Lucian

Thanks Julian, this is exactly what I was hoping would be the case. You gain a stop of light without increasing softness so to speak.

Hi Speedbooster users,

I was hoping someone could enlighten me on how these things work.

Most fast lenses are actually pretty un-usable at their top speeds. So what I'm wondering is; lets say you have a f2 lens that is really too soft to use until stopped down to 2.8, does that mean when using the speedbooster you could now use that lens at the equivalent of f2 and it would be sharp?

I'm assuming so, because there is really no point in making most lenses faster unless their open aperture performance increases parallel...

Thanks!

Awesome footage, thanks for posting.

What aperture can you get down to with these contax and retain sharpness?

Love it!

where is this shot?  the last shot looks a little like the bp refinery in long beach, ca.

bmpcc above the ikonoskop and d16 for image quality? no way! value for money perhaps.

Kodak truesense sensors are gorgeous IMO  :)

If that were Los Angeles it would likely attract unwanted attention from police, The rails are fairly subtle but the monitor would get a lot of attention.  With my loupe and pistol grip my GH2 gets folks asking what kind of camera I'm shooting on.  It changes the silhouette of the DSLR just enough that it's no longer inconspicuous.

Really? I guess I've been lucky. I've shot around L.A with rails + shoulder rig, glidecam and vest, even driven down PCH right past police with a camera magic armed to the car without incident as yet!

Mjfan :  I've been researching these two myself. There is an exhaustive breakdown of both over on kenrockwell.com

Although he seems to love nikkon even claiming the 50mm is superior to the contax ziess,  he does mention in one review:

"I was never happy with the fast Nikon normal lenses. My Minolta Rokkors were better, giving much better performance wide open."

So if you are going to be shooting wide open a lot such as low light or trying to squeeze bokeh out of a smaller sensor camera the rokkors might be a better pick.

 

 

which type of vintage lens is better for a cinema-like image on a g6? would like to stay on one system, thanks!

 

I spoke to VD. They are already using the new design.

"We have modified the original design and are delivering ISCO units in the new form now.

I am not sure where the Lighter come from , we have not changed this at all and do not propose to as the components are aluminium which they have to be to provide the new facilities.

Cut Off . The optical performance of the unit is not controlled by us however we have modified the original concept to allow the ISCO unit to be mounted closer to the Taking lens , this does allow for better coverage .

The other change we made was to introduce a more robust locking system."

Now I'm really tempted.

I agree, I bought the dell myself and a color munki. It's a decent poor man's grading setup if calibrated correctly.

http://www.amazon.com/Silica-Gel-Desiccants-Inches-Packets/dp/B009NH5S8U/ref=lh_ni_t?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=AR8XJJ19SNPNX

broken link ...

(something like that? http://www.amazon.de/St%C3%BCck-Silicagel-Silicabeutel-Gramm-regenerierbar/dp/B00977COAG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391099607&sr=8-1&keywords=trockenmittel+silicagel )

@Ch_D that's great news, I almost caved last week and sent it to VD. I wrote to them a while ago and brought up the vignette issue and asked if they had any ideas and they never wrote back. Could you please elaborate, did they give you date for the new design?

I played around with making a cover, nothing spectacular as yet, the problem is most of the designs that I have come up with end up covering the distance markings which I need to make sure I don't unscrew the front element.

how did your follow focus stopper idea work out?

Very cool!

what is the florescent light? is that a portable tube?

Thanks for posting. I am always hunting for the best iscorama taking lenses. The DSO 2x oval aperture isco optimized helios is top dog IMO at the moment :)

Contax looks very clean and sharp!

Outputting to pro res (mac) or extremely high bitrate  x264 before uploading to youtube/vimeo helps. Unfortunately though

they will always re-compress. I

Hi, 

thanks a lot. 

I corrected the distortion, but more would affect the image quality. 

Also, the youtube compression is awful. The video result on my computer is insanely better, even the compressed output from Premiere Pro. But then after the upload it looks bad. Any suggestion ? 

Yes the jupiter is hopeless wide open.

Also, I think the academy has a very limited scope on cinematography.

The master says best:

http://sea.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/874483/christopher-doyle-interview-part-2-life-of-pi-oscar-is-an

For Her, 

 

It was a really tight budget with a tiny crew.  The ACM article makes no mention of any specific instance where the C300 was used.  I haven't seen the film yet but I'm betting, being they shot in LA, on location, with almost no money and a tiny crew, it was used to impromptu steal a shot or location discretely or just get a camera crammed somewhere the Alexa was just too big to go.

Apparently much of the exterior stuff was shot in shanghai. They had trouble finding non white extras and so the was a bit of fuss about the lack diversity in the "future".

I saw the film and loved it. I think it's an obvious choice to shoot a film set in the future on digital but to me it would have been much better on 35mm since it's really more of a love story.

16 million in box office off a 20m budget (not including marketing). I hope it can make some money on VOD and other avenues. It is almost impossible to make a good film and make a return :(

 additional focal lengths are in pipeline.  I'd hoped for them to be available sooner, but it's taking longer to develop than I'd expected.  looks like possibility of a 40mm and a 25mm, both in f2 aperture in the next few months.

Love it. Thank god for DSO!

thanks for the comments.  does the single focal length pose a big turn off?  

 

-please bear in mind the key criteria is to develop a full frame friendly outcome, with possibility of using the crop modes in ML to obtain various field of views.  and for use with speed booster or not depending on fov required when using on smaller sensors.

At first I thought a single focal length wouldn't interest me, but I had not thought of using it full frame with crop modes. Could actually turn a weakness into a strength since you wouldn't be constantly swapping lenses. Clever.

Price for me would depend entirely on the quality and character of the results so it's hard to say.

That said, I don't own a FF camera  and if I did I'd still be keener on and pay more for; a standardized set of matching DSO pairing lenses spanning a good focal range.

Interesting. Isco owners are lucky to have you testing and innovating for such a niche market.

I take it you have tried the Tair 135mm and Jupiter 9 85mm? I found them to play okay with iscorama although the Jupiter 9 gets a cheesy diffusion glow wide open. I've also tried a switar 25mm which was not the greatest match. I'm curious how modern glass like sigma primes fair too.

Honestly for narrative 35mm (mir24) and 58mm (helios) end up beng used for mosly, because I trust them not to do anything funky when I'm under the gun time wise, and also because I do a lot of shoulder rig or glidecam stuff and any longer becomes too hard to stabilize.

I'm moving onto the digital bolex which has an even smaller sensor but planning to use the 0.58x speedbooster to bring it up to a 1.74x crop, so I imagine I will continue to stay in 30-85mm range the majority of the time.

A set of DSO isco optimized for x2 oval spanning that range would sublime,   You selling or have plans for a standardized set? 

It has two CF card slots. I don't believe you can record direct to them on the launch firmware but the SSD is enterprise class, rated to run 5 years continuously.

 

unfortunately this camera appears to have a classic case of a solution-looking-for-a-problem, starting from the form factor which doesn't lend itself either to traditional mounting solutions nor to newer DSLR rigs. Sure you can mount it on a tripod, but trying to attach it to a rail system with a follow focus gear is going to be...challenging.

 

The internal drive can hold about an hour-ish and then some worth of video, and the data can then be transferred to the CF cards, or to a computer through a USB 3 slot. Transfer time through USB 3 for about 500Gb worth of data....about an hour. 

 

Lens mount is a C-type. This was another bit of odd choice to me, while once again this mount is true to the original Bolex, why require the end user to buy into yet another type of adapter, particularly one which is not used by anyone else?

 

2K -- The sensor is a super-16mm sized one, shooting at 2K uses the entire sensor, while shooting in 1080p mode crops the sensor down to what Joe described as regular 16mm size. In my opinion, 2K offers neither high enough resolution for re-cropping and enlargement in post, nor is particularly useful as a delivery format for web, festivals, and DVD/Blu Ray where this camera's output is likely going to end up. So why not either stick to 1080 and use the full sensor, or go all the way up to 4K?

 

 

The camera has it's compromises, but I wanted to mention some corrections.

The 500gb drive holds almost 2hours of 1080 RAW footage, not 1 hr.  Personally I wouldn't bother with cf cards except redundancy. Firmware update will enable automatic dumping to the cf cards when not recording. If you must though.

The camera does 1080p(16mm mode), 2k(s16) and a firmware update is planned for using the entire sensor to do 4:3 (for anamorphic and other use.  I think many people plan to use 16mm and s16 glass with their respective sensor crops so it makes sense.

The camera ships with c-mount, but there M43, PL, EF coming. Better than adapting if you can.

Internal battery is does 4 hours shooting which is not too bad compared to the pocket . External switchronix does 12hrs.

There is no problem mounting it to a normal rail system and FF.

Spectacular! thanks for posting.

The Olympus plays quite nice. I'm still trying to find the perfect matching set of taking lens for the rama 36. Russians are nice but aside from the 44 they are a bit slow and inconsistent.

Considering going with a set of older manual Nikon's and running them through speedbooster on a s16 sensor.

Result should be a fast, cheap, accessible, rama compatible set of matching lenses.

What do you guys think?  what are ya fave taking lenses?  new thread?

I think this is the best example of where you and I differ in our priorities.  A Red Epic is cheaper than an Alexa Studio and almost 5 times the resolution on paper.  But still, I'd choose an Alexa over the Epic.  

Exactly. I can definitely see 4k will be a help with compressed shooting and be a catlyst for overall improvement, but at the same time in this price range you can already buy raw 1080p cameras. Resolution and sharpness are not really where I feel the lacking...

raw for latitude in post with good DR at 1080p or 2k, from there my mind goes to lens choice, lighting, subject not resolution. 

That said I have never shot 4k, or seen a comparison of down sampling it to 1080p so maybe I'll change my mind once the gh4 comes out. 

a tiny version of something like a mbox donut, or just a plastic collar might do it. I'm reluctant to send to VD because they cover the rear element completely which means increased vignette on many lenses. I did inquire to see if they had any potential solutions but did not hear back.