2.35 aspect ratio on Super16

[James West]

I have a director who's interested in 2.35 on Super16. There is no plan on a blow-up, probably just finish to HD. I know there are anamorphic lens options for Super16, but I was just thinking of putting the matte on in post, and keeping it simple with spherical lenses. So, does anyone have war stories, or Pros and Cons? Thanks!

[David Mullen ASC]

If you just want the aspect ratio on video, just matte the image.

 

Anamorphic lenses for 35mm cine cameras have a 2X squeeze, thus giving you more than a 2.66 : 1 image in regular 16mm and a 3.36 : 1 image in Super-16, so you'd be cropping the sides to get to 2.35, compared to cropping top & bottom of Super-16 spherical to get it.

 

Unless you want the odd optical artifacts of anamorphic photography.

 

The other problem would be getting anamorphic lenses in short enough focal lengths for doing wide-angle shots in 16mm.

[Stuart Brereton]

I recently shot a short drama this way. We had the ground glass marked with tape to a 2.35 AR. We transferred the whole s16 neg area, and it will be letterboxed in post.

 

There were no particular problems that we had. In fact the only issue was with the framing chart that I shot at the head of the first roll. Despite taking time to set it up properly, in TK the chart appeared to be slightly dutched. However, all the footage after the chart was correctly oriented. I've no idea what caused it, so put it down to human error (mine).

 

I considered shooting anamorphic 16mm, but the difficulty in obtaining matched sets of lenses at an affordable price makes the tiny gain in neg area over s16 matted to 2.35 pointless. In addition, anamorphic 16mm is not a familiar format for many people which can cause problems in post (Adam Frisch has some horror stories to tell about this....)

[Jayson Crothers]

Mr. West! Welcome to the forum good sir........

[John Pytlak RIP]

If you crop, just remember you are not using much of the available Super-16 image area, so try to keep the graininess low: don't underexpose, use the slowest stock you have the light for, use modern stocks like Kodak VISION2 Color Negative films.

[James West]

Thanks for the great responses! I'm feelin' a lot better about this. Also, I just dug up an AC article that also talks about this situation, in April of 2004, the film "Never Die Alone", shot spherical, framing 2.35 for super16. Although they blew it up (cin.Matt Libatique, dir. Ernest Dickerson) from a DI. But at our budge, we're just going to video, so this will work out great.

 

Mr. Crothers good to hear from you! Happy Belated Birthday, by the way!

[John Pytlak RIP]

Thanks for the great responses! I'm feelin' a lot better about this. Also, I just dug up an AC article that also talks about this situation, in April of 2004, the film "Never Die Alone", shot spherical, framing 2.35 for super16. Although they blew it up (cin.Matt Libatique, dir. Ernest Dickerson) from a DI. But at our budge, we're just going to video, so this will work out great.

 

Mr. Crothers good to hear from you! Happy Belated Birthday, by the way!

 

More on "Never Die Alone":

 

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/16mm/why...rDieAlone.jhtml

 

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/16mm/why.../mcAlpine.jhtml

[Mitch Gross]

You can also check the archives on this site. We've discussed this repeatedly and David Mullen & I even shot some tests which were printed out to 35. General opinion was that there is almost no difference in image quality between 16mm with anamorphic lenses v. S-16 using spherical lenses & cropped. But there is a huge difference in costs and difficulty in using anamorphic lenses in 16mm, so go with spherical S-16 and crop.