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Digital Sensors = Anamorphic Redundant?


dubzee
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Nice test. Looking like a good solution to get an easy anamorphic-like look. Sure as hell is easier to focus and handle than a dual focus setup.. Just don't like the corner performance, is that caused by the 0.7x adapter?

 

I don't think many people are using anamorphic for the resolution. It's all about the character of the lens.

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Your solution looks better than i expected, but I think the resolution loss due to the wide angle adaptor you are using is rendering the concept not a viable option IMO.  You have a raw enabled 5dmk3 there and the lens solution is not feeding the camera with resolution it should be getting.  a jupiter 85mm f2 and a £150 sankor 2x will deliver 3 times the resolution, even with the huge amounts of cropping you'll need to do on the 3.55:1 aspect ratio in order to obtain the 2.35 you're currently looking for.

 

to give you an idea of what i am talking about..  This video was shot on the Sony NEX5n.  avchd, with 24mbs and a mushy 1080p mode which is less than half the detail of 5dmk3 hacked for raw.

 

 

 

This video i feel highlights exactly the resolution gain you get from using a 1.5x anamorphic on a 16:9 sensor.  if i had cropped away 1/3rd of the image from the top and bottom rather than downscaling the 2552 x 1080 workflow to 1920x 800 (approx) the resolution would have really fallen down.  Granted the iscorama is a £2000 investment, but damn does it make the most of the limited resolution the camera captures! - i've enabled downloads should you wish to see the video in a better light without vimeo compression. 

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Ya that is a great vid! It'll be interesting to try my camera once they release the new debayer algorithms as part of the MLV extractors. As it stands it's kind of pixellated.

And hey... 2k GBP vs $300 CDN ain't bad for "better than expected".

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Not sure I understand... It's approximately 25% less pixels, not 14%.

 

To achieve 2.40:1 aspect ratio with the 5D you crop 1080 lines to 800 lines.  The 1080 lines of the original 16:9 footage corresponds to 20.25mm of sensor height and after cropping this means an effective vertical sensor size of 15mm.  After cropping, a "scoped" 5D represents a 36mm x 15mm sensor.  Anamorphic 35mm, however, is 21mm x 17.5mm at the negative which makes it a larger format by more like 16% (*) in the most important dimension with respect to lens selection, to framing, scale and focus distance.

 

Besides the elongated bokeh and horizontal flares (for bent glass up front versus the boring middle and rear anamorphic designs) the fact of it being a larger format plays into its overall aesthetic.  This is also a factor in its favor when shooting on smaller format cameras like MFT + 1.33x  versus shooting spherical and cropping in the same format (putting aside the oversampling and enhanced detail captured when conforming to flat 1080P).  

 

Anamorphic allows the use of the entire sensor height of the 16:9 camera which puts you closer to your subject than you would be when cropping for "scope" format.  It's vertical framing that determines your distance to subject after all, not horizontal, when you're dealing with widescreen.  Focusing on a subject that is closer to camera means enhanced bokeh (hence why anamorphic of any stripe is bokehlicious on 5D and similar cameras, even if the optics are sometimes harder to wrangle).

 

...And based on the discussions, turning 16:9 into 2.35:1 even with a real anamorphic isn't a resolution advantage.

 

 

Yeah it is.  Doubly true if you're shooting AVCHD.

 

 

(*) with only a single decimal place given for anamorphic and the cropped 5D being a whole number the math is a little "roundy" on this point given 15/17.5 = 0.857 --but-- 17.5/15 = 1.166 

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I have to disagree that there's a resolution advantage to downscaling from 16:9 to 2.35:1. If it was an analog optical process - sure - but there are fixed quanta and downscaling could introduce aliasing because of it through dithering.

 

Also remember the getting closer thing is abrogated by the fact that the 0.7x wide angle adapter gets me 14% closer.

 

Really what we're doing is comparing apples and oranges. I never said this was a replacement, but just an experiment I was doing to see how it turns out, with some thought-provoking discourse in the process.

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You're suggesting that supersampling introduces aliasing.  Mmm-kay, dubious but playing devil's advocate perhaps bad downscaling can introduce aliasing.  Yeah.  So do it well.  Do it right.  Use quality software.   Work at a high bit depth and use high quality scaling.  Folks wanting to cut corners and finish in their editing software, yeah, they might have some issues.

 

Not only does it not introduce aliasing it contributes to noise reduction as well as artifact reduction in the case of AVCHD footage.  That's not theory, that's experience.  Finishing in something like After Effects from a 32bit linear light workspace does not introduce the artifacts you're describing during down sampling.  Nothing negative is introduced.  I would hope that something like Resolve would be as capable.

 

Upsampling horizontally also is very forgiving.  Even at SD resolutions.   This is the defining exploit in our visual system that made the 16:9 anamorphic DVD the highest quality home release you could get of any film until BD. It's what's behind the color sub-sampling present in all broadcast video formats past, present and, looks like, future.  

 

With full-sample in the vertical field Sony was able to pull off their amazing con of 2001 convincing certain filmmakers that the original HDCAM was somehow the death-blow for film, with all of its 3:1:1 135Mbit 8-bit codec glory.

 

I will agree that optical does a better job, especially if all you're doing is a naive digital scale by comparison.  

 

Saying what you're doing is a viable alternative for folks with 36mm sensors is all fine and good.  I've suggested the same, given that, besides a few of the available adapters, large format cameras tend to have more caveats associated with compatible lenses, etc.  But the provocative title of this thread and several other statements within the thread go above and beyond claims of having a viable alternative.

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