Hey everyone, I have been experimenting with the GH4's 4k anamorphic mode as a sort of 16mm mode. The GH4 can record 4k footage in a 4:3 aspect ratio (designed for an anamorphic de-squeeze in post)... 16mm film is also a 4:3 aspect ratio. I have an old Angenieux 12-120mm cine-zoom in c mount. I love the lens, it has an interesting look to it and has an amazing zoom range for doc work. The only problem to shooting with it was the heavy vignette requiring a significant crop to remove. However, when I switch the GH4 to the 4:3 anamorphic mode, the vignette is much smaller as it opens up the vertical part of the sensor and captures more of the lenses image circle. Here is the view at 12mm. As you can see, heavy vignette but not nearly as bad as it is in 16:9 mode. Here is the same view with the lens set to 120mm. Somewhere around 70mm the vignette mostly disappears, and at 120 its more or a light falloff and not the tunnel vision effect you see at 12mm. Taking the first 12mm view and applying just a 16x9 center crop to elimnate the vignette gives you this image. It works quite well! I am not sure how to determine the final resolution but FCPX tells me that this 4k footage is scaled by 143% (all of this is being done in a 1080p timeline). I could also crop even less if I keep the final aspect ratio at 4:3. This weekend I will be filming a rallycross race in upstate NY and I plan on only using this lens. I will share the results here after filming. Very excited to see how this works. Has anyone else tried this with old 16mm glass? Also, these shots are ungraded but one nice thing about this old lens is that it shoots very flat. Not much contrast, however it leaves a lot of room for grading.
