Sean Cunningham

I can't help but ask myself two questions after seeing the BMPC/Epic video: 1) why was all the BMD footage Prores (though it held up)? and 2) I wonder how much better the RED would have looked if it were linearized through ACES and had the LOG look washed out of it.

You make it sound like Resolve is arbitrary. It's not. You have to have an appropriate GPU. It's not a hard spec to meet if you're not using a laptop or certain Macs that don't give you the option of choosing your GPU.

Yeah, I wouldn't be at all interested in any 1:1 crop mode.

Hmmm, interesting. Well, I really like the gentle distortion I get with my 24mm when shooting anamorphic. I think it tends to be a little more pronounced than when I shoot with my Lumix lens at wider focals because of the corrections happening there.

Hey, since you're also a fan of really wide where do you stand on distortion? Do enjoy bow? I guess you would have to at least to a certain extent but I know my buddy has this crazy weird ultra-wide rectilinear lens he sometimes shoots on with is 1D. I think it looks too strange, personally, when the camera moves or especially when it tilts but he's a stills photographer and likes it for some of his landscape photography.

Thanks!

Folks are all likely using the same LUTs being passed around so that likely contributes to seeing the same bias and error in a lot of footage. I would be curious to see these cameras graded through an ACES color pipeline rather than subjective stabs at just trying to achieve a decent, baseline log-to-lin.

Mmm, sorta, I'm mostly just wondering if you get to use the full 24mm sensor height when defining a non-16:9 aspect ratio. I don't have access to a Canon camera at the moment to satisfy my curiosity. I went looking up the "crop mode" once and the online ML docs weren't entirely clear to me about how these various resolutions and aspect ratios worked because I just haven't had hands on. I was doing lens equivalencies but, for anamorphic, I think it's more important to use the vertical size. I wasn't really sure for the different options on the 5D what that measurement would be.

When you are shooting with ML and defining a 4:3 aspect ratio are you using the same height as normal 16:9 shooting or does this force you into a center-cut crop mode?

Yeah, it pretty much ends up being a wash, horizontal-FOV wise, between larger and smaller sensors with these adapters at the wide end. You can get maybe a few mm wider with a GH2/GH3 but you would be hard pressed to really tell in the footage. Still, you have to consider this is, with a 1.33x adapter, close to the same FOV you get from a 30mm Panavision lens which isn't as wide as they go but it's pretty wide. The thing that needs to be confirmed by other sources, and possibly tested at multiple distances throughout the focus range, is whether the Letus is actually 1.33x or not. A few folks have reported an effective ratio of more like 1.21:1 which would have an impact on our shared affinity for wider angles.

That's an interesting politically correct theory. I guess until more countries are forced to run dash cams all the time it can't be proven or disproven.

No no, these are Russians. Driving is so bad/crazy/dangerous virtually everyone over there has to drive with dash cameras which means you could likely spend hours watching Russian crash videos, plus all the other crazy phenomenon all those cameras catch. I was responding to JackHorror above and his "crazy Russians." Just driving to "grandma's house" in Russia seems like a death defying feat, though all the video evidence seems to also imply you cannot kill a Russian with an automobile. LOL, your post is maybe a little bit racist though :)

I'm guessing that the simple act of driving to visit grandma over there breeds a new level of fearlessness into them, hah-hah.

I don't know. I don't think Kubrick's weighted down, controlled style must be used for anamorphic (which he only shot in once I believe). I don't think the content of either film would have been served had they been so studied and imposing. For something like Django, yeah. Serious subject matter should dictate a serious, studied style not necessarily the lenses. Anamorphic can be fun too. Scott Pilgrim, like that director's other films, has fun with the format. Even though Panavision had their really lightweight series for steadicam work I think much of the shooting style of classic anamorphic films is simply a matter of physics. The cameras were big and heavy and so were most of the lenses but producers and studios dictated stops that required massive amounts of lights for their slow stocks (DePalma's Blow Out was shot on sub-200ASA stocks!). A lot more than artistic preference went into the overall feel of a production back then because they simply couldn't do a film like today, even using the same lenses. All the equipment, all the lights they had to have, everything about the process was slow and heavy and controlled and studied. Nowadays you have filmmakers using these classic lenses that supposedly weren't any good until being stopped way down only they're using them wide open, because they have a bit more freedom from the executives that would complain too much of the frame wasn't in focus (or that films like The Godfather were too dark).

Yeah, once you go sufficiently stopped down you get fewer cues that funky optics are involved, in the sense of a still image. I still think you get a different sense of perspective and spatial relationships between objects that's different than that of a spherical lens though, revealed through Z-axis movement. I think the cues end up "feeling" different even if you were to match horizontal FOV with an equivalent spherical lens. I haven't tested this theory out though. Yet. I think to do it right you would have to use something like a 5D with spherical lens compared to a smaller format camera with an anamorphic lens, matching FOV and comparing both the still composition as well as depth cues from the camera dollying forward. But, yeah, anamorphic and spherical are mixed in big motion pictures. You have a better than 50/50 chance that any film with heavy visual effects the photography containing the effects will be spherical, either shot on Super-35 or VistaVision. Most facilities don't like working with anamorphic plates when adding visual effects, unless a filmmaker mandates that no spherical photography is used even for effects plates. This goes back to Star Wars at least. One of the first things Luc Besson was convinced to do at the beginning of The Fifth Element was to shoot spherical. Unfortunately. Nowadays with disc and RAM and CPU like we have there is less of a worry because working with the higher resolution imagery isn't a big deal and you can do optics compensation for tracking. The Dark Knight Rises is another example of mixed photography, with anamorphic 35mm for most of the regular narrative parts of the film and 65mm for the big action set pieces.

Another hard drive of some sort is, unfortunately, the only reasonable sort of "backup" you can make given the size of the files these days.

I'd suggest going with the upgraded GPU because more and more any image based workflow is relying on GPU acceleration versus CPU. GPUs are so much better at floating point processing than the fastest CPUs it's not even funny.

@richg101 I think you might be onto something with your suggested era of lenses that might be a natural sort of pairing with this adapter. So far I like the look on my most used lens, my 24mm Nikkor f/2 but I was most excited to see how the adapter looked on my 50mm F.Zuiko f/1.8 because I felt so constrained by how I had to make use of it on my Century Optics adapter. I grabbed my GH2 and chased my nephew around a bit yesterday afternoon. Cats are so played out so my nieces and nephews are my go to in a pinch, hah-hah. Working at f/2.8 your arm gets a work out chasing focus at this focal on MFT but I'm really liking the results. I got several shots with extreme backlight coming in from outside and paired with the Olympus the flaring felt a bit more integral to the image than we see in some pairings. I couldn't have got the same footage with my Century Optics adapter because, to be open to f/2.8 @ 50mm, I'd have had to be stacked up on a +1 at least. Otherwise I'd be forced to an f/6 or so and while "okay" it just wouldn't have had the same feel at all. With the Anamorphot I was still able to, in this case, track with him from about 2m or so away to close which, on the Century Optics, wouldn't have been possible because of the +1 I'd have had to use to be at this stop. You can actually go "run n gun" with a 50mm at a filmic stop on the Anamorphot and then, for controlled beauty close-ups, go to the diopters for enhanced bokeh. Going by vertical FOV, the 50mm + GH2 should be roughly equivalent to 82mm on anamorphic 35mm.

Yeah, I'm not much of a fan of the Copolla version, since by this point he was already well into his decline, but it at least looks like a real movie. My favorite has always been the '79 version with Frank Langella by John Badham ;)

Andrew of SLR Magic confirmed that the Sigma 18-35mm worked with the adapter on the BMPCC (but not with a SpeedBooster). Some may work with the longer portion of the range and vignette on the wider end. Some may just be soft throughout. Andrew Reid reported that the placement of the entrance pupil in the optical design is a critical factor here. On the GH2 I can use my Lumix 14-42mm from ~25mm on up, which means I won't use it at all because I have 24mm, 25mm and 50mm primes that work much better.

If you want to see just how little even the current king-of-the-hill can guarantee a "film look" you should beg, borrow or steal Dario Argento's Dracula 3D. Whatever you do don't pay money though. It's one of the most atrocious looking films I've ever seen. I couldn't believe the credits and all the digital post firms that lay their hands on this turd. The credit list went on like you'd just witnessed a big budget Hollywood picture. Besides the effects, which make The Asylum films for SyFy look like ILM blockbusters, the cinematography and grading were often lower than pornography levels. Like early '90s, shot on BetaCam stuff. I don't understand how this could come from the same filmmaker as Deep Red, Suspiria and Phenomena. I mean, content aside, he made beautiful films that had a singular dreamlike quality to them. It was clear that at some point in the digital pipeline someone or several someones had no idea what they were doing and it was all just ruined, even though what was done on set wasn't good. All of the lighting was hard and sourcy, like they were using small cheap units too close to talent in several instances. You had weird cases of blown out faces in a nighttime exterior, etc., etc. Perhaps the DP was intimidated by a digital camera and either failed to light for film or lit in a way that they used to take for granted would look better through the magic of film. It also appeared that there was a botched log-to-lin conversion prior to grading, which might have been done in a heavy-handed, non-color managed 8bit pipeline. Oh yeah, the film was shot on an Arri Alexa to ArriRaw. When I looked up what camera could have possibly rendered such an amazingly horrible looking motion picture I was literally stunned. I really don't understand how this is even possible to do on purpose much less through possibly compounded gross incompetence by multiple crew members and post vendors. It's just baffling.

I worked many years at Digital Domain, the company that raised the bar for and set a new standard for taking film into the digital realm and then going back out to film. Not even Kodak could match the quality of our filmouts. We did so, in the beginning, with 8bits and the best digital color men in the industry. We became fairly infamous quickly, for a lot of reasons, one of which being a screening where a collection of filmmakers were shown imagery containing a shot processed by us and only one among the entire audience could pick out the 8bit shot. The right 8bits looked almost indistinguishable from straight film that hadn't gone through a digital step. Besides drastically opening up the compression pipeline I think Driftwood's patches for the GH2 make their best effort looking for that "right 8bit" among the raw info coming off the sensor. It's still going to be the last 8bit compressed camera that I ever buy though.

So long as most of our cameras are locked to 16:9 shooting your higher compression anamorphics simply aren't practical and almost guarantee amateur only potential. It comes as no surprise not a single company is falling all over themselves to invest the capital and energy into developing a new 2x adapter that only a handful within a handful within a handful of people would get use out of and practically zero commercial or marketing upside. I expect that's an even smaller market than customers for low power, large diameter achromats.

Well, that's marketing. Marketing is propaganda. Americans eat up all manner of self-aggrandizing propaganda images that sell the myth of "America" that they agree with and/or have been indoctrinated to. You don't have to be tuned in on Super Bowl Sunday to see all manner of back-patting, circle jerk, rah-rah images being sold and being used to sell to Americans. When they see those techniques and coded images used to try to sell an "America" that isn't their ideal there's sometimes blow-back, as this ad proves. But the technique itself is propaganda while at the same time the essence of filmmaking.

17mm is rated as usable on S16 size sensors but the lens design itself will be a factor. There is more air between the front element of the taking lens and the rear element of the anamorphic than I expected. You might expect, based on a visual inspection, to get even wider performance than they're rating each sensor size but you really must test each lens. For instance, the Lumix 14-42mm will surprisingly vignette at wider than ~25mm on the GH2, even though 20mm is the recommended lower threshold. SLR Magic do not recommend zooms, however, and though the front element of the Lumix lens is quite small its optical design means that at each step along its range it's not as optimal for this application as a prime lens will be. When shooting anamorphic the conventional calculation of finding equivalent FOV isn't terribly meaningful unless you do the extra maths involved in the compression. With the 17.5mm Voigtlander, after compression, you would have the equivalent FOV to ~30mm focal length on a 36mm sensor if you're concerned only with horizontal FOV. I'm now starting to think that, when shooting anamorphic, it is the vertical FOV and vertical sensor size that is more important when selecting a lens for a particular task, since it is the vertical dimension that actually determines the composition of talent. Sliding them left or right to strike a Golden Section composition is more of a secondary concern.