I was lucky a few months ago to find a rare Isco Centavision lens, which is a high quality 2x wide anamorphic lens. It has it’s own focus ring and it gives quite a Cinemascope-a-like 3:1 aspect ratio on the GH1 with it’s quirky native 16:9 sensor.
I also like the Panasonic LA7200 but it’s not suitable for full frame cameras. This one isn’t either! (For that you’ll need the more expensive Iscorama) On 2x crop cameras like the GH1 the Centavision variety has some big advantages over the LA7200.
• Gives you a shallow depth of field
• Gives fast apertures without defocussing affect
• Works at moderate telephoto focus lengths
Now one of the things bothering me about anamorphic shooting on DSLRs is that you get a squashed view of the footage in playback mode and live when shooting. But thanks to Tester13, you can now resize the width & height of the MJPEG shooting mode in PTools to anamorphic proportions, be it the usual 2.35:1 or 3:1 (this firmware hack is like a never ending 2nd wave of DSLR manual controls!)
This has the side affect of actually squashing the image to whatever your desired width & height is. It doesn’t crop the image.
Bringing anamorphic footage out from a HD sensor at 1920×1080 required people to squash the footage afterwards in Final Cut Pro. But now the camera’s firmware does it for you. The gift horse that keeps on giving doesn’t stop there either because you may enter a lower vertical resolution in-camera instead of wasting that res afterwards by scaling in FCP you have more bandwidth left over for higher bit rates or interestingly – higher resolution.
In fact, it possible to get higher than full HD resolution from the GH1’s MJPEG mode.
I recorded footage at 2160×720 and we can probably go higher. The 16:9 1920x1080p sensor output is scaled by the encoder to 3:1
Not sure if that extra resolution is upscaled from 1920 or it is actually 2160 yet!
Focussing is pretty untroubled. You set the main camera lens on infinity an just use the ring on the anamorphic.
It seems to work best on the Canon FD 50MM F1.4, Canon FD 35MM F2 SSC (with mild vignette) and the beautiful Contax Zeiss 85MM F1.4
Low light shooting was previously a bit out of bounds for anamorphics, be it in 35mm film format or on digital format. But not any more.
Footage coming in part 3
Check out the guide to Anamorphic MJPEG width & height settings on the updated HDSLR Wiki
