Caleb Genheimer

Better thermal management/active vents will probably remain something you have to look to the Cine division for.

Any thoughts on a glimmer or similar lens filtration glass for a halation effect? It seems to happen at very high contrast edges, and only on very bright light sources, up where there often isn’t much dynamic range/differentiation between bright and BRIGHT (if that makes sense). Ive always thought if Tiffen were to do a low power red/pink glimmer glass, that might get awfully close.

I’ve done a decent amount of front/rear group mismatch pairing. What I’ve found is this: 1. you can often find mismatched pairings that function at equivalent quality to their matched arrangement. 2. mismatched pairings are not able to be focused, meaning that they are in focus only at infinity. (This is different from what anamorphic users refer to as “dual focus.” The anamorphic is infinity only just to be clear.) 3. The maximum angle of view is determined by the front element group, and cannot be changed. (Note a key distinction however that the squeeze ratio changes, which DOES change which taking lens focal length will be associated with the unchanging angle of view. This also means that the vertical field of view changes as well.) 4. the source-point flare comes from the rear element group, the secondary mirrored flare comes from the front element group. To take all of this and give a specific example, let’s say I’m trying out pairings with the front element group from my Kowa 16-H. On my Blackmagic PCC4K, lets say my favorite lens to use with it stock is my Canon FD 24mm, which also happens to be the widest lens I can use if my final delivery is going to be a tasty, vignette-free 2.39:1. Let’s move on now to the (imaginary) mismatch pairing. I have an old B&L CinemaScope kicking around, and I pair the rear grouping from this scope with the front grouping from my 16-H, in front of my 24mm, which is set to infinity. The B&L elements are nice and cozy right up against the 24mm’s front, but things look blurry. I move the 16-H front grouping in and out until I get a nice sharp image. Neat! If I focus the 24mm on something closer, say, my C-stand at 5’ from camera, I can’t seem to achieve anything sharp no matter what the distance is between the Kowa and B&L element groups. Oh well... infinity it is! (That’s what variable diopters are for anyway, right?) Ok, so we have our trusty 24mm. We have a Frankenstein of glass from two scopes in front of it, and it’s nice and sharp (at least at infinity,) so what now? Well, let’s shoot a chart, pull some footage into an NLE, and figure out what the squeeze of our new Frankenscope happens to be. A quick stretch of the footage to where the chart looks normal reveals..... 1.75X! Neat! Now, there’s definitely some vignette, but that’s ok, we’re after 2.39:1 delivery. Let’s crop in until the vignette goes away, shall we? The result? vignette free when cropped to 3:1. That’s cool, we could probably go a little wider with the spherical lens. A quick scour through the camera bag unearths a LUMIX 21mm lens. Let’s ditch the 24mm and try the 21mm. Abracadabra, drop some 21mm footage into the timeline, desqueeze and crop out the vignette: 2.39:1. There now exists a 1.75X scope that can go as wide as a 21mm taking lens! That’s a wider taking lens than the Kowa could handle stock! Or is it? A meander through the maths: 21/1.75=12mm lens equivalent horizontal 24/2=12mm lens equivalent horizontal BUT!!! (You may say, and you’re correct) there is no vertical squeeze factor here, so vertically, the 21mm is STILL wider than the 24mm. Yes. You are using a wider focal length lens, but your horizontal field/angle of view remains unchanged. The two scope configurations both are and aren’t equivalent to each other. Oh the joys of anamorphic. This is why anamorphic lenses are said to have two focal lengths (one horizontal and another vertical,) and it’s why we get oval bokeh too! The final kicker is when we add our variable diopter of choice: an SLR Magic Rangefinder. The stock Kowa is now choked to a maximum of 28mm, and the Frankenscope can only do 25mm. It turns out that in practical application, the limit of all wide anamorphic adapter setups is the variable diopter, not the scope. The new Rapido FVD-35 is right at the limits of the very widest anamorphic adapters. What’s more, a bigger diopter setup to squeeze out those last few distorted degrees of angle-of-view would be laughably gigantic. The FVD-35 is 134mm in diameter. That means it already sits only 2cm above a 15mm LWS rod setup, so unless you want to go full 19mm studio rods and use 6.5X6.5 mattebox for filtration, the FVD-35 will do “just fine.” Why, then, would anyone bother to Frankenscope? Well, because lenses are so much more than the numbers. Even by the numbers, you might prefer a novel squeeze ratio. You might want beautiful mixed gold and teal flares. You might want the thick, lush flares from an old scope with some added sharpness and contrast from one more modern. You might want a unique look, that’s all your own, completely custom. Besides that, the experimentation is really fun! A quick look at remotely reasonable anamorphic offerings reveals: Xelmus has a 40mm and Atlas has a 32mm, both of which only cover a standard 35mm open gate. The FVD-35 is right in this ballpark in any case. Unless you find an exceptionally rare 22mm LOMO, or rent some top shelf glass, you’re not going to go wider... never mind that depth of field becomes so deep when this wide that the differences between spherical and anamorphic are difficult for most people to differentiate. As someone who hacked scopes apart to try and go wider, here’s my conclusion: do what works for you, but you’re gonna need a big variable diopter, because that’s the bottleneck. After that, find your wide scope of choice, Frankensteined or stock, it’s just preference. I had some awesome results from very humbly priced pairings. I bought a half dozen or so scopes off eBay, and did my level best to spend $100 or less on each. A great trick is taking big/long adapters meant for 35mm projection, and pairing their front element groups with rears from shorter 16mm projection scopes. As a general rule, this seems to significantly shorten the scope’s length, and reduces the squeeze factor. There are a plethora of theoretical 1.8X, 1.75X, 1.5X, and 1.33X custom scopes out there for anyone with the willpower and funding to go on a mix and match bonanza.

HAH good luck. Everything these days is “Full Frame,” except it’s not... because they always choke the high quality modes to 16:9, wasting precious sensor height.

Kodak Atlanta are the lab I’ll use if I have a choice, yeah. This had to be developed and scanned by Pro8mm at the time, KFLATL were closed down because of COVID restrictions. They did a good job, but Kodak’s scans are just a hair more crisp.

No open gate??

Taking lens was Navitron 25mm f0.95, mostly around f2-2.8. I’ll preach 1.75X on 16mm until the day I die. The camera-to-dollar ratio on regular-16 versus super-16 bodies is kinda ridiculous. I just bought the absolute top quality 1.75X adapter (Kowa Inflight), and I have a crystal sync sound camera with coaxial mags and a color video tap... still all for cheaper than a S16 SR-2. That’s the REAL beauty of film. There’s no sensor difference between bodies, it’s all in the film stock. Would I absolutely love a 416, an SR-3 Highspeed, or even an XTR Prod? Absolutely and maybe some day. But if I don’t tell you what camera I shot on, can you even tell? Not really. There’s a lot of great glass out there too for cheaper simply because it’s not a PL mount body. I can get some classic Cooke and Angenieux glass in Eclair’s CA-1 mount or even in Arri STD. And C-Mount? Perfect for 16mm and very adaptable.

Had some footage left in a mag from another project, so I walked down to the river behind my house and used it up:

If I were to concept a camera, here’s where it would sit: 1. A symmetrical sensor unit, something like a cross between ZCam and Sigma FP 2. A first-party detachable battery grip that’s essentially all the right-hand grip stuff usually built into DSLR/Mirrorless bodies (D-pad, scroll wheels, fn buttons, REC, etc.) The battery grip can be detached and mounted elsewhere via a cable. 3. A first-party detachable rear touch screen. Simple single-hinge 180 degrees towards the top of the camera with auto image flip. The screen can be detached and mounted elsewhere via a cable. 4. Detaching the screen reveals a V-Mount plate. 5. Dual pixel AF on sensor, with a FIZ output port on the front of the camera body, so that the camera AF can drive rail mounted focus/iris/zoom motors on any manual lens. 6. Electronic ND. 7. True full frame sensor with open gate compressed RAW internal recording up to 30fps. 8. Open gate all-I-frame LOG mode up to 60fps. 9. Open gate compressed LOG up to 120fps. 10. Dual native ISO. 11. ~5K/6K. 12. Positive Lock L-Mount or comparable large diameter rigid short FFD mount. 13. XLR Audio V-Mount stackable module with two inputs that are 32bit float capable. Bonus if it’s a SoundDevices MixPre licensed unit. This unit can provide pass-through for the rear screen or a V-Mount battery. 14. An EVF optical accessory for the detachable screen. 15. A V-Mount Stackable wireless module which supports low latency HD monitoring, multi-device (latency) Wi-Fi smartphone monitoring, camera control, and FIZ control. 16. RAW can be over USB-C to SSD, but third parties will just make dual-SSD holders that stack in the pass-through V-Mount stack, so it almost may as well be internal. 17. I’m one of those weirdos who would rather have a hard mounted sensor instead of IBIS, so... yeah. The core body kit is just brick+grip+monitor. Basically a slightly bulked Sigma FP until you break it apart. You add the stackables as needed, and bank somewhat on 3rd parties to make ergonomic solutions for grip/monitor relocation, rails, boosters, shoulder pads, FIZ motors, etc.

The complete non-starter issue for me on all these external RAW updates over HDMI is the fact that it’s always C4K or 16:9. What’s the heckin point of a “medium format” or “full frame” RAW camera if I can’t even use the FULL frame? #anamorphicproblems Seriously though, I want to use the full sensor height. Anything else is just infuriating. I assume it’s some limitation of the HDMI hardware, either the camera’s output, the signal format, or the Atmos’ input, but that doesn’t make it less frustrating. When there’s a camera that can shoot RAW and be speedboosted into IMAX 15/70 territory, I’ll be there with bells on. Until then, my GH5S and Blackmagic Pocket 4K will tide me over just fine.

Honestly, let’s not kid ourselves. Panasonic has plenty of good cameras. I don’t give a crap if they make a few cheap duds here and there. The market will teach them right from wrong. But their true Achilles Heel is their autofocus, and at a certain point, that deficiency is going to be egregiously impossible to ignore. I hope they ditch Apple’s ProRes Raw and/or add Blackmagic Raw. DaVinci has my heart and soul, and FCPX screwed me enough times that I’m not going back down that road. If they create their own Raw, that just crowds the market.

@Seb Fargeswhat you selling?

We’re not worthy!

No biggie! The Kipon is definitely an awesome piece of kit! When it comes to putting extra glass behind already top-notch lenses, it seems only appropriate to go with the highest quality option, which is undeniably still Metabones... even considering how much better the offerings of other booster brands have gotten. Anyone not looking to chase the LF look obsessively is almost certainly better served by a fast native lens in whichever format they’re using.

Yes, I’m aware of the Kipon! I’ll be holding out a while longer to see if Metabones offers a comparable product. From the limited review knowledge out there, the Kipon is very good but not without distortion. I also have extreme respect for Metabones’ locking mount variants. It doesn’t matter how good your optics are if the adapter wiggles, and a locking mount aim the adapter is the only way to guarantee full stability.

L-Mount crop-fixing booster? Yeah I think they’re right to skip that particular one. However.... L-Mount medium format booster? Now there’s a different story. A Netflix-approved mirrorless camera that bites at the heels of IMAX 15/70 imaging size? Yes please and thank-you! In the words of Futurama’s Bender, “I’ll shoot my own Dunkirk, with blackjack and hookers!”

Man, yeah. Lots of complex emotion on this for me over the last week. I’m a white Minnesotan, working 6 days a week even during COVID-19... I thought about photographing/video documenting, and I agree it is incredibly important work and that things must be seen. But my heart is broken. Just straight ripped apart. I just got home from two days In Minneapolis/St. Paul, and I’m glad I didn’t bring a camera, and I left my phone in my bag. There’s a LOT of I guess I’d call it “social justice tourism” going on, and that just sits uneasy with me. Like, people were posing with their friends and signs for selfies, and then leaving the sit-in at the capitol before it was done... even more selfies with the George Floyd mural at Cup Foods. Don’t get me wrong, it is good that those people are at least engaging on some level, but social media is already drowning in this stuff at the moment, that isn’t necessarily an efficient vehicle for change. I don’t need pictures to communicate what I’ve seen with my own eyes. I saw the entire capitol lawn filled to bursting with beautiful peaceful people all afternoon, championing full institutional overhaul of the oppressive system... which by the way was organized and led by FREAKING HIGHSCHOOL STUDENTS, who were all more articulate than yours truly. I worked alongside hundreds of my fellow Minnesotans ALL DAY yesterday as we packed food and household supplies for our neighbors in need. We were tired. We were drenched in sweat. It was beautiful. Emotions, events, words and actions are in the highest contrast in this moment. Sometimes you’ve gotta leave the camera behind and commit your full self to being present. And I must say this: while the news has been reporting both the peaceful protests and the unrest, the time devoted to each is woefully disproportionate to the time Minnesotans have been devoting to each. Yes there has been some destruction and some violence. But there is an immeasurably larger effort of peaceful demand for justice. Heres the only picture from today, snapped by a construction worker on an adjacent building and texted to one of the church food drive organizers. All of those bags of groceries were gone within half an hour. The need is real, but Minnesotans are rising to the occasion, government or no government.

From what I’ve seen of the Aivascope 1.75X out there, almost all the footage seems to be from the original version, and I will say although I never used that version, this MKII footage looks quite a bit cleaner. It appears at the very least that the coatings were changed to something with better performance. I suspect also either better QC, more precision in the housing, or both. I will be shooting an in-depth review at some point, but all of my cameras are currently rented out indefinitely for one of my regular client’s live-streaming needs until virus restrictions change, which will be who knows when. I don’t honestly know what it would cover FOV-wise in such a large sensor. On my BMPCC4K, it definitely clears 24mm, which is on par with the Kowa, and my Kowa won’t even manage that unless I use a massive variable diopter like the FVD-35. If I had a 22mm, I suspect it would cover with that as well, but some of that incremental focal length minutia gets deceptive with anamorphic adapters. There might be a taking lens that works well with it on medium format, but the diameter of the rear glass will be restrictive. There is certainly some measure of maths that can be done to get an idea of where to start, but in my experience, you can crunch numbers on crop factors, sensor sizes, equivalencies, aspect ratios, etc. backwards and forwards... at the end of the day, you need glass and camera in hand to test the setup for compatibility. It is likely that in theory, it works at or just eider than “normal” focal length (50mm FF equiv.,) regardless of the format. Outside of a handful of the highly sought after lenses, this is as wide as it gets for adapters 1.5X and above. The vast majority (Sankor, 16-D, Schneider, Moller, etc.) start at the long end, 58-85mm. The Aivascope 1.75X is, however, adequately sized to cover almost any lens I would get for my 16mm camera. I just need focus marks added to the Focuser-8 so I can use tape and nail proper focus reliably.

Andrew... get your hands on an Aivascope 1.75X MK2 (or wait for the MK3), it’s a freaking BEAST. I wouldn’t say it kicks my tunes Kowa 16-H straight in the crotch, but it sure as heck kicks it in the shins a bit. I got mine with a single focus on front for under US$800, after seeing the image it feels like highway robbery. It’s as wide as my Kowa. Anyone who’s been around the anamorphic block for a decade or so will grasp the weight of that statement.

I have to say, so far my Aivascope 1.75X MKII/Focuser-8 combo is performing in a manner that has me considering it as being criminally underrated. I know it’s not an Iscorama “clone” AFAIK, but their 1.5X I would assume is just as good as their other lens. I’m grabbing the Aivascope instead of my Kowa 16-H these days, and that’s saying something. Im laying low for a couple more years. Vazen is on the verge of greatness... the 40mm was a good foray, but the revised focus method in the 28mm is on par with other anamorphics that have significantly higher price tags. If they can do a S35 line of lenses with those mechanics, it will be tough to say no. They do need to take Andrew’s advice on coatings though. Their lenses render a bit modern to my eyes. I think it’s a coating/color/contrast issue. The optical rendering (bokeh etc) is very pleasing.

For anyone curious, here’s an update: Aivascope 1.75X MKII on 16mm. Make sure your variable diopter has focus marks, or you’ll end up with some blurry shots like I did 😬

Thanks!

Here’s my latest anamorphic adventure! Pro-tip for anyone who is considering an anamorphic rig on film: make sure your variable diopter has focus marks! Everything looked focused in the viewfinder, but it definitely wasn’t. Marks and a tape measure are your best friends.

I just want a board sensor that covers 16mm and has dual pixel AF so I can hack my 16mm camera apart and replace the ground glass with a CMOS and have reliable AF on a film camera.

Bummer that there’s no full sensor height Anamorphic mode. Looks like even the “full” frame mode isn’t FULL frame.