its ratio, see the complete anamorphic squeeze ratio chart.

The Manual Way: Desqueezing in Your NLE

DaVinci Resolve

1. Import your clips into the Media Pool.
2. Right-click a clip and select Clip Attributes.
3. Go to the Image tab.
4. Change Pixel Aspect Ratio from Square to your ratio (e.g., Cinemascope 1.33x).
5. Repeat for every clip.

The problem: you have to do this one clip at a time. If you shot 200 clips on a shoot day, that is 200 right-clicks, 200 dialog boxes, and 200 chances to pick the wrong ratio.

Adobe Premiere Pro

1. Select your clip on the timeline.
2. Open the Effect Controls panel.
3. Under Motion, change the Scale Width to your squeeze factor (e.g., 133 for 1.33x).
4. Alternatively, use the Interpret Footage option (right-click in the Project panel).
5. Repeat for every clip.

Premiere does not have native anamorphic desqueeze support. You are manually scaling, which means you need to calculate the exact percentage yourself.

Final Cut Pro

1. Select your clip in the browser or timeline.
2. Open the Inspector (Cmd+4).
3. Go to Spatial Conform and change the type to None.
4. Under Transform, adjust the Scale X value to match your ratio.
5. Repeat for every clip.

FCPX added some anamorphic support in recent versions, but it is limited to certain ratios and does not always auto-detect correctly.

The Problems with Manual Desqueezing

Manual desqueezing in an NLE works, but it comes with real costs:

• Time. Every clip needs individual attention. A 200-clip shoot day can mean 30+ minutes of pure setup before you start editing.
• Human error. Pick the wrong ratio and your footage looks subtly off. Mix up 1.33x and 1.5x and you will not notice until export.
• No preview before import. Your camera roll and file browser show the squeezed version. You cannot review your footage properly until it is in the NLE.
• Re-encoding risk. Some methods (like scaling in Premiere) require re-encoding, which degrades quality and takes time.

The Automatic Way: Use Desqueezed

Desqueezed was built to solve every problem listed above.

Step 1: Open Desqueezed and select your files. Pick a folder on your computer, a photo album on your phone, or drag and drop.

Step 2: The app reads each file's metadata, identifies the anamorphic lens used, and auto-detects the correct squeeze ratio. No manual input needed.

Step 3: Hit Desqueeze. Videos are corrected via metadata (zero re-encoding, zero quality loss). Photos are resampled using Lanczos interpolation.

That is it. 200 files in about 12 seconds. Mixed lenses in the same batch are handled automatically because each file is analyzed individually.

You can desqueeze before importing into your NLE, so your timeline starts with correctly proportioned footage from the first frame. Or desqueeze on your phone and share directly to Instagram or TikTok without ever opening an editor.

For specific workflows, check out the iPhone desqueeze guide or the batch processing guide.

When to Desqueeze Before vs. During Editing

Before editing is almost always better. You get correct aspect ratios in your file browser, correct thumbnails, correct previews. When you import into your NLE, everything looks right from the start. Since Desqueezed uses metadata correction for video (no re-encoding), there is no quality penalty.

During editing makes sense only if you need the raw squeezed files for a specific post-production pipeline, such as VFX work where the compositor expects the original pixel dimensions.

Or Just Use Desqueezed and Skip All of This

If you are reading this article because you have a pile of squeezed footage and want to fix it, the fastest path is clear. Download Desqueezed, point it at your files, and let auto-detection handle the rest. It is free, works on iPhone, Android, Mac, and Windows, and it will save you more time than any tutorial ever could.