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Not only the Leica :- )

There are so many variables when it comes to how you're viewing the film images. Negative film has wide dynamic range and soft highlight rolloff. Positive film has much more limited dynamic range and pretty hard highlight rolloff. Faster film tends to be grainier. Filmmakers with a big budget would be choosing their film stock for aesthetic/style reasons. Imagine shooting Taxi Driver on the same technicolor low-grain film stocks that were used for The Sound of Music. Bright saturated colors would have been terrible for Taxi Driver. Scorcese chose less gritty films than some others might, but Travis Bickle lives in a relatively desaturated/dark world and that's for the best. Filmmakers with low budgets were likely to choose the cheapest film stock they could and some even used the leftovers that weren't exposed from the productions of others. Or in the case of John Waters, whatever film he could steal. Next, as you said, for these classic films, you aren't necessarily looking at scans from the master negatives. You might be looking at scans of the release prints. They didn't always save the masters. It could even be a second or third-generation print. Then to add to that, the way the film gets transferred matters. Did they scan the original negatives or a print? How was it scanned? Was the film being scanned perfectly flat? What compression was used on the scanned image? Was it scanned or telecine? If telecine, which projector lens was used during the telecine process? As far as the lenses, razor sharp lenses have been available for a long time, including in the 50's, and including wide angles. Lots of vintage wide angles are a little softer in the corners, but they can be very crisp in the center... but fashion applied in many eras of film, just as it applies now. For some of the softer images, especially close-ups, they might have been using a net filter, made more complicated by the net filter potentially being mounted behind the lens instead of in front. https://www.provideocoalition.com/the-secret-life-of-behind-the-lens-nets/ I'm sure I'm forgetting more things too. Like almost anything going through an analog to digital process, there are about a bazillion variables to consider along the way.

For those interested in small setups, in modestly priced gear, in non-clinical rendering of images, in very fast lenses, in vintage lenses, or older equipment, we exist in a space that has no quantitative reference. There are no numbers to look up and understand things from. It applies to the equipment: Questions like "how sharp is that lens?" don't have an answer (that is intuitive anyway - MTF charts aren't intuitive and often aren't reliable or even available). Even if it did, that answer would only be true at one aperture setting, and even then, is only true for the middle of the frame or the edge of the frame, but not both at the same time. If we shoot at base ISO with a 4K camera then we'll likely get an image with roughly 4K resolution, but at higher ISOs the effective resolution will likely drop due to ISO noise, NR, compression, etc. If we use filtration, like diffusion filters, then these lower the effective resolution of the image. It's literally what they're designed to do. How much do they do this though? Not only is there no published answer to this, but the answer changes depending on focal length, sensor size, etc. It applies to the look we're creating: Any colourist working creatively will be trying to create an image with the right amount of resolution / sharpness / noise / etc, not just "the sharpest" or "the highest resolution". How much is desired? What are the references? I've been struggling with many questions from my own equipment and projects, including: My TTartisans 17mm F1.4 is less than half the weight of my Voigtlander 17.5mm F0.95, but the TT is quite soft at F1.4. How soft is it though? Is it too soft? If I want to shoot low-light with the GX85 (which has terrible higher-ISO NR) then what ISO setting is too soft, and then which lenses do I need to use in which environments to get enough light into the sensor? My Takumar 50mm F1.4 on my generic M42-MFT speed booster has pretty soft edges, but how soft? You'd think the solution to these would be to look at the footage and decide, but (for me at least) it's a double-edged sword because I also don't know what final images I want! I have spent a good amount of time looking at Hollywood films and big budget TV shows (see the original The Aesthetic thread) but apart from just going "I like that" and "I don't like that" we have the problem once-again of there being no way to quantify things. Saying "this show is softer than that show" really doesn't help. My solution is to reference things back to film. I originally did this with my Panasonic GF3, which shoots 1080p so soft you could cut it with a wet noodle, by comparing it to the presets in the Film Look Creator tool for 8mm and 16mm film I concluded that when the GF3 didn't show macro-blocking due to the (very low) bitrate, it was about the same as 8mm film. This was actually a really useful reference for me, because the associations I have for 8mm and 16mm film are quite useful. 8mm film has an aesthetic that is very nostalgic and low-fi, but was never good enough for TV shows, let alone the cinema. My new plan is to reference everything back to film, across quite a number of ways... Texture, which is what I've talked about so far: - I will be trying to "map" my lenses and cameras and codecs to a specific resolution of film (16mm, 35mm, somewhere in between) - I will be trying to "map" my aesthetic preferences to film too, like wanting a certain project to have the resolution of 16mm for example, but further than this - the size and amount of grain can also be a useful reference. These are useful references for me because a lot of the aesthetic references of cinema I have were actually shot on film and so by associating these things back to film it's a relevant reference, not just some arbitrary scale that isn't directly related. Dynamic Range and Contrast: - How does the DR from the GX85 look when put through an image pipeline in Resolve compare to the contrast of a 250D -> 2383 process? - What about the iPhone vs a 16mm process from the 90s? or a B&W process from the Italian Neorealism or French New Wave period? Contrast and DR should be relatively easy to match to various film stocks by just shooting some over/under exposure tests and adjusting my standard Resolve colour pipeline to match what is in the spec sheets. Speaking of spec sheets, not only do the spec sheets for motion picture film contain the Sensitometric Curves that show DR and contrast, but they also contain the MTF curves too as a reference for resolution. When it comes to resolution you don't need to look at the charts though - I asked some film geeks I know to comment on the FLC presets and they said that the 8mm / 16mm / 35mm presets in the Grain panel have about the right amount of image softness and amount of grain (but that the character of the grain isn't accurate), so the FLC is a reasonable reference for the texture of film in a very broad sense. What else? Image stability is another one. 8mm film cameras were larger than modern compact cameras so were more stable with the lenses they were normally fitted with, but 8mm had pretty terrible gate weave (alignment from one frame to the next) so having micro-jitters from hand-holding is compatible with the look. Whereas 16mm would have had more mass and less gate weave but at least at first would have probably been shoulder mounted or on a tripod, so some types of shots / angles will be more compatible with the aesthetic than others. Depth of field is another one. Lots of people think the "Super 16mm look" just means deep DOF, but it's more nuanced than that, as the lenses typically used would have some separation in low-light when focused closer, but due to the lenses at the time the shots might have been softer wide-open, so that's another relationship to understand. There are lots of other parameters that make an image that aren't covered here, but I am finding that getting some kind of reference for texture and contrast fills a very large gap in the landscape for me. The goal isn't to accurately emulate anything, its to develop a keener understanding of the spectrum these things exist in. Where I'm hoping to get to is to be able to develop summaries like: The GF3 is about 8mm at base-ISO, which during the day is equivalent to <some particular F-stop>, so I can put basically any lens sharper than 8mm onto it and the result will still look like 8mm. I can hand-hold this tiny camera with an acceptable level of shake up to about Xmm and it'll still fit the 8mm vintage / amateur / nostalgic vibe. The GF3 is tiny but once you add a lens that is larger than a pancake then I may as well use the GX85, so the only sensible lens is the 15mm F8 bodycap lens. Any other combo doesn't make sense. (This is an actual example I've worked out through testing). The GX85 at base-ISO is equivalent to <film size of some kind.. 16mm? 24mm? 35mm? 50mm?> which requires lenses of <F-stop> during the day and <F-stop> in well-lit night environments. This amount of resolution is suitable for projects with a vibe of <gritty street? vintage? night cinema? high-end commercials? etc?> but not other vibes. (This is still yet to be tested, but once I've worked out the camera then certain lens combinations will reveal themselves to make sense and others will obviously not work) iPhone? Where does it sit in all this? It has huge resolution and very strong codecs (4K Prores HQ or even Prores RAW) but poor DR and even worse ISO performance. GH7. What are the aesthetics I want to create that I can't create with the above (because the above is too limiting). What lenses and shooting styles and approaches are required for these aesthetics? The ultimate thinking is developing "constellations" where there is compatibility / alignment between: a camera, one or more lenses, certain shooting situations and techniques, an image pipeline, and a target aesthetic. I've been working on finding these "constellations" by starting at the camera and working forwards, but also by starting with the end aesthetic and working backwards, and I've identified a number of partial matches, but I think that by relating everything back to motion picture film, I can make more progress fitting the pieces together.

Great posts, sticky this! Your contribution here @kye is priceless and a fine example for everyone, myself included : ) It's always a pleasure to read your thoughts! :- ) Keep going… I’m linking to it elsewhere, BTW ; -) Food for my trainee students. : D

Famously, the greases that Leica used in their old lenses would evaporate and deposit on lens elements over time. It can be cleaned, but the danger of evaporation/depositing is real!

Now I have mostly progressed my GX85 Super-16mm "conversion" I am turning back to a more generalised look at film and The Aesthetic as it pertains to cinema. My next step is to convert my S16 emulation into a 35mm emulation, which shouldn't be that hard as it's the same stuff but just using more of it, so turning down the grain and backing off the softening and size of halation and bloom etc. In order to get my bearings I've collected a bunch of frame grabs from cinema over the decades, and some fascinating things have emerged. Observation One: Film doesn't look like it's gotten cleaner and sharper This is what people say, but when scrolling through the references, you can find things like this from 1952's Bend of the River: and then things like this from 1994s Speed: Obviously you need to be smart about things, so both these shots are likely to be locked off, focus wouldn't be missed, lit naturally and exposed properly, etc. There are lots of shots from Speed that are soft, but it's an action movie so lots of them are probably motion blurred or the action was impacting how well that frame was focused etc. Luckily, License to Kill from 1989 will get us back to safe ground with some nice sharp images: But how are these images possible all the way back then? One thing that comes to mind is that when consulting Kodaks excellent Chronology of Film page, you see that the negative stocks started off as very low sensitivity and increased over time, so it's like comparing the high-ISO of todays cameras to the native ISOs of past cameras. Observation Two: Images look like they've gotten less worse The further back you go, the more you find shots that should be sharp but just aren't. The example above from 1952 was a real outlier, as most of the images from that time looked more like these from 1955s A Bad Day at Black Rock: I suspect the quality of the lenses. All the above looked like wider shots, so maybe that lens wasn't so good (wider lenses are harder to make). Maybe it wasn't at its sharpest F-stop. A lot of the sharpest images across the frame grabs I looked at were close-ups, and I suspect back then a 50mm at it's sharpest aperture and focus distance was a lot better than a wider lens at whatever F-stop and focus distance was required for the scene. Check out these grabs from 1955's The Seven Year Itch: Monroe was at her height of popularity so there's no way she's getting the beat-up lenses from the rental company or a camera team that doesn't know what they're doing. I can't think of any reason these two particular images would be softer than the technology at the time would have allowed. By 1971 things seemed to have gotten a lot more consistent with Diamonds Are Forever: Then if we fast forward to the last few years, we get films like 2024s Trap, which looks quite sharp and even approaching a digital look: but still has films over-emphasis of high-contrast edges: and it's a similar case with 2023's Poor Things which can look quite sharp: but on wides it still has that film look: and it's only when the lenses get crazy that the edges start looking more vintage again: Anyway, lots of food for thought, but it's almost like the sweet spot of film has remained relatively similar in performance but has gotten drastically wider as you can now get images that are that sharp and clean in much less light and across a vastly wider range of lens focal lengths and apertures. Another variable is that prior to digital projection, the final image had to go through many more layers of film than it has to now. Back in the day the image pipeline was something like: negative → interpositive → internegative → release print, rather than just negative -> scan, and it's not like our projection lenses haven't gotten better now too! Let me know if you can think of any more variables that I didn't mention, but it's like we're looking at lenses get better and film be useful in more situations, rather than it get "better".

It actually feels like it's in a softer set of threads, so it's not like metal on metal where it grips and then slides easily, this just requires a certain level of force to get it to move and once moving it requires the same force to keep it moving. I would absolutely never ever put something like WD-40 into an optical assembly! Not only would it potentially dissolve or melt any plastic it comes into contact with, but solvents can 'wick' into things and spread across surfaces (especially bad if those surfaces are on the inside and you can't get at them to clean them), and solvents will evaporate and likely fill every void or space with fumes, which can potentially condense on the surfaces of the lenses and dissolve the coatings etc. I've glued things together before with PVA glue, which is water based, and after the glue had dried (ie, the water in it evaporated) it had condensation all over the sensor and lens etc. I set it on a windowsill in the sun to dry for a few days and it cleared up fine, but I think that was mostly because it was water and that didn't interact in any way with the lens or sensor elements.

Speaking of the dials registering the wrong way, I've mostly noticed that on dials when you rotate them quite slowly, so it seems like trying different speeds might be the best strategy. It's also good to get a decent light source and look over the surface of it by looking at the reflections as you rotate it. I'd be looking for any evidence it's been dropped etc, especially on anything that's meant to move like the buttons or dials etc, but also on the corners. I dropped my GF3 on one of its corners and as it's a metal chassis it just got a little flat spot and wrinkle, but you can feel it if you pay attention.

I'd use a little known plugin called Tilt Shift Blur (TSB), which comes with Resolve but is very special in a critical aspect. Normally if you have a node and give it a key then the node calculates things as normal and then uses the key as a transparency effect, so if you used a large Gaussian Blur and gave it a key then you'd get a huge blur mixed with the sharp image at the level of transparency the key dictated. However, with the TSB, the key defines the size of the blur, so you can vary the size of the blur that way. For this purpose I'd give it a luma key of the image and adjust the contrast and amount to control the relative amount of blur between the lighter and darker parts of the image. The TSB is what I use to soften the edges of the frame in my lens emulation nodes, which allows there to be no blur in the centre and it gradually transition to having a larger and larger blurring towards the edges. The fact that the key input acts as a transparency control really doesn't make much sense when applying most OFX plugins and I'm surprised they haven't made more of them smart like the TSB one where it uses the key as an input to control one or more of the OFX parameters.

A quick headsup with the Viltrox adapter. Years ago, I hacked a Canon 10-18mm to make it fit, which it did. However, one day, I took it out my bag and was getting some really crazy lens flares. Turned out, the back lens element was touching the glass in the adapter when at around 12mm. In my bag, it cracked the glass in the Viltrox, and I learned there's a pretty good reason the combo didn't work without being hacked. So if you get any EFs lenses, be careful - or you'll end up with a one of a kind, megaflare adapter (I've used it a few times since because of the 'creative flaring', so it's not all bad) This photo is from the moment I noticed something was wrong. Luckily, it was on my GX85 at the time, which I was using for behind the scenes stills. So nothing was lost or ruined in a 'professional' sense.

Defintely check out and test the rotating thumbdial on the back. It's not specific to the FP, but I've bought second hand cameras where those things became glitchy and register as spinning one way when you spin it the other. Or flip flop between left and right if you rotate it too fast. It's probably not going to be an issue, but is the only thing I'd double check on top of what you said already. Maybe also look for damage on the pin connectors used for the EVF by the ports.