Sean Cunningham

I've got the Nikon 24mm f/2, 35mm f/1.4 and 105mm f/2.5 and can recommend the 35mm and 105mm as I've done some 35mm print photography with them and like them. The 24mm is okay but it's pretty flavorless. I've read the 28mm is better. It's the lens I use most on my GH2 but with a Speedbooster I'm sure I'd be more likely to grab the 35mm since it's got more character. I also have a 50mm Nikkor but the iris needs servicing that it's never going to get because it's not near as good looking as my F.Zuiko 50mm in OM mount.

It was Alexa, but the low-con look is indicative of an aesthetic choice and doesn't really have anything to do with being Alexa. His other work with the same agency (which has other equally, if not more so impressive

You're terribly lucky. These focusable adapters are all rare enough that they're effectively unicorns, of course. They're not readily available, like what I was referring to before the pointless derailment discussing said unicorns, but yeah you lucky few that already own one of the good 2X adapters have far better options. Personally, the longer I go without having one the less likely I'll ever be to acquire one and seek practical alternatives. PS> that 85 1.2L is pretty amazing.

No, you're making too many apples and oranges assumptions here.

I'd just rent a cine lens. Having the cash in hand is barely even half the battle. If I was making a movie and had $5K to spend on a lens I would rent an even better lens that I had immediate access to with guaranteed quality. A new lens would change that equation. But there's a bit of a Chicken-and-Egg scenario with any new 1.5x/2x lens showing up, besides $40,000 cine lenses that you can rent.

Yes, a few lucky people with $5000 Iscorama and LOMO lenses. What is your point? Also, that'd be a 1.5x most likely though the point is the same.

Hopefully we'll see both more options for 4:3 shooting as well as new adapters that make 2X shooting more viable. We really need both for 2X at the enthusiast/prosumer level to not be pure novelty. You could, for instance, shoot that Pharell Williams "24hrs of Happy" using the SLR Magic adapter. Sure, it wouldn't be quite as impressive looking as the Panavision C-Series, but you could, in all those locations, as they made that video. But you could. You just flat couldn't with an ML-Raw 5D and any of these 2X projector door stops or the popular and available 8mm and 16mm lenses.

On Youtube versions isolating individual hours have started showing up. Pretty amazing undertaking. It's the same song looped to fill each hour but well worth checking out. Some really nice moments and a lot of photographically interesting locations.

It was shot with a rolling shutter too. Pretty, but I was a bit surprised to see that.

The flare in this video is because of the multi-element LED. The Panny would flare in the same way in this circumstance. The aesthetics of a lens flare are from at least five contributing factors: anamorphic design, anamorphic coating, taking lens design, taking lens coating and then the light source itself. No lens design in the world, or combination of lenses plus coatings could turn this LED light into a single, pretty flare.

No, genius, you're missing the point that that is a camera doing more, more work, more over-engineering, than what's going on in the BMD cameras. I'm not talking about how good it ultimately is I'm talking about what it is and what went into its manufacture FFS. It's doing more work for a lesser result, because it has to have all this other stuff that can be ignored in a narrow-focused device like the BMD cameras. That is why it's complete garbage that if Canon or any of the "majors" were to do a comparable camera it would just have to be more expensive. Strip all the junk that now doesn't have to be designed, poorly or well, all of functions that don't have to be tested, all of the extra engineering necessary to take the raw imagery off the sensor and completely ass it up into some low-bit AVCHD in realtime, take all that out and you're left with a much simpler camera doing less work. The ML-enabled raw 5D is doing less work, generating a better image, than what Canon themselves designed, intended or would really rather you be doing. Strip all that still stuff out, all that garbage AVCHD out, what you'd be left with would be a camera that might actually then be even cheaper than a BMD given the advantage of scale and manufacturing that the "majors" have. It could, they don't and the people who say they couldn't are full of it. They don't want to or don't care to. That's it. The only question then to ponder is why. It doesn't matter anymore now that there are alternatives.

And he totally missed the real point of that particular reference, but that's okay.

No argument there. It would cost twice as much and come with a shitty codec. They'd fill it up with BS and create a half dozen models with meaningless, incremental differences between them and none containing all of the features most asked for. Something like what we have. Not that it matters to anyone but I don't want them in this market. All I've ever pointed out is how effortless it would be for them to have done it if they wanted to. The BMD cameras are far simpler devices than the $300 Rebel at BestBuy that's essentially designed to be crap so that someday you'll buy one that's maybe less crap...but still crap.

I couldn't really say. I heard about it but have only so far seen the trailer. It's a "pinku" musical, in other words, a musical porno (softcore), about a woman who falls in love with a kappa which is this mythical water creature over there. Very, very Japanese. It's got some great reviews but, having seen films like Fallen Angels and In the Mood For Love, I just don't understand the why of him and this kappa movie if he wasn't there to make it beautiful.

Oh yeah, he's awesome. But check out that kappa movie sometime. I don't see him anywhere in there. It has the same non-aesthetic as so much of what's done in Japanese low budget filmmaking. My only point is it would be terribly misleading if someone were to hear what a wonderful DP he is and by chance pick that film to get a sense of his work.

I think the answer, or something close to this, is in something he says near the very end. He says the C500 had an "electric" quality. It's all about the way it responded to those lights (I dislike Sony sensors for this reason too). The Alexa, likely more than any other high end camera, delivers an image that feels more like film and more analog. For whatever reason, that "electric" or electronic, video-look of the Canon was somehow more appealing. I see what he's responding to but, like you, I wouldn't have picked anything but the Alexa either. I didn't find anything dull at all about the night driving sequences in Drive.

Well then. Isn't it just great that those people have more than enough choice already. In fact they have redundant upon redundant choices for their compromise. They should be happy and go about their business.

It's been pointed out quite a bit, not having the ability to delete files in-camera is not specific to BMD and seriously isn't a matter of "figuring it out".

They're only low volume because they're being produced by a small company. Given that they can't make them faster than they can sell them it stands to reason the larger companies could beat BMD at their own game because scale is on their side. Your naysaying doesn't make any sense. Your argument also ignores the fact that all of the majors are selling cameras purposely retarded from doing what BMD cameras are doing. Every DSLR is a raw camera internally. It's more engineering, more complexity and more work added on top to arrive at shitty compressed footage, not less. For reasons ranging from apathy to protectionism they aren't doing what BMD is doing and they're doing more work and spending more per camera to NOT answer that segment of the market.

Works for the Panavision C-Series, which has been used quite beautifully in every single genre of film. Good choice.

Has anyone shot a feature on a ML 5DmkIII? BMPCC is even newer. If this trailer just came out back up to six months ago as a conservative guess for when they rolled on first shot, but this is a film already in theaters so conservatively you're looking at maybe a year ago, and that would be really fast. Folks who haven't ever made a feature can offer all sorts of Monday Morning Quarterback suggestions. He might have just used the best camera he had access to. The MKIII makes some sense if you already own it, not really as a new purchase decision in light of renting other equipment (then or now) or getting a great result out of a camera you might already own, or might get free. $3-5K can pay for catering. Nobody here knows the circumstances. At a time when he could shoot on anything Soderberg chose to shoot a feature on an XL-1S when it wasn't even close to being the best or state-of-the-art for DV cameras at the time. He had his reasons. And even when he goes with an expensive, high-quality camera, on his own (The Girlfriend Experience) the result is quite raw and un-finished looking and that's his choice for that project. Odds are ML-RAW wasn't available in this case (if this is recent enough for that then it begs the question: why Sedna?) and, still, I come up with nothing but some shorts being done that way when I google. This could be a pre-final trailer also. I couldn't actually see much evidence it was graded at all. Even though it's on a site taking tickets it could very well be an early trailer, especially dealing with small sales companies. Smaller outfits in general simply aren't always that great about getting the best or most current materials out there, or going back to re-conform an earlier trailer with final materials. Looks fairly raw (in the totally un-cc'd sense) to me and as such the lesser looking individual shots could have been improved substantially in grading. But maybe this was just a purist, wham-bam, no post, warts and all "Dogme" style production where they weren't going to sweat the aesthetics. Maybe the DP actually was sub-par but try and reconcile the fact that Underwater Love was shot by the same man who does Wong Kar Wai's sublimely beautiful films.

It's like all you need anymore is a hook or chorus and don't even have to sweat the rest of a song...it's the same thing for four minutes. Oh well. The visuals are compelling enough that the "song" didn't annoy me too much until I thought about what was actually there, and wasn't there.

The dedicated website wasn't functional when I was trying it out but as near as I can figure it lets you, possibly from a clock interface or with some sort of reference, let you see longer segments that were eventually edited into this, described here. I'm not really a fan of this music but I like how simple the concept was and what went into its execution. Plus, what's not to like looking at footage from what's, for a lot of folks, the gold standard for anamorphics (regardless of soft edges and aberrations).

Shot on Alexa with 50mm Panavision C-Series @ stops between 1.4-2.8 with almost no second takes, so some of this is focus-pulling from the gods.

  Yeah, the plastic casing is a drag.  I've never tried to disassemble a lens before though.  Looking at my older, all-metal lenses, mostly Nikkors and Olympus, they look held together by magic to me in any case.  I was, I guess wrongly, assuming they all came apart rather easy if you had the right "key" or some other mechanism.     I love your suggestion for a deeper power speed booster.