Caleb Genheimer

Man, great interview! It’s a major buzzkill that it will never do open gate video recording though. I don’t know how to push this on full-frame cameras, but as of now, only the S1H even utilizes the full sensor height in video, which makes the anamorphic shooter in me cringe to no end. That, and the GFX cams are obviously also a larger imaging area... but then those have even more sensor height they could be using, so.... yeah. A bit depressing.

Yea, at this point it’s high time for someone to crack the camera firmware and see what they can actually do with the hardware. Either that, or they need to get on it with a similarly priced Cine cam. Put the same hardware in a new box with active cooling. It is also high time for the competition to kick Canon’s butt on AF performance. AF is their last bastion of defense. Honestly, if the Panasonic S1H had AF on the level of the latest Canon Cine cameras, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation, the S1H would be a virtually flawless Full Frame camera (IBIS, Dynamic Range, Open Gate, 6K, High Framerates...)

Wait, your thing is steam powered? Where do I pre-order?! 😂

Honestly it’s past time for Tilta or similar to just make a stand-alone AF module that controls their focus motors. Then any camera could have decent AF! AF this, AF that... it’s just a tool. Sure, you shouldn’t use it all the time, but there are times where it is the tool for the job. Heck, I’d trust Canon’s AF on my 16mm camera most of the time (if that was a thing,) because I’ve tried pulling focus off that tiny ground glass, and it’s just not reliable. As is, I have to get an extra pair of hands and a tape measure to avoid wasting film on blurry takes.

So to be clear... no open gate yet?

I have a crystal sync sound 16mm camera that I acquired for $980, so now every time the latest and greatest digital camera drops, I view the price tag through the lens of how many gold Kodak canisters loaded with a 400’ core load I could purchase and process with the same amount of money. An A7sIII is about 7 loads of 16mm film, processed and scanned. That’s 77 minutes of footage at 24fps. Conservatively, that’s a 15 minute short film in the bag, or a 30 minute film if you shoot a tight ratio. That’s almost enough film to produce the entire first act to a feature if you plan carefully. The dynamic range is ok I guess, and the color science is at least useable, but it doesn’t have AF, and it’s not full frame, so I should probably replace it soon with something newer?

16-bit external could be the diamond in the rough here depending on how exactly that pans out.... as well as how good the AF is. My impression is that while Sony might not be knocking on Canon’s door with the FX9 AF, they’re definitely standing on the doorstep. If this new camera has the same/similar performance, it might be the “best kid on the block” so to speak... in the mirrorless hybrid category. The advantages of large photosites shouldn’t be ignored either. It’s not the “FX9 in an a7 body” that everyone was dreaming of, but if those caveats mean that it is a rock-solid performer without quirks, that’s probably worth the few omissions. As an aside... where is everyone right now on BRaw vs ProRes Raw? I’ve found the BRaw/Resolve experience to be nothing short of revolutionary, where in contrast, ProRes Raw (at least in my price market) lives almost exclusively on external recorders, and isn’t supported by Davinci (the industry standard color software). My gut tells me BRaw is ultimately the cleaner system, but maybe I’m wrong. Regardless, when are all the other camera manufacturers going to band together and legally swat down Red’s BS? This “no internal Raw” is getting old.

Ugh. If Blackmagic would just resurrect that NX1 sensor in a Pocket cam with that AF and BRaw, I’d honestly be happy. In a smaller/hybrid camera, that’s what I want. It’s for putting on a single handle gimbal, pointing and shooting. If I want cine style with a focus puller, rails and a full setup, I’ll use a cine cam no problem... don’t care about AF in that case. But on these small cams? Bad AF kills the usability within their obvious use-cases, and crappy codecs kill the good vibes.

Catching up on this thread and now I’m sad again that my NX1 is dead, and that Samsung exited the market. Their AF actually rivaled Canon’s, unlike everyone else’s.

Yeah, it still blows my mind that Canon’s DPAF is genuinely their last bastion of defense. It really is undeniably good and unparalleled. The S1H hits every other possible mark, so if Panasonic aren’t singularly focused on implementing flawless AF at this point, they‘ll miss their window of opportunity to sweep the competition across the board. They made a hybrid camera that received Netflix approval... It doesn’t get much more professionally demanding than that. Even considering that, I’m suggesting my employer buy a couple C200s for our bread and butter cameras. Focus has such a fundamental impact on your image image, that it trumps a lot of other things.

There are many factors besides focal length that impact vignette. You have to get all the optics as close to each other as possible to maximize your results. Unless you get lucky and find someone who regularly uses the exact lens combo you are asking about, chances are you will have to just give it a go yourself to figure it out. Be kind to the next fellow and document your results! My best advice for finding taking lenses is to not rush things and keep an eye out for good prices, so that if it doesn’t work as expected, you can flip it and not loose out.

With that much resolution, they really should run half of the photosites through a different gain architecture to achieve higher dynamic range.

All I want in a full frame camera is in-body compressed RAW full sensor (36X24mm) readout at 24fps. It’s really that simple. I can rig up to mitigate other shortfalls, but I want that big LF sensor in a box, uninhibited by crappy codecs, without paying an arm and a leg. BMD’s Pocket line is perfect for this. Sure, the box isn’t the best, but the sensors do great things, especially with Resolve to unpack it. Also, the Kipon Baveyes medium format booster is great and all, but if Metabones could do their own FF>MF booster sometime soon (like, yesterday?) that’d be great. I’m ready for an attainable IMAX digital alternative.

I’ve actually looked into it a bit deeper, the Tilta motors can do it. A friend sent me video evidence today (he has multiple motors.) You can pair two motors to one control, and you can auto-tune them to the travel of the hard stops on their respective lenses. I think it may take some tomfoolery if the two lenses in question have different minimum focus distances, but that’s surmountable. The bigger question is the linear vs logarithmic layout of some lens focus scales, but most seem to be in similar ballparks. Speaking of which, the Nucleus Nano really doesn’t read out distance marks for this reason... it’s just on a scale of 0-100. Might be nice to have control of those motors along with some math to display actual focus distance measurements, even if it requires a bit more setup. I’ve got a bit of spare cash knocking about in my LLC, so I’ll watch for the pre-order situation to develop. I’m very hopeful for an elegant and natural looking autofocus/assisted focus system, especially to pair with the odd 16mm film project that I tackle here and there. Pulling off a video tap has proved to be dangerously unreliable, and while a good 1st AC can easily remedy the situation, that’s not always in the cards.

@BTM_Pix How is this coming along? I know the whole world has kinda come to a halt, but I’m curious. I would throw in a slightly unorthodox feature request for addition at some point: control of two focus motors simultaneously. This would make it useable for 3D rigs, and for synchro-focus of an anamorphic adapter and taking lens (although the latter would require disparate lens profiles for each lens to be running simultaneously, rather than a simple duplicate motor control output.) I’m sure there are other potential uses (2 camera shoots, etc,) but it’s something I wish Tilta did NOW with their kits having multiple motors.

Yes, I wouldn’t say any of their current offerings are quite close enough, but I think based on what I’ve seen is possible, they definitely could make a filter that got 80-90% of the way there. The benefit of doing it optically is that the effect doesn’t rely on there being adequate digitized information present in the file. Digital still has limited dynamic range, and in all my attempts at emulating halation in post, I’ve run into that as a real issue. Once a light source is blown out/overexposed, there’s no way to determine in a technical sense how far blown it really is. But a good filter can pick up on that easily, and bloom that onto the high contrast areas of the captured image appropriately. That’s really been my main gripe with digital halation... either I don’t have hardly any, or turning it up makes it go everywhere. There’s very little differentiation.

Better thermal management/active vents will probably remain something you have to look to the Cine division for.

Any thoughts on a glimmer or similar lens filtration glass for a halation effect? It seems to happen at very high contrast edges, and only on very bright light sources, up where there often isn’t much dynamic range/differentiation between bright and BRIGHT (if that makes sense). Ive always thought if Tiffen were to do a low power red/pink glimmer glass, that might get awfully close.

I’ve done a decent amount of front/rear group mismatch pairing. What I’ve found is this: 1. you can often find mismatched pairings that function at equivalent quality to their matched arrangement. 2. mismatched pairings are not able to be focused, meaning that they are in focus only at infinity. (This is different from what anamorphic users refer to as “dual focus.” The anamorphic is infinity only just to be clear.) 3. The maximum angle of view is determined by the front element group, and cannot be changed. (Note a key distinction however that the squeeze ratio changes, which DOES change which taking lens focal length will be associated with the unchanging angle of view. This also means that the vertical field of view changes as well.) 4. the source-point flare comes from the rear element group, the secondary mirrored flare comes from the front element group. To take all of this and give a specific example, let’s say I’m trying out pairings with the front element group from my Kowa 16-H. On my Blackmagic PCC4K, lets say my favorite lens to use with it stock is my Canon FD 24mm, which also happens to be the widest lens I can use if my final delivery is going to be a tasty, vignette-free 2.39:1. Let’s move on now to the (imaginary) mismatch pairing. I have an old B&L CinemaScope kicking around, and I pair the rear grouping from this scope with the front grouping from my 16-H, in front of my 24mm, which is set to infinity. The B&L elements are nice and cozy right up against the 24mm’s front, but things look blurry. I move the 16-H front grouping in and out until I get a nice sharp image. Neat! If I focus the 24mm on something closer, say, my C-stand at 5’ from camera, I can’t seem to achieve anything sharp no matter what the distance is between the Kowa and B&L element groups. Oh well... infinity it is! (That’s what variable diopters are for anyway, right?) Ok, so we have our trusty 24mm. We have a Frankenstein of glass from two scopes in front of it, and it’s nice and sharp (at least at infinity,) so what now? Well, let’s shoot a chart, pull some footage into an NLE, and figure out what the squeeze of our new Frankenscope happens to be. A quick stretch of the footage to where the chart looks normal reveals..... 1.75X! Neat! Now, there’s definitely some vignette, but that’s ok, we’re after 2.39:1 delivery. Let’s crop in until the vignette goes away, shall we? The result? vignette free when cropped to 3:1. That’s cool, we could probably go a little wider with the spherical lens. A quick scour through the camera bag unearths a LUMIX 21mm lens. Let’s ditch the 24mm and try the 21mm. Abracadabra, drop some 21mm footage into the timeline, desqueeze and crop out the vignette: 2.39:1. There now exists a 1.75X scope that can go as wide as a 21mm taking lens! That’s a wider taking lens than the Kowa could handle stock! Or is it? A meander through the maths: 21/1.75=12mm lens equivalent horizontal 24/2=12mm lens equivalent horizontal BUT!!! (You may say, and you’re correct) there is no vertical squeeze factor here, so vertically, the 21mm is STILL wider than the 24mm. Yes. You are using a wider focal length lens, but your horizontal field/angle of view remains unchanged. The two scope configurations both are and aren’t equivalent to each other. Oh the joys of anamorphic. This is why anamorphic lenses are said to have two focal lengths (one horizontal and another vertical,) and it’s why we get oval bokeh too! The final kicker is when we add our variable diopter of choice: an SLR Magic Rangefinder. The stock Kowa is now choked to a maximum of 28mm, and the Frankenscope can only do 25mm. It turns out that in practical application, the limit of all wide anamorphic adapter setups is the variable diopter, not the scope. The new Rapido FVD-35 is right at the limits of the very widest anamorphic adapters. What’s more, a bigger diopter setup to squeeze out those last few distorted degrees of angle-of-view would be laughably gigantic. The FVD-35 is 134mm in diameter. That means it already sits only 2cm above a 15mm LWS rod setup, so unless you want to go full 19mm studio rods and use 6.5X6.5 mattebox for filtration, the FVD-35 will do “just fine.” Why, then, would anyone bother to Frankenscope? Well, because lenses are so much more than the numbers. Even by the numbers, you might prefer a novel squeeze ratio. You might want beautiful mixed gold and teal flares. You might want the thick, lush flares from an old scope with some added sharpness and contrast from one more modern. You might want a unique look, that’s all your own, completely custom. Besides that, the experimentation is really fun! A quick look at remotely reasonable anamorphic offerings reveals: Xelmus has a 40mm and Atlas has a 32mm, both of which only cover a standard 35mm open gate. The FVD-35 is right in this ballpark in any case. Unless you find an exceptionally rare 22mm LOMO, or rent some top shelf glass, you’re not going to go wider... never mind that depth of field becomes so deep when this wide that the differences between spherical and anamorphic are difficult for most people to differentiate. As someone who hacked scopes apart to try and go wider, here’s my conclusion: do what works for you, but you’re gonna need a big variable diopter, because that’s the bottleneck. After that, find your wide scope of choice, Frankensteined or stock, it’s just preference. I had some awesome results from very humbly priced pairings. I bought a half dozen or so scopes off eBay, and did my level best to spend $100 or less on each. A great trick is taking big/long adapters meant for 35mm projection, and pairing their front element groups with rears from shorter 16mm projection scopes. As a general rule, this seems to significantly shorten the scope’s length, and reduces the squeeze factor. There are a plethora of theoretical 1.8X, 1.75X, 1.5X, and 1.33X custom scopes out there for anyone with the willpower and funding to go on a mix and match bonanza.

HAH good luck. Everything these days is “Full Frame,” except it’s not... because they always choke the high quality modes to 16:9, wasting precious sensor height.

Kodak Atlanta are the lab I’ll use if I have a choice, yeah. This had to be developed and scanned by Pro8mm at the time, KFLATL were closed down because of COVID restrictions. They did a good job, but Kodak’s scans are just a hair more crisp.

No open gate??

Taking lens was Navitron 25mm f0.95, mostly around f2-2.8. I’ll preach 1.75X on 16mm until the day I die. The camera-to-dollar ratio on regular-16 versus super-16 bodies is kinda ridiculous. I just bought the absolute top quality 1.75X adapter (Kowa Inflight), and I have a crystal sync sound camera with coaxial mags and a color video tap... still all for cheaper than a S16 SR-2. That’s the REAL beauty of film. There’s no sensor difference between bodies, it’s all in the film stock. Would I absolutely love a 416, an SR-3 Highspeed, or even an XTR Prod? Absolutely and maybe some day. But if I don’t tell you what camera I shot on, can you even tell? Not really. There’s a lot of great glass out there too for cheaper simply because it’s not a PL mount body. I can get some classic Cooke and Angenieux glass in Eclair’s CA-1 mount or even in Arri STD. And C-Mount? Perfect for 16mm and very adaptable.

Had some footage left in a mag from another project, so I walked down to the river behind my house and used it up:

If I were to concept a camera, here’s where it would sit: 1. A symmetrical sensor unit, something like a cross between ZCam and Sigma FP 2. A first-party detachable battery grip that’s essentially all the right-hand grip stuff usually built into DSLR/Mirrorless bodies (D-pad, scroll wheels, fn buttons, REC, etc.) The battery grip can be detached and mounted elsewhere via a cable. 3. A first-party detachable rear touch screen. Simple single-hinge 180 degrees towards the top of the camera with auto image flip. The screen can be detached and mounted elsewhere via a cable. 4. Detaching the screen reveals a V-Mount plate. 5. Dual pixel AF on sensor, with a FIZ output port on the front of the camera body, so that the camera AF can drive rail mounted focus/iris/zoom motors on any manual lens. 6. Electronic ND. 7. True full frame sensor with open gate compressed RAW internal recording up to 30fps. 8. Open gate all-I-frame LOG mode up to 60fps. 9. Open gate compressed LOG up to 120fps. 10. Dual native ISO. 11. ~5K/6K. 12. Positive Lock L-Mount or comparable large diameter rigid short FFD mount. 13. XLR Audio V-Mount stackable module with two inputs that are 32bit float capable. Bonus if it’s a SoundDevices MixPre licensed unit. This unit can provide pass-through for the rear screen or a V-Mount battery. 14. An EVF optical accessory for the detachable screen. 15. A V-Mount Stackable wireless module which supports low latency HD monitoring, multi-device (latency) Wi-Fi smartphone monitoring, camera control, and FIZ control. 16. RAW can be over USB-C to SSD, but third parties will just make dual-SSD holders that stack in the pass-through V-Mount stack, so it almost may as well be internal. 17. I’m one of those weirdos who would rather have a hard mounted sensor instead of IBIS, so... yeah. The core body kit is just brick+grip+monitor. Basically a slightly bulked Sigma FP until you break it apart. You add the stackables as needed, and bank somewhat on 3rd parties to make ergonomic solutions for grip/monitor relocation, rails, boosters, shoulder pads, FIZ motors, etc.