valid

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...

All looks great. With regards to the grading, which tool LUT did you use to convert BMD Film to Cineon?

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...

Which camera/ lenses are you using? how did you color grade too?

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.

The original aperture is completely removed and in its place sits a very thin and precisely milled brass insert.  There are a number of other people doing similar things, but they just seem to go for the laser cut acrylic route and as such the actual ovals are never as perfect due to the cut always being a bit graggy.

 

Rather than modify the limited range of alternative focal lengths from the same era and source, I have developed a ultra high quality wide angle attachment (the FF38), which FF58 users can install on their lens to widen the fov to 38mm.  all of the lens character of their ff58 remains intact, but the fov is widened.  and as it happens the wide angle attachment improves sharpness.  Moderate barrel distortion is visible, but nothing too bad!

 

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... :-)

I'll chip in if I may... :)

 

I literally don't know which I prefer and I'm actually building these things.  The reason dso started was to add a degreee of dirtiness to the iscorama (which at the time i wanted more gragginess from, with the singla focus and sharpness left intact!).  The 1.5x oval was created to add to the look of the 'rama and give a 2x oval look, which also sharpening the helios marginally.  

 

A wide open helios 44 + iscorama is indeed a beautiful thing that will never quite be matched with an oval aperture alone - 58mm, f2 and a 1.5x widening of horizontal fov as well as the physicality of the big hunks of glass from the 'rama' is a hard thing to match with anything.  The ff58 does not deliver horizontal streaks so if this is important then the ff58 will not do what you need.

 

The benefits of the oval aperture is that you gain sharpness by a huge amount (since the aperture on a 2x oval is stopped down by around 1.5 stops), but you maintain some of the shallowness of an f2 lens due to the oval remaining the same height as the original f2 aperture.  Then keep single focus capability, and keep size down - particularly on a full frame sensor since 58mm is relatively wide and you'd need an 85mm taking lens on a full frame snesor if using an anamorphic.  end result is a very similar fov.  though the 85mm will look 'bigger'.

 

The new FF38 attachment is a nice addition to both the ff58 and the helios 44.  since it widens fov while actually sharpening the image quite drastically.  If you have the pixels to spare, a big sensor or speed booster, and enough light to cope with the 1.5 stops slower aperture due to the oval, and can afford to crop, the ff58(2xoval) + FF38 wide angle attachment will stand head and shoulders above the iscorama for 95% of image quality criteria while being a lot less of a financial and creative burdon - when i take the iscorama out it always causes worry which always seems to impact on workflow.

 

I'm still gonna grab a 'fm module' when they are available so I guess that says it all:)  you cant beat real anamorphic if it's really needed!

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.

you can get a very very good anamorphic effect using Pentax 110 lenses add an oval aperture in the micro 4/3 adapter back and a vertical piece of fishing line and then just shoot as normal - it looks great and you just swop out the Pentax lenses on the front of the adapter as all the gubbins is in the adapter , you have 18mm,24mm 50mm and 70mm lenses at f2.8 to play with

frame to 2.39 add black bars in post - and most people will never know...

cheap and looks nice!

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? ;-)

Any idea if this will work with the Kowa B&H?

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