How do you prompt AI video models to simulate fisheye, Petzval, or split diopter lens effects?

Name the lens explicitly, then describe its optical signature in visual terms the model can render: "shot on a fisheye lens, extreme barrel distortion, curved horizon" works better than "wide shot." Pair the lens with one camera movement, and route the shot to a model with lens understanding — Seedream 5.0 Pro simulates fisheye, Petzval, and split diopter natively inside invideo.

Write every lens prompt in two parts: the lens name plus its visible optical signature. AI video models respond to the physical description of what the glass does to the image, so "Petzval lens" alone underdelivers compared to "Petzval lens, swirly bokeh, sharp center, soft radial edge falloff." Then add exactly one camera movement operator — a slow push-in, a static tripod hold, a gentle pan — because lens character reads most clearly when the motion is simple. Community testing of camera-language prompting reaches the same conclusion: the lens spec needs an operator instruction attached to render believably (Reddit thread on operator prompts).

Fisheye. Prompt the distortion itself: "ultra-wide fisheye lens, heavy barrel distortion, curved horizon line, edges of the frame bending outward, subject centered." Keep camera motion slow — fast moves through a distorted field tend to produce warping artifacts at the frame edges, so favor a locked-off shot or a slow dolly. Placing the subject dead-center exploits the lens's natural geometry: the center stays truest while the periphery bends.

Petzval. Describe the three-part signature: "vintage Petzval portrait lens, subject tack-sharp in the center, swirling circular bokeh in the background, soft vignetted edges." Give the background visible texture to swirl — foliage, string lights, a busy street — because the swirl effect only reads when there are out-of-focus highlights to spin. A slow push-in on the subject accentuates the center-sharp/edge-soft contrast. Filmmakers replicating this digitally describe the same target look (r/Filmmakers on the digital Petzval effect).

Split diopter. Prompt it as a composition with two focal planes, not as a lens name alone: "split diopter shot, foreground subject in sharp focus on the left, background subject in equally sharp focus on the right, soft blurred seam dividing the two focal planes." Specify which subject occupies which half of the frame and put the seam over a low-detail area — a wall, a doorframe — the way cinematographers hide it in live action. Stating both depths as "in sharp focus simultaneously" is the key phrase; without it, models default to a single focal plane.

Model choice. Lens simulation is a model capability, not just a prompt skill — Seedream 5.0 Pro simulates fisheye, Petzval, and split diopter characteristics inside an AI video pipeline, alongside cinematic lighting and precise skin-texture rendering, and it runs natively inside invideo, so the invideo agent can route lens-driven shots to it while sending other shots to Veo, Kling, or Seedance 2.0 as the material demands. Research pipelines are moving the same direction — the AKiRa project demonstrates direct control over optical parameters in generative video (arxiv) — but at the prompt level today, the lens-name-plus-signature-plus-operator formula is what produces the effect. Generate several takes per lens prompt and keep the one where the optical character holds through the full clip; lens rendering varies between generations, so selection is part of the workflow.

Realism, cinematic lighting, precise skin textures, lens understanding, precision editing, and multi-image fusion. All of it, natively inside invideo.

— invideo's creative team, on Seedream 5.0 Pro