Tito Ferradans

I like the video. I was paying attention to their edits more than the lens though. hahaha. I think they did a good job of explaining what it is and what it does. Some small misconceptions here and there, but nothing terrible! hahaha As for the crop factor, it is a bit confusing. The BMPCC4k has a crop of 1.9x, so I guess what they were talking about is that an APS-C crop on top of their crop makes it 1.25x more intense. That makes no sense. It's just confusing math. If you're unsure about coverage, my video has the coverage in FF and you can get any conclusions from there. ?

I waste no time! hahaha. Mine is the final version. Bokeh depends a lot on the focused distance, smoother the further away you focus and really cat-eyed on the sides when at min focus. There's a sweetspot somewhere in the middle. As for flare, many things can be influencing your perceived difference, from white balance to color correction. What @kye said. Pushing the hues all the way around is pretty extreme and bound to give you poor results. You can still try it. hahaha You're welcome!

@Rudolf I appreciate your points and the way you laid them out. Indeed Isco has the longest track record and it was never cheap. My biggest point for Sirui is that they made it in a way that anyone can just pick one up and start shooting. There's not much of a learning curve as there is with adapters, and that's good for us because it pushes everyone forward. We might (hope to) see something that bests Isco some day. The Aivascope 2 did a pretty decent job, for example. ?

Wow, too many things to address. This forum is getting fun again! Thank you so much for all the input and keeping the argument civil (we have all seen how these conversations can go). I can't disagree with you on everything. If you're here on EOSHD and you have an opinion, you're not a vanilla shooter. ? After too many years of shooting with adapters, what I look for in a lens is not really the end result but a framework that supports improvement. The Sirui has it (so does the Iscorama). Last night I slapped in an oval insert at the aperture and made bokeh 2x. It got a lot better. Then threw in some focus and iris gears just for the fun of it and some filtration. The image is on the sharp side, so I mounted a vari-nd (since I don't want the ovals to change with the aperture) and a BPM 1/4. Things got more interesting when I put on a 0.8x wide angle adapter, which works great and degrades sharpness a bit more. The image is looking a lot more organic and that's what I wanna show on my next video. Now to beat down the Iscorama a little bit more, 1.5x is not that much squeeze either for bokeh, plus minimum focus at 2m and rotating front/extending body make life a lot harder. It's not a perfect lens from the start. The pre-36 also has that weird box-shaped flare. Nonetheless we have solutions for most of these problems. The Maxiscope/Proxiscope addresses minimum focus and focus gears, plus mounting to rails to speed up lens changes, the newest Van Diemen rehousing fixes the rotating front and the long focus throw, another mod fixes the box flares. But still, paying $2k (cheap!) for it only puts you at the bottom of a hill to climb and make it "perfect" (lots of airquotes here). It also only goes as wide as 40mm on FF and no one fixed that one yet. hehe I agree with this too. I'm drafting a new series of videos for next year, focused more on the anamorphic feel than the gear itself and the cornerstone aspect of it is that by embracing scope we're embracing artifacts and losses in IQ. That's what we want. Fortunately, if a lens is sharp there are plenty of tools to unsharpen it. The other way around is a bit trickier. You can always blur a focused shot, but you can't recover one that was shot out of focus. ? Bringing this lens to the indie people is what makes the difference. Anamorphic has always been the snob aspect of cinematography and I strongly disagree with "this is expensive to keep the masses out". That's the core thought that got us in bad shape about... everything in history. As for preferences, we shouldn't dismiss someone else's style just because it's not what we are trying to do. (Unless that person is the owner of The Anamorphic Store. In that case, dismiss them immediately. Ripoff) This is EXACTLY my point in this whole thing. Some people might not like it (I still don't like Blackmagic Cameras very much), but it's important to acknowledge their importance in the grand scheme of things. This lens is an evolution of a movement that I'd say SLR Magic started, by manufacturing new, cheap anamorphics. That improved with the GH4's anamorphic mode and it took a sharp turn up when Atlas came into the game. Vazen is also part of it, and Sirui brings this into the hands of people who couldn't afford any of the previous options. Competition is the only way to make anamorphic cheap and I'm super glad to see it happening. I hope we soon see other focal lengths or other brands jumping onto this train.

That was shot here in Vancouver, yesterday as a matter of fact. hahahha! Those two are Brazilians and the girl in pink is my girlfriend. ? I got mine in e-mount because I didn't want the review to be too different from everything that came before. Full frame can push optics harder and that's what I was going for. hahahah. So far, every time I brought the subject of synchro focus up with lens techs and manufacturers, everyone was horrified. The main issue is the focus curve isn't linear for both lenses, so travel for each lens is set differently and controlled by a "master" helicoid, which is the focus ring.

I thought that was gonna shock everyone, but you're the first one to comment on it! hahahahaha Ohhh, thank you so much man! I reached out to SIRUI as soon as the first article about the lens came out. I'm also not a huge fan of the indiegogo campaign (too "flashy") and after watching all the other reviews I knew exactly what I needed to cover on mine: the technical stuff only hardcore anamorphic people would think about. For the new vanilla shooters out there, most of the stuff I'm highlighting is TMI. ?

Indeed different ballpark, but nothing that can't be fixed (someone say oval inserts?). As for sales, most people are in this not because of the stretch factor, but to get cinemascope, and 1.33x will give you that. It's not like prices will drop like crazy overnight, but I expect them to slow down.

I'd hold off buying adapters until February when Sirui starts shipping. I think adapters' prices will start dropping.

None on the lens. It's a single closed unit, no play anywhere. I don't have any adapters with me anymore, but I can compare with words. hahaha. I'll compare it to a LOMO 50mm Squarefront. ?

If you have any specific questions about the Sirui you'd like to see answers for - and that haven't been covered in the recent myriad of reviews - let me know here. I'm starting my review today, with a first part to go up on Sunday. ?

I'm actually working to make this a lot more accessible and easy to navigate! ?

This only applies if you're shooting FF and using the entire 16:9 frame. In that case, you'll also have wildly different aspect ratios between 2x and 1.5x. Take into account your final aspect ratio and that should allow you to explore wider taking lenses, knowing that not all of your sensor will be covered and that's fine (especially on 5D3 ML).

I have lots of experience with both J9 and C/Y 85/1.4. The Jupiter is a big hit and miss, like most Soviet M42 lenses. If you get a good copy, you'll have tons of character, easy flares, lots of bloom and sharp results wide open. Not a contrasty lens unless stopped down. Getting a good copy is a tough process though. You can go through a dozen of them before finding one you like. I certainly have. Contax: the 1.4's are all fring-y, chromatic aberration-y wide open. The 35 is the best performing wide open of the trio. The 50 is notoriously bad wide open (think blooming and intense CA). The 85 has no blooming and CA is mostly controlled, at least in my copy. But good luck getting a close up in focus if everything is not bolted down. hahahaah Here's some more info on my set and the decisions through building it - https://***URL not allowed***/zeiss-contax-cine-tune-up-guide/

A few thoughts. 1 - Your first scope is very unlikely gonna be your last. I've grown past my first, second, third, Nth scope. As a matter of fact, I sold all of my adapters except an Iscorama pre-36 I got for cheap because everything else hindered my shooting style. The Iscorama does it too, just less than the others. Get the cheapest one that picks your interest and get used to shooting with it, solve its problems, learn its quirks. Then move up to something better. Some issues will be solved, but there will be an entirely new category of problems to tackle. Shooting with adapters is a lesson in compromising. You get a little bit over here, you lose a little bit over there. 2 - A ton of people that come to anamorphics think "I just wanna go as wide as possible". The best solution: shoot with a spherical 14mm, throw in a ton of filters and crop the top and bottom. Going super wide won't give you bokeh, so what's the point anyway? My widest-ever setup was the Contax 21/2.8 and the Letus 1.33x Pro. Super wide lens, subtle scope compression. The result is I would've gotten better IQ by picking a 15mm and framing for 2.35:1. 3 - Read. Lots. Watch videos. Ask questions. I'm biased because the links below are all mine. No one else has tried to document this stuff as I have. ? www.tferradans.com/anamorphic www.anamorfakeit.com www.youtube.com/tferradans

Hahahaa, good way to interpret the result! If you want a hint, you can guess some of the answers based on who shot the photos. Weird! I'll reach support and ask what's up with that... I look forward to seeing your order!

Thanks Leslie! Yeah, the link should be active, this is to the page where you can take the quiz: http://www.tferradans.com/anamorfake and this one is straight to the e-shop: https://anamorphic.e-junkie.com/product/1622776/Anamorfake-It-Until-You-Make-It21-Guide

Hey guys! I wanted to share my latest project and there's no better place than here, where I started! The price of scopes on ebay only goes up. To counter that I spent the last two years researching and testing out ways to achieve the anamorphic look WITHOUT actually using scopes - which I call "anamorfaking". Then I turned all of the research into a 170pg guide and put it up on my blog. http://www.anamorfakeit.com I get a lot of suspicious (not to say dismissive) looks when I say I'd rather shoot anamorfake than use most adapters out there. Many folks think that REAL anamorphic will always be superior and better. I'm here to challenge that perspective. If you go on the link above there's a quiz featuring ten images that mix anamorphic, anamorfake or both techniques. See how well you can tell them apart! If you get all correct, there's a discount for the new guide. You can also check the first few pages for free here: http://www.tferradans.com/anamorfake/TFerradans-AnamorfakeDemo.pdf Have you ever used any tricks to craft the anamorphic look? Lens mods, oval cutout filters, fishing line, letterboxing, etc

no one ever said this was for sale. o.O

If you have a Tokina 0.4 that should help you, but you'll be coming from infinity to very close focus. It will kill bellows draw, but you'll be doing a lot of leg exercise moving from one place to the other to keep subjects in focus and finding your framing. That's beyond my comprehension. I never notice a difference in field of view when using diopters. But, when going up in strength so hardcore like a +10, it's hard to get ANYTHING in focus. A single focus solution is likely to work well, better than fixed diopters and bellows. The problem I can imagine is the size of your front element being bigger than the back of a single focus solution. Try SLR Magic's rangefinder, they are dirt cheap on B&H these days.

I heard "diopters" and was summoned here. I personally haven't published much on how diopters work besides what's in my original guide - www.tferradans.com/anamorphic But I have a ton of research and drafts expanding on the subject. Most vari-str diopters (single focus solutions) act as a wide-angle adapter when close focused (Rectilux is 0.9x for example, I have notes on the others too, but not by memory), and regular diopters alter focal length a tiny little bit (you should disregard it). Here's a great article by Jay Holben on diopters - https://ascmag.com/blog/shot-craft/deep-focus-diopters and an instagram post by the author of the article, expanding on depth of field and the things it sounds like you're looking for:

Hey @ken! I'm pretty sure these (as most 1.33x fixed focus lenses) are two cylinders. They might be tiny and close together. I had it for a brief while and the footage was indeed squeezed and there were flares. Saying there was oval bokeh was too much, because I don't even think GoPros can have bokeh. ?

Building a setup is a series of very personal choices. All we can do is provide you with useful info, and here's some! Go to youtube.com/tferradans and watch as many of them as you can. Then go to tferradans.com/anamorphic and read the guide. Finally, check your lens choices based on the calculator at anamorphic calculator.

Yes. The thinner the better, until it becomes too thin and the flare disappears. hahahah

That was me.