going wider?

[brucker]

@ipcmlr replied, and thanks! :)

@Burnet,... not that i would know, as i dont have a gh2, but could it be that the 14-42mm is the lens focal length before it hits the sensor? at 42mm do you get an 85mm portrait lens kinda look? i know on my nikon 1 a 10mm looks like a 24-28mm cos of the crop.

[Sean Cunningham]

This is true no matter the camera. The focal length is the focal length. 40mm for a Panavision lens denotes its vertical equivalent (horizontally being half this since anamorphic) and the actual FOV captured is then determined by the crop aperture size of the motion picture camera. If I'm reading your comment correctly you might be under the impression that movies are shot "full frame" and they're not, for reasons I outlined earlier. Not since sometime in the 1960s and even then it was only some.

[brucker]

oooh OK,.. yeah i'm coming from a photography background so i was thinking 40mm on 35mm film field of view. cheers for clearing that up.

[brucker]

does anyone happen to have a clip where they mixed anamorphic with standard spherical wide footage?

would be great to see some footage if anyone's got any and more importantly i'd love to hear about what you had to do to blend the two.

cheers.

[OverCranked]

[quote name='brucker' timestamp='1354107465' post='22518']
does anyone happen to have a clip where they mixed anamorphic with standard spherical wide footage?

would be great to see some footage if anyone's got any and more importantly i'd love to hear about what you had to do to blend the two.

cheers.
[/quote]

Andrew Reid Has done a few of those. In this one he is mentioning the fact about intercutting with some kit lens in telephoto settings. Here is one ;

http://vimeo.com/15543342

[brucker]

cheers Overcranked!

 

i've watched that a few times but never read the article, so never knew it was a mix.

 

for future noobies who may come across a similar problem, i've decided to go with a wide angle spherical to get the shots i need,... figured getting the shot is more important than being anal about using anamorphic all over. 

[OverCranked]

,... figured getting the shot is more important than being anal about using anamorphic all over. 

 

.... and that's a fact. If you have perfected the story and screenplay is screen worthy and the audio is transparent and grading is coherent then intercut to a few shots taken through the bottom of beer bottle if you want. It's the sum of the experience that your audience takes home not individual parts. 

[brucker]

^^^ indeed!

 

and it works relatively well,...

 

i got the Nikkor 10mm f2.8 designed for the Nikon 1 series. for about $150, which gives me a 27mm-ish Fov (on 35mm still film).

 

tried degrading the shot a bit by reducing contrast and some blur.

 

its passable as long as you're not after flares or oval bokeh,... they were never what i loved about anamorphic, so it works for me....

 

i like getting a filmic look with maximum depth of field and this way, it's workable, for select scenes, after a bit of fiddling about.

 

thanks for your help everyone, and i hope this helps someone else out in the future.

 

cheers.

[JohnBarlow]

Mixing footage from ana and spherical is quite common in the movies

 

A recent example has to be the latest Batman movie, where you can see shots with oval and spherical iris reflections which give the game away somewhat.

 

I suppose the reason for this is that some DPs (except JJ Abrams) do not like the squishing effect when doing focus pulls

 

 

does anyone happen to have a clip where they mixed anamorphic with standard spherical wide footage?

would be great to see some footage if anyone's got any and more importantly i'd love to hear about what you had to do to blend the two.

cheers.

[Sean Cunningham]

Actually, most DPs will likely tell you they prefer scope.  It's some directors don't care and the DP is accommodating to their indifference.  Lots of producers don't care and pressure production to go with whatever is cheapest.  Lots of visual effects professionals prefer not to work with it because it's not quite as straight forward as spherical, though that's more of an anachronistic problem these days with how fast computers are and how much better the software is with tracking and match-moving.  Still, they bitch, the producer just hears "more expensive" and pressures the director and DP to shoot spherical.  

 

There are reasons for mixing (in the case of Batman they also mixed in 65mm at the beginning) but most of them are related to technical issues or money.  Technical issues can always be overcome by either money or effort.  Back in the 70s and 80s things weren't as flexible so almost any time you saw an "optical" or "process shot" or just "visual effects shot" and it wasn't in a movie that Douglas Trumbull was involved with you were seeing a mixture of scope and spherical if scope was being used for principal photography.

 

It's never because going non-scope is "better".   The best you can do is make a case for "more appropriate for a given application".

 

edit: also, Panavision solved anamorphic mumps a long time ago with their lenses.

[JohnBarlow]

How do you morph from a Burnet to a Sean ;)

[Sean Cunningham]

How do you morph from a Burnet to a Sean ;)

 

Gonna take a guess what you're asking.  "Burnet Rhoades" is an online handle I started using some years ago, pretty sure with AIM.  I've never been one to tolerate a login with a string of numbers after my name or initials.  Just won't do it.  My login at various studios has always been "pockets" since an old roommate hung that nickname on me back in the early 90s and this is what I'm fairly well known as within the VFX industry (and will answer to it in conversation as readily as I do "sean") but for larger, public networks this handle is often taken.

 

The first script that my brother Tim wrote features a pair of modern day outlaw cowboy brothers, Lamar and Burnet.  They're named after well known roads here in Austin and would be a wink to any local.  I don't remember if he originally spelled their last name as "rhodes" or "rhoads" or "rhoades" but I started using the later because I figured it was the most unusual.

 

I'm a creature of habit so pretty much anything new where a handle is available it's the one I use.  I also use it to try and avoid confusion with the creator of the Friday the 13th franchise, Sean S. Cunningham.

[JohnBarlow]

Cool,

 

I was flicking through the filmography and thinking to myself - this looks a lot like my DVD collection ;) 

[brucker]

cool, gotta watch the batman now,... the only online thing i could find was a reference to Babel, but i thought that might not count as every location was filmed differently and looked it for the purposes of the film.

 

wanna guess how i got "brucker" from Shuji?  :P

[Sean Cunningham]

More reference for y'all on the wider end of the spectrum.  No such thing as too wide.  This is from one of the most talented working DPs and an awesome looking motion picture: [url="http://www.theasc.com/ac_magazine/October2011/Drive/page1.php"]the cinematography of DRIVE.[/url]

[tehellet]

So I bought myself on ebay a Century Precision Optics C1351 wide angle adapter, 0.6x apparently. I went cheap, $12. The lens itself is in perfect conditions, and it's BIG. Its read thread is 80mm but it came with an adapter to bayonet that fits PERFECTLY on my Redstan front filter adapter for my 2x Kowa Bell&Howell. 

 

However... when I put it on, NOTHING seems to focus... it kinda shifts the whole backfocus way back (or front?) so I cannot get focus anywhere. So it occurred to me to use diopters to see if I could get anything in focus, and I have the Tokina ATX plus a set of vivitar close-up filters. I combined many but in the end I found that the best solution was to use the vivitar +1 and the +4 stuck together between the Kowa and the wide angle adapter. This got me decent focus (worse than without the century) but then I realized... there wasn't anything WIDE angle about it!! I took pictures to compare but what I seemed to gain in angle of view with the Century seemed to be countered by the closeup filters. But then without the filters I couldn't get anything in focus! Has anyone had a similar problem? Perhaps it'd be better if I mounted the wide angle adapter farther away from the Kowa? I haven't tried that yet, will try it in the morning.

[powderbanks]

cheers Overcranked!

 

i've watched that a few times but never read the article, so never knew it was a mix.

 

for future noobies who may come across a similar problem, i've decided to go with a wide angle spherical to get the shots i need,... figured getting the shot is more important than being anal about using anamorphic all over. 

 

I'm working a music video now that i shot with a 2x anamorphic and regular primes...going from the super wide 3.55:1 shots to the 16:9 shots was jarring, to me. So i just cropped the top and bottom of the 16:9 footage to roughly the cinemascope aspect ratio (2.35:1). That made the cuts between the different aspect ratios much less noticable.

 

I made a post in the screening room forum with a couple different primes and my 2x anamorphic lens...gives you something of an idea of what works

[brucker]

cool, shall head over and watch tuit suite.

 

its surprising how well they can be blended, and i think that if you lead with anamorphic to establish the look and feel, then mixing and maintaining the feel is not that big a deal. 

 

we'd probably only get "busted" by people on this forum anyway :P

[Caleb Genheimer]

I doubt anyone on this forum would bash you for mixing. Hollywood (except for the already mentioned J.J.) very often mixes anamorphic and spherical footage. Especially for low/no-butget films, getting certain shots with anamorphic is simply not feasible, most notably wide establishing shots like the ones under discussion here. And really, anything as wide as what is being discussed will have pretty deep depth of field with most subjects, so the ability to differentiate aspherical shot from an anamorphic one would be quite difficult if not impossible, provided you crop both types of footage to the same aspect ratio.

[Sean Cunningham]

...so the ability to differentiate aspherical shot from an anamorphic one would be quite difficult if not impossible, provided you crop both types of footage to the same aspect ratio.

 

It's kinda interesting you mention this.  The Dark Knight Rises BD takes a cue from the laserdisc and dvd releases I have of Trumbull's Brainstorm and mixes aspect ratios based on the photographic process being used.  The 65mm sections pop out to full 16:9 coverage while the anamorphic pieces are letterboxed.

 

It's less distracting than Brainstorm which centered a 1.85:1 frame in the middle of the screen, both letterboxed and pillarboxed on a 4:3 set where the edges would pop out to 2.2:1 letterbox for the parts shot in ShowScan.