ergopossum

Here's a production blog with some BTS stills and footage (might want to skip the two most recent posts), and here's the main website, which we'll probably update further in the coming months. The blog's written by one of our producers and doesn't delve into technical aspects much, however. I liked working with the bolex adapter lens, we used it in conjunction with a redstan adapter ring and Nikkor AI prime lenses. We had experimented with Zeiss lenses, but found that the look of the footage we got, with the bolex adapter over the top, was almost identical to the Nikkor-prime footage, so we chose the Nikkors because they had a consistent 52mm filter ring. The big trick, of course, is that you can't really rack because the lenses have to be focused separately. We found that the Bolex's horizontal focus was a little more forgiving than the prime, but it was generally the case that the Bolex had to be focused first, and then the prime lens. Occasionally the circumstances were such that we couldn't see well enough on our little 5" monitor to get things perfectly focused, especially in the rush of shooting a feature over a tight time schedule. For the film's handful of rack focus shots, we used a cinemorph filter, which did an adequate job of matching the look. The 35mm vignetted slightly but after cropping 11% off the sides to get to a 2.4:1 aspect ratio it was cropped out. The 24mm vignetted quite a bit, but looked alright blown up slightly and still resulted in a slightly wider shot than the 35mm after cropping/resizing. I really liked the flares the lens produces. Blue and very 1980s sci-fi-ish, there are a few of them in the trailer. They have a soft quality to them that was nice. It flared perhaps just slightly easier than would be ideal, but not bad.

The footage looks great. It definitely seems like golden hour with haze and subtle detail in shadows holds up better in raw than in most compressed formats. I spent a while looking online to try to find an answer, but I couldn't-- has there been any progress on the resolution for 7D raw footage, or is it maxed out at 1728 x 972? I also recall there being some luck with getting higher resolutions in crop mode on the 50D and didn't know if that had worked for the 7D as well. Information online about Magiclantern Raw more recent than last fall seems to be fairly scattered.

As far as recording straight into the computer, I was thinking of the use of an HDMI-in card like this card, or this one or this one. In theory you could use a card like that to record the clean HDMI out of the camera into a program like Dragonframe's live view. But this is a significant amount of extra money and hardware.

I've used compact fluorescent bulbs of the sort made for conventional incandescent lamp sockets in stop motion animation for years without flicker problems. I was shooting at variable shutter speeds with a stills camera. The lack of flicker does depend on the shutter angle, I believe, though I'm not very familiar with how shutter angle functions in relation to fluorescent, with regard to the Blackmagic cameras. The colors are nicer than cheap LEDs, but of course they're somewhat omnidirectional light sources so they're a little harder to control than an LED panel. I'm curious as to why you want to use the time lapse function, maybe this is just a simplicity thing using what's available to you. I imagine finding a way to feed the HDMI video into the computer and take stills from there would be a little easier in the long run since some frames take longer than others to set up, and this would allow for reshooting frames when necessary, etc. The BMPCCs are certainly very appealing for stop mo purposes as they do not incur the shutter life problems that DSLRs do.

This footage looks beautiful. I would not have thought of the 5D3 raw as a good travelogue/documentary style camera given the cumbersome nature of raw footage, but it looks so visceral with the exceedingly clear images and colors. Do you find it a challenge to get the footage you want with the 5D3 raw workflow? It seems to me like one would normally want to shoot a huge amount of footage for a seemingly run-and-gun travelogue video like this, and that would be harder with this setup.

A trailer for an upcoming feature film I wrote and co-directed. We shot the movie on a C300 using the 16/32/1.5x Bolex Moller anamorphic adapter lens. Many thanks to the people on this forum for helping me figure out the logistics of this during pre-production! YouTube Link

This looks great. If you wanted to correct for the bent flare slightly on a wide angle shot here or there, it wouldn't be too difficult to do in After Effects without much resolution loss. When you use the Nikon-mount Sigma 18-35 on your BMPCC without the speed booster, how are you controlling the aperture?

I'm also curious about how the speed boosters would perform alongside anamorphic adapter lenses. Would there be additional softness or distortion issues? Would the lenses vignette too much because of the adapter?

As far as I understand, that cannot be true...removing the UV filter that had been accidentally sandwiched between the lenses did almost completely eliminate the green portion of the flare, and I don't get a similar double flare on other lenses.

Even if you couldn't get it *quite* that smooth with your hands, you could definitely shoot it about 10% wider and stabilize in post with something like Premiere's "warp stabilizer" or a similar tool in FCP and other editing apps. A slight wobble won't show much distortion after post-stabilization.

Incredible footage. I was left wondering how small these objects were, the magnetic oil spikes looked like some kind of alien creature.

*Bump* / slightly embarrassing update that may be of interest to some: the lenses on the first few shoots I used the anamorphic for were with some rented lenses, and I realized that the UV filters on these lenses were causing the bulk of the reflection. I thought I had taken the UV filters off, but I shot a subsequent project with the same prime lens set, removing the UV filter when I had flares, and 80-90% of this double-flaring issue was gone. (There is still a very slight double flare resulting from the taking lens, but it's nothing like my sample image above.)  

I haven't used a BMPCC, but it occurs to me that its footprint is nearly identical to that of the NEX series of cameras -- this would be advantageous for using widely available rigs that are designed for that class of cameras. As far as I know, the small-size camcorder market is not very popular for professional video use and so there aren't many good rigs suited to that form factor. There are remote helicopters designed for use almost exclusively with the NEX that could work with this camera, as well.

Bolex Moller 16/32/1.5x.   If I'm getting anything too ugly, I'll definitely experiment with stopping down. Should be okay, I imagine most big flares would be in wide shots where a fuller focus is fine.

Thanks for the info, guys. tferradans, the Nikkor lens flares on their own are naturally green, and appear to simply be stretched by the anamorphic so they resemble an anamorphic flare. It's not as obvious in this still, but when I move the camera around it becomes quite clear that the green portion is coming from the nikkor as it looks just like its normal lens flares stretched anamorphically.   I have tried other lenses a little and the green was gone, in that case the results looked pretty nice but it was with a very cheap fotasy lens that is basically a toy, haha. I haven't experimented thoroughly, however. I would have access to some older Zeiss prime lenses instead of the Nikkors on this project if I want them, so perhaps I should see how the flares compare. The green really bothers me, but it's also the fact that I'm getting two major streaks on the image instead of just one.