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Update: uploaded trailer

£350 £315 Also open to offers... message me :-) Would much rather sell it here than on eBay

Hi guys - having a little clear out. 1x ISCO Ultra-Star Plus 2.1 (RED) anamorphic lens. I think this is the highest-resolving specification lens out of the ISCO ultra stars. 1x Redstan custom Ultra-Star clamp (68mm back thread) - with retaining ring Bought the lens itself from redstan a few months ago. Just never ended up using it as I haven't got a focus module. Thought I would offer it on here (where people actually know their stuff ;)) before I put it on eBay. Would be a great lens for the FM Lens focus module. I've thrown in some nylon grub screws to fit it inside the module. Condition: Optical: Clear, no fungus, scratches, or dust. No issues. Mechanical: Focus ring is a bit on the heavy side. But no serious problems. In my experience the ultra stars often have tighter focus rings. Cosmetic: Great. No issues. Price: £315 + shipping from London, UK. Paypal only, please. All photos taken today (18.12.2014). Let me know if you're interested!

BTW Sean (the US guy you posted) does make gears for the UK. I've ordered 3 gears from him before, one for my Kowa B&H. Just message him directly and he'll sort you out ;-)

Looks great. I just don't understand why the FM guys didn't do these kind of portrait tests in the first place. Would have been a no-brainer! (instead of their slow focus pulls through the barley field)

Do you guys with isco ultra-stars and cineluxes get a strange distortion? (uneven at the edges) Which makes pans look kinda weird. I've got both a cinelux and an isco star but both have this problem, which is why I'm sticking to my kowa for now...

on BMCC EF and Kowa Bell & Howell I've gone to 28mm widest (voigtlaender 28mm f/2.8). I think that's the limit - 25mm already vignettes.

I think there are more factors than just sharpness (in my opinion). I have a Kowa B-H (had 3 copies before), a red isco ultra star, and a schneider cinelux. In my experience, the cinelux is the sharpest, but then the Kowa B-H lets you go wider (up to 28mm on BMCC) and doesn't have the weird uneven distortion like the ultra star / cinelux do...

first BMCC to Rec709 lut from blackmagic, and then rec709 to cineon conversion. Ideally I would have some kind of sRGB-to-BMDFilm or rec709-to-BMDFilm lut to avoid the cineon step (and just grade everything together as if it were BMCC footage) - but I haven't found such a thing...

Shot on a BMCC with Samyang primes for the spherical stuff (16/2.2 and 35/1.5), and 28mm voigtlander with kowa bell & howell 2X for the anamorphic. Colour-wise it's done in a cineon workflow (converting both rendered sRGB and blackmagic's log-gamma prores to cineon) - then graded with some film emulation luts and a bit of complementary highlight/shadow colour correction

PPS I also saw a plugin which could do distorted/swirly bokeh as you got further away from the centre (such as helios 85mm '> ) - which seemed super interesting, but I haven't tested it yet. link: http://hagbarth.net/?p=768

Thanks :-) Will keep you updated! Yeah frischluft is great. Also just the default Defocus/ZDefocus nodes in Nuke does the same thing for oval iris. I also simulated subtle anamorphic lens breathing during a focus pull too (just by animating horizontal and vertical stretch). PS Here's a purely in-camera shot (Kowa B&H with a 28mm taking lens) that i used for reference '>

Screen grabs from a short sci-fi film I'm directing. http://alexeymarfin.com/blue-eyed-me-coming-soon/ Can you can tell apart which shots are real anamorphic shots and which are spherical + pseudo-anamorphic aesthetic done in post? ;-) Any feedback welcome :-)

Bought a lens through that program once - no tracking updates, of course - and it was just left lying on the floor (!?) of the public corridor in my apartment building. And I was home all day, so no one even tried to deliver it. Luckily I found it and picked it up before someone else did, but still very strange. Have avoided that service ever since.

Sounds great! How do you increase sharpness with a wide angle attachment? :o how is the CA? with regards to the topic... i've been having the similar thoughts: I'm a vfx artist and for any cgi integration, working with anamorphic footage is such a ball-ache, compared to spherical stuff.... Mainly, of course, because of the non-uniform distortion the anamorphic lens gives... I do love shooting anamorphic for my own personal work, but professionally, I can't see myself working with anamorphic footage for any shots which require heavy vfx/cgi comped in, simply because the workflow becomes such a PITA... (unless of course it's a massive budget with super modern anamorphics) for me it's also the fact that all (or almost all) of the anamorphic "voodoo" can be recreated in post: - flares - either purely cg or shooting real flares on a black background with real dirty anamorphics to get the grimeyest flares and just comping them in ;-) - lens distortion. using grids from real lenses like 40mm panavision primo you can get pretty close to - oval bokeh can be sometimes done - anything with a depth map or where the foreground/background/etc plates are separate layers, (which have been filmed/rendered in-focus) can easily be de-focused with any shape aperture. It would be good to have an oval aperture modified spherical lens, though - for portrait shots and things where I'm not filming separate background and foreground plates, though. Maybe I will look into that :-) I'm still an anamorphic fetishist, but I guess i'm realising that I like having the freedom of controlling the intensity of the voodoo, rather than having it "baked in" to the footage. :D (That and anamorphics do degrade sharpness/resolution, even a red isco HD plus ultra star or cinelux :-) just my two cents... :-)

Just out of curiosity - how do you make the oval aperture? Do you place a second disc with an oval aperture behind/near the original (circular) aperture? Or do you replace the original aperture entirely? PS are you going to modify other lenses apart from helios-44 in the future? Maybe mir-1 37mm if you wanna go down the similar aesthetic route ;-)

BTW I have one of those gold schneiders with the front lips for sale if anyone is looking for one? Just having a clear-out so not looking to make a big profit.

Why specifically pentax 110 lenses though?

Great! looking forward to it :-)

Hey comurit - next time you speak to the anamorphicshop guy, could you please ask him for a test video with a fast focus pull? All the tests he has so far are 20-30 seconds to focus from close to infinity. Could he do it in 4-5 seconds or something? Thanks! (and not just fast-forwarding the existing ones ;-) ) I want to see how the lens breathes, etc - I hope he's not avoiding the fast focus pulls for a reason

Great! hopefully they will show the mounting process with those lenses too (as they're not 70.6mm dia)

Nice video. Just got a cinelux myself. What's the diameter of the back thread on it? (you mentioned you screwed it on with a step ring)

My main concern at this stage is that, in each video, it takes them 30 seconds to do a focus pull... Does it takes 20 turns to do it, or are they trying to hide the focus breathing?

So... any news on that potential group discounf? ;-)

I asked anamorphic-shop the same question on facebook - he said yes, but because the FM attachment is designed for a 70.6mm diameter (like the cinelux / ultra stars) and the B&H is smaller, it would need an additional mounting ring. He said he would post a video of the additional mounting ring soon, so I guess we'll see what that means