Sean Cunningham

  LOL, you obviously haven't read the actual tests being done (click the link above).  Resolution with the same lens on the adapted NEX is measurably higher than a 5DmkII in the center and averaged over the entire lens, only dipping slightly in the corners.  Right there, sharper than still the best value in full-frame motion picture shooting, so good still that Canon had to take it off the market to make their newer, more expensive cameras more attractive to Canon buyers.   Also, you haven't read how Slumdog Millionaire was shot with those cameras either.    Please, continue to punt though.

  The M4/3 version is going to perform even better, based on their white paper and existing tests with functional prototypes.

@lafilm   Barrel distortion is a function of the lens.  If you see it with this adapter it would show up on a FF camera.  Next.  (forgetting the fact that strict prohibition of barrel distortion of any magnitude is kinda silly outside stodgy industrials and ENG stuff that tends to be flavorless in every way anyhow...).  Oh, and your "not as sharp" comment is 100% incorrect.   Your second comment makes no sense at all.   Wide options exist for M4/3 and BMCC type films.  I seem to remember wide shots in Slumdog Millionaire.  Oh look, it's even smaller than the BMCC.  Oh look, it won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.  Who'dathunkit?  Not folks that handicap based on a spec list and their preconceived notions instead of the observation of reality and results.

  Go start talking about camera and lighting in a discussion on an actor board and see how fast you're shown the door for being off-topic and unwelcome.  You do it thrice here with your tangent about some specialized lens, not to mention ADR, that has nothing to do with anything going on here and/or irrespective of the reality of this project and where it is in the process of completion (ie. not completed).  Trying to force a confluence of other subjects is both presumptuous and selfish.  This is a shooter's board for technical discussions.   This is an image-centric article about an anamorphic film in post-production.  Maybe you should start a blog or something, maybe, and get this stuff off your chest in a more appropriate venue?   Anyway, on topic, so the interface between lens and camera wasn't tested is what you're saying.   You're taking it on faith that it's both free of human error (pretty unique feat, regardless of pedigree) and also manufactured with the forethought that it just might be used with very, very rare anamorphic lenses that functionally depend upon a correct and precise up-vector, ignoring the skew in the raw imagery that had to come from somewhere other than the camera (a reasonable assumption, though it should also be eliminated from causation)?     Forgive me from being too analytical but solving these kinds of problems based on the number of places error can be introduced (here we have two cameras, two adapters and multiple lenses, nominally) is just kinda what I do and I have a hard time turning it off.  I come from a background where if I didn't figure out the problem it was likely never going to be fixed.  There aren't that many factors here so isolating the problem is really easily and quickly done, but to do it you have to get over any notion that any one of the pieces involved could not possibly be behaving in a way that's inconsistent with your expectations.   "Professional" equipment is as likely, if not more likely (by virtue of being one-off or low volume) to malfunction or have some kind of issue.  You quickly learn this the more you're exposed to it.   edit: Regardless of all that, I do applaud any filmmaker who goes for it.  I don't think even close to half of them lucky enough to start their film, as an independent, see it through to getting it in-the-can.  Fewer still begin post production and even fewer still make it through editorial to arrive at a completed film.  Keep at it.  Every step is a reward in and of itself and fuel to keep pushing forward.

http://vimeo.com/57817375   (password: baller)   ...I put the password on it so that the seriously, seriously boring footage wouldn't be cluttering up my vimeo.  It's just that I was surprised that a stop this big worked at all with the Century Optics adapter.

  Uh, no, this was being shot to a $60,000-80,000 Accom or Abekas digital disk recorder before being put to uncompressed digital tape for network broadcast.  DVDs were almost ten years away from existing at the consumer level.  It has everything to do with transcoding between YUV and RGB at 8bits.  You don't know what you're talking about here.

Oh, not like the square front LOMOs.  It's a weird thing then.  I'd still check the interface between OCT and MFT, since your checking with a projector has nothing to do with how well this piece works in the mix.  These wouldn't necessarily be manufactured or engineered with anamorphic tolerances in mind.

  Without applying some kind of chroma filtering (some codecs do this, or have options to) you will retain banding in a 32bit workflow if it exists in the original footage.  32bit isn't going to create transitional data where there was none (not without intentionally applying another process expressly to do so, or by some byproduct of that process).  If the 8bit source bands a first step transcode to 32bit will band unless it's filtered or dithered.  Make sure you're also not introducing it with some discrepancy in your color management, just as a "crazy check".   8bit 4:4:4 can band, and does band, given the right material.  That's why all the better 601 gear quickly had to step it up to 10bits by at least the early 1990s at the latest.  Even with only 720x480 pixels you couldn't rely on 8bit uncompressed to not band, especially when transcoding.     The fellows at Amblin found this out the hard way when they were doing the FX for the pilot episode of SeaQuest DSV and had to put in an 11th Hour call to the image format experts at ASDG who wrote them special drivers for their digital disc recorders to filter the incoming chroma, smoothing out the big, nasty bands that all of a sudden showed up in all of their foggy, blue underwater shots.

  By this time I was already frustrated with you.  You want reality, everything after the first paragraph in your first response to this thread was bullshit and everything I've written after it was a response to said bullshit.  Now, if English is a second language or something then I'll say, "sorry, I'm being too hard on you, you're handicapped from making a good point here."     Otherwise, you failed to address the actual query of the original author so that you could go on some kind of rant, either original and from your own head or cobbled together from other stuff you read on the internet somewhere (which may have also been a bloated, non-answer to someone's specific topic), because you wanted to participate more than you could actually contribute.   There.  Face your realities.  Or would you like me to give you line item "WTF are you talking about?" replies to your first post here?  I was going to do that but then thought it might come off rude so I just offered a gentle nudge to stay on topic instead.  My mistake.  There's a reality for me.

  Actually no, I answered his question and offered "wisdom" to you but you proved your own point why that's often a waste of time.

...meh, no delete.

  Out of curiosity, did they use your PL-to-M4/3 adapter and camera or did they test the LOMO+taking lens with their own equipment?

He was asking about whether or not the guide was worth it and voiced a specific concern that was giving him pause.  You should have stopped at "yes", IMO, the rest was off-point and kinda all over the place, not particularly helpful.   Aside from a handful of folks on this forum the audience is mostly folks with an expensive hobby.

  You kinda lost it there, in the context of your being specific to DIY, indie, etc.  If you're waiting to have distribution "taken care of" then that means 99.999% of the time you aren't going to be making your movie.  As an independent you do everything you can to make the movie.  Distribution isn't a guarantee and it's a job comparably as difficult (if not more so) than shooting a film, which isn't even most of the work involved in arriving at a completed picture.   Distribution and even comments regarding script and story should largely be left out of technical discussions specific to the craft of lensing an image and equipment.  They are their own thing.  Trying to impose some kind of confluence does more damage than good, usually, to the S/N ratio of forums such as this.

  I've noticed this skew in other LOMO footage posted online.  Could be some misalignment in the adapter if there's no possibility of misalignment between LOMO and taking lens.  I've got cheaper Nikon-F to M 4/3 adapters and one of the areas where they skimped on craftsmanship was in assuring that the adapter itself was true once attached to the camera.  In this case it's about a degree, if that, off, making the lens support option practically useless because it isn't perpendicular once attached.     It's not hard to imagine something similar is at fault here, somewhere in the collection of strangers between the LOMO itself and the camera.

The grain tool in AfterEffects is quite good. Loads of options so it can be intimidating if you're looking for something with just a dial or two but you have complete control. It's worth finding a setting you like and running out an uncompressed clip of the grain applied to either a black or 50% gray solid though and mixing this over your footage (repeating the clip as needed) since it's on the slow side. You might google for a grain clip someone else has made and posted somewhere.

I think I know what you're referring to.  That 2.66:1 example image from Blade Runner, when this isn't an aspect ratio appropriate for any presentation of the film, amiright?  I'm pretty sure Andrew just cropped a screen grab to illustrate this unusual, but still pleasing, aspect ratio that you get simply as a mechanical result of combining the 1.5x options out there with the fact of our current 16:9 taking limitation.     In fact the externally seen picture (external to the guide, seen elsewhere on the site) I'm referencing is taken from the section of the guide that does this, placed in between an example showing the mechanical result of combining a 2x lens with 16:9 (3.55:1) and one of the 1.33x lenses and 16:9, which only coincidently (and therefore lucky for us) produces the most common aspect ratio of ~2.35:1    Using the Blade Runner imagery to illustrate these examples, rather than something unfamiliar from someone's VIMEO test footage, was an author's choice to make the math more relatable.  At least that's what I took from it.     Regardless, I find myself referring back to both of his guides all the time.  In the case of the anamorphic guide it's worth it just for the research he's already done on virtually all of the types of lenses that pop up on ebay, each with their own personalities.  This guide could potentially save someone thousands of dollars.  However truthful the sellers might be this guide allows a potential buyer to skip the costly experimentation and potential disillusionment or disappointment.

I was curious about this myself.  Turns out there are multiple manufacturers of the Helios 44, each with their own slight differences.  If I remember correct, some have six blades while others have eight, or more.  There are also some (newer) with more modern, mulit-coatings.  Based on this I determined that if/when I purchased one it would be one of the first gen or a 44-2 and I wasn't really interested in any of the higher revisions besides maybe the 44-3.

M4/3, at least the GH2, is going to be bigger than S35.  It's going to be closer to the FOV you get with a 1DC shooting 4K, almost exactly like a RED Epic shooting 5K, which is between full-on, full-frame and S35.   More excited yet?

  I was thinking about this as well, either a buyout then bury or someone burying them in a lawsuit either over patent or some other anti-competition nonsense.  It makes me want to get ahold of one of the first M4/3 models released, regardless of lens version, if Nikkor isn't one of the first, just in case the ninja lawyers get sent in since they won't be able to recall stock that's already shipped.   Anyone remember the Andromeda system?  4:4:4 uncompressed straight out a USB2.0 port on a DVX100 with pixel-shift upscale to HD? Yeah, that got disappeared many, many moons ago.

  They did a 2K IP.  They had said specialist.   I do agree that scanning a print or dup-negative would lend the film an extra level of organic credibility though.

  If they use digital source material for the the DVD/BD it will be from the 2K IP (see: Master Format) but it's surprising how many films that originate digitally have still gone through the process of getting to home video via a film source.  Believe it or not it was standard operating procedure over at Disney Home Video that they scan a print of the early Pixar movies.     A staff of folks would then "dust bust" and enhance the resulting scan before then mastering to dvid just like they'd been doing with their own films, even though Disney had switched to a digital ink-n-paint system at least going back to Rescuers Down Under.  They had to be told by an external consultant that this methodology was fucking stupid *.     * - this was during the bad period for Disney where Eisner was running the company into the ground, almost to the point of being bankrupt and went so far as to mothball Feature Animation, fire Roy Disney and sell off most of the animation equipment that had been at the company for decades.   

  GH2 will be getting the same field of view as the 1DC shooting in 4K mode.  That's very exciting.   Where I'm excited for s35 stuff, like the bigger dog cameras, is it means we'll potentially be seeing a return of an aesthetic that doesn't exist in current motion pictures, in the theater.  Outside the occasional indie shot on a 5D, like Rubber perhaps, the cool, small-format, experimental stuff is going to be limited mostly to online and festival venues.     Applying this technology to the likes of a Genesis or Alexa or RED means we could see a new era of epic aesthetics show up in the next mega-million tent pole picture (that odds are would have been made in pedantic S35 spherical otherwise, unless it was from one of the few filmmakers still out there with enough interest and enough pull to insist on anamorphic).     There's only a few directors, like Nolan or PT Anderson maybe, willing to dust off one of those Smart Car sized large format film cameras to shoot in 65mm or 8-perf 35mm.  Something like this means digital for big budgets could finally aspire to something beyond just mimicking or replacing the most generic, least quality 35mm format that's been employed for major motion pictures since the introduction of color nearly, and without major new investment either.  Everybody wins.

  Exactly.  People regularly spend $1000 or more on a single lens that they might use half or a third of the time they shoot, if not less.  Forget what anamorphic enthusiasts shell out for their passions.  $400 or $600 or $700 for something like this, even if this is only a hobby?  Comparatively speaking they're giving us all a gift pricing specialized optics like this.     Elsewhere people are defending a major corporation's justifiable douchebaggery in charging $6K for tweaks to a second model in a single product development.  Meh, the internet.

3D BD numbers are likely misleading too.  I have neither a 3D capable BD player or TV but I have at least one or two 3D BD movies simply because that's what was there, or there was some extra (besides the 3D) that was offered on that version of the release and not the regular BD.  Packaging other extras is, if you want to look at disc marketing in a cynical way, a means to manipulate the up-sell and pad the numbers so that they look more statistically relevant than they might actually be.   I've never seen a 3D BD in action anywhere but a retail outlet and can't name a single person that I know with a 3D BD setup in their home.      edit: also, the sales figures they're keeping track of aren't sales to individuals but sales to the distribution channels.  So, for instance, Sony knows how many of a title they've sold to resellers, which means they count discs that are still un-sold to customers, sitting on shelves, which might one day end up in the $6 clearance bin with twenty other copies at a single store.  These will still be considered "sold".