Mondo

heh.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
2/10

'Covert' Flare Factory in black..  
 

Have your friend shine a flashlight at the anamorphic. Use the flares to make sure that your lens is properly aligned.

Just did a shoot with the D5200 last night and I was very impressed. Used it along side my GH3. Footage cuts nicely together so far and if I didn't know which camera was which, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Very close.

thanks for doing this test my n*****.  

These look great! Wondering when I'd be able to get my hands on them.

Hi! The band I made this video for finally released it and I'm very happy, so I wanted to share it with you guys.
 
It was a lot of work and it's not without its flaws, but considering the crew (three people including me apart from the make-up artist) and the time we had it came out quite decent.
 
Please tell me what you think!
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhqTsAmPYYs
 
By the way, I shot it with the Driftwood Apocalypse Now! 6GOP Nebula patch, and the lenses I used were:
 
· Rokinon 28mm f2.8
· Minolta MD 50mm f1.7
· Minolta MD 135mm f2.8
 
If you have any questions just ask!

Hey guys. cheers for the comments.

@ Andy, yes these are helios 44's. A superb base for the concept. They are sharp and characterful out of the box. 'tanks' as you say:) a superb design. I wouldn't say any 'improvements' are made optically, rather they have worse optical properties!, or should I say, properties lens manufacturers try to remove in order to get cleaner images. Obviously sharpness is maintained, but various tweeks are made to element coatings, tints are applied to give more or less temperature to element glow, to match or contrast the colour of the flares created by your choice of anamorphic lens, anti flare/glare properties are tweeked by machining the inside barrel and metal components. As a result these are less contrasty than a typical standard helios 44. -Almost to the point where you'd want a lens hood on bright days in order to limit the glare to only be prominent in situations where there is a light source in shot, at which point the magic happens. These are certainly not lenses for slick product photography shots, but more for a grungy look, or to add a bit more of a vintage look to the modern and sharp anamorphics which give the lovely bokeh and waterfall distortions but can often lack a bit of visual adhesive we see on the old panavisions and 16mm anamorphots. Once attached to the anamorphot they do a nice job of boosting the general rawness of the image and the lens defects that often result in creation of those lovely optical artifacts.

@Brucker. Cheers man. The machining adds a bit of an industrial look to the old and tired helios form. Though these are crisp and sharp looking on the outside, they are graggy/grungy on the inside:). They are not a direct replacement to your standard tired helios 44 - Personally i would say you would want a standard helios in your kit alongside one of these, these are in no way better than a standard helios 44, but just different. If someone wanted a standard helios 44, but with the nice machined finish on the outside we can do this too.


@Mondo. Glad you like them:) They will be available soon (within a few weeks). Just sorting out the information, packaging and deciding on the options that will be offered. We will be putting them up on ebay or as direct purchase slightly cheaper if it avoids ebay and paypal fees.


I'll send over a sample to EOSHD and let him have a play. Will be nice to see what the master thinks

I agree. It takes some time to get used to focusing both lens correctly.
I use following technique: for close-ups I just focus both lenses all the way down and fine tune via taking lens focus.
For focusing on far objects everything is vice versa, except for fine tuning is done again with taking lens.
For inbetween distances I try to focus both lenses on approximately same distances basing on focusing marks on 'em.
 
Wish you luck and lots of patience while practicing.

Nice article and some great shots on the video.  The REWO rig, bmcc and isco looks like a lovely refined system.  good balance looks evident.  one of the first images of the bmcc rigged into something that looks usable and comfortable to handle.
 
I didnt know the 54 was less sharp than the 36 and I feel the lack of 36 style barrel glow is a negative point about the 54.  Something is quite lovely about the glowing barrel of the 36.
 
re. optimum lens choice, I look forward to sending over a sample to EOSHD of the new custom lenses I am developing specifically for adding some extra character to footage (and primarily anamorphic footage)  :)  I think they might add a hint of extra rustic glitz to the image from the mighty 54! 

There's a lag of 1 second from when record button is pressed and recording begins. More worryingly there's a 1.5-2 second curtailment at the end of the clip so if you stop recording a stopwatch on 10 seconds, the end of the clip will show the watch on 8.5 seconds.
 
This was in the pre-production model too and I told Panasonic to fix it.
 
Seems they did not do this.

Tokina 11-16 with Novoflex Nikon mount adapter. Allows you to control the aperture.

I'd rather talk about cameras.

There it is, the 'Petit-Cinevision'. If I google this, the only hit I get is the eBay auction where I bought it... Could it be something like Angenieux? It also says 'made in Japan' on the side.
 

For good measurements, the Petit-Cinevision next to a bag of Haribo Goldbären. Everybody knows them right?
The Goldbären where supplied by the seller, which is good, so my girlfriend didn't go crazy I bought 'another stupid lens'. She ate them before I could take the picture.
 

The front. The glass looks really clean, in very good condition. The focus ring isn't smooth at all, its bumpy and lacking damping. But the lens elements seem to move fine. Also, it focuses from 0,9 meters to infinity, which is awesome.
 

My baby and the Jupiter 8 50mm f/2. The Petit-Cinevision already came with a Bolex-clamp included, I'll need some crazy step down filters though. It looks like it's made for the Jupiter though.

I find the magic window magnified focus assist is working well. Keeps your composition full screen and magnifies the centre.

Peaking on such a little screen is is pointless honestly, punching is alot more useful to me. Can we please get the screen info to stay on at all times, eff peaking just let me have my info on all the time!

All of these parameters are very important to 2 types of people:-
 
1. The ones who shoot big budget films, cinematic automotive commercials and other high budget stuff.
2. The people who need a reason to not go out and shoot anything.  Blaming the limitations of 8bit colour etc for their lack of ideas or personal drive.  
 
 
I used to hanker after 444 10bit, uncompressed blah blah blah.  now it bores me.  IMO you'll probably be happier not knowing about it.

I've tried the GH3 with Blackmagic HyperDeck Shuttle 2.
 
Unfortunately there's no quality gain from the HDMI 1080i output. Internal codec is very good and the HDMI output is interlaced before it reaches the external recorder. I could successfully deinterlace it with JES but final result was a bit softer than internal recording. It would be interesting to try the 1080p output, but you'd need a recorder that can do 1080/60p.
 
It doesn't do 24p or 25p native 1080p via HDMI. The 24/25p is PsF (interlaced wrapper).

B&H just has way higher demand than any other camera store. Manufacturers do favor them because of this, and they often times get more product than other stores, but not at a scale relative to the massive skew in customer base. There is no way for them to keep up with basically the entire country turning to them first for new equipment.

Anyways, I took gravitatemediagroup's advice and was able to snag one from Samy's. Canceled my order at B&H after they told me that I would likely not get one from their current shipment.. Excited to finally get this thing all up in my gob.

MY PRE-ORDER IS FINALLY IN AT B&H. Checked my order status and it's in stock and should be shipping soon.

Y'all know what Darias Khondji and Dean Cundey, Kovaks, Carpenter, Storaro, Toland, Conrad Hall, Harris Savides and pretty much anyone you can think of and dozens you can't, guys who shoot great looking stuff on purpose, not by accident, not because they got lucky but by design and through their own effort and expertise, either for the selfish benefit of the image itself or in service to the story, you know what they did so that they could do that stuff when it count, when they were getting paid to do what they did, when dozens if not hundreds of people were depending on them, waiting on them, when possibly millions of dollars were on the line or potentially rendered forfeit, you know what they were doing so that they could do what they did?
 
They were shooting tests.
 
Every camera.  Every lens.  Thoroughly.  They didn't waste other people's times learning what they could and couldn't do under a variety of common or unique circumstances on-the-clock.  They're smart enough to realize the occasional "happy accident" of a flare or focus pull or color combination or Golden Triangle configuration that just happend to occur at just the right time such that a most amazingly emotional chord is struck when the image is viewed by most humans is great but discovering that that last take, the one where the set/car/character/town is destroyed by fire, the giant monster is blown up, the command shuttle breaks apart the rented helicopter is finally, perfectly aligned with the setting sun to create a perfect silhouette through rippling heat refraction in some exotic locale on their last day of access or visa or the last raw nerve of some local potentate or executive producer isn't wasted because they didn't know WTF they were doing and just hoping for the best.  
 
They weren't satisfied knowing the stuff they were using was expensive, or from a well known pedigree, or supposedly crafted by Santa Claus's most talented, clever elves, or promised in some way to never fuck up, under any circumstance, with any other combination of previous, contemporary or future widgets made by Satan Claus or the Easter Bunny or Baby Jesus.  They had to know.  So they could do it.  On purpose.  On demand.  Repeatedly. 
 
They shot tests.
 
What they likely didn't do, for all sorts of reasons, is share these tests with the world, in a public venue, so that others at, below or above their stature and experience could comment on, learn from, share, ridicule or improve upon.  (this last bit was my maybe cryptic way of saying we should be lucky we're in a community where ideas and techniques are shared openly and not hoarded.  I'm not saying "stop posting tests" and non-narrative videos)
 
edit: TLDR version -- y'all stop marginalizing folks posting test videos because that's how you familiarize yourself with your gear enough to be useful to yourself and anyone else.  It's what the  name brand pros do so snarky comments about yet-another-boring-test-video are really just ignorant.

Why not rent some and find out? Since you shoot GH2 you can adapt anything to it. They have macro lenses as well.
 
 
http://www.borrowlenses.com/

I totally agree with you on this. There's a place for separate discussion of all the elements important to filmmaking. If I see anyone trying to derail a discussion about some technical aspects of film production on here with their boringly obvious and uninformative 'content is king' mantras I will be, to quote Tarantino, shutting their butts down.
 
The analogy you used about the actor board was perfect. One wouldn't interrupt a discussion about acting technique with something completely irrelevant about CMOS sensors so why do we see it happen so often in reverse on camera forums?
 
"Hey Daniel Day Lewis your acting is pretty useless without a lens!! How about we talk about what's really important!!?? Canon or Nikon glass?"

There is no ADR, as ADR is usually a process after picture editing is locked. We are editing the film now, and this is a working trailer. It is also, as the article's title clearly states, about a very specific type of anamorphic lens, which I find provides a magically slight distortion to reality. A Frazier (correct spelling) lens allows the foreground and background to be in focus, and is great for wildlife shots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frazier_lens

Anamorphic and Frazier are very different animals. This is also not an article about acting, and having seen all the footage of this film, I find the acting to be very good, very natural and real. I see the written story coming to life through the characters. Other professionals in this business, one with two academy awards, feels the same way. His name will be in the final credits.

Something else should be said here.

Most filmmakers I know salute any filmmaker who goes through what it takes to get a feature film in the can. Whether it was shot on an Alexa or an iPhone. For anybody else reading this, if you have a passionate dream to tell a story in moving pictures and sound, GO FOR IT!! Know the difference between constructive, well informed, and useful criticism, and destructive, sour criticism, which should be ignored. Brush it off and move on.

Check that. I called Kenmore and they still had some in stock. No sales tax outside of WA. Forget B&H for the moment. No reason to keep waiting. I grabbed one. Finally!