48 Hours & Bokeh

[Hal Smith]

Anyone know how the circular bokeh came about in filming "48 Hours"? It ran on HBO HD last night and in most of the EXT-NIGHT scenes bright lights have a pretty, perfectly circular bokeh. The credits list Panavision gear - Panaflex, etc. Any flares were also perfectly circular. Many of the night exteriors look like they were lit with existing light, some fill here and there but a very documentary look.

[Dan Goulder]

Anyone know how the circular bokeh came about in filming "48 Hours"? It ran on HBO HD last night and in most of the EXT-NIGHT scenes bright lights have a pretty, perfectly circular bokeh. The credits list Panavision gear - Panaflex, etc. Any flares were also perfectly circular. Many of the night exteriors look like they were lit with existing light, some fill here and there but a very documentary look.

48 Hours was not shot anamorphic. It was shot using Panavision spherical lenses.

[Max Jacoby]

Anyone know how the circular bokeh came about in filming "48 Hours"? It ran on HBO HD last night and in most of the EXT-NIGHT scenes bright lights have a pretty, perfectly circular bokeh. The credits list Panavision gear - Panaflex, etc. Any flares were also perfectly circular. Many of the night exteriors look like they were lit with existing light, some fill here and there but a very documentary look.

They probably shot wide-open, so the irisblades did not impose their shape on out-of-focus highlights.

[Hal Smith]

They probably shot wide-open, so the irisblades did not impose their shape on out-of-focus highlights.

That's probably it, thanks!

[Chris Keth]

How many blades do panavision's lenses have? My large format lenses have, depending on the lens, twelve to twenty-two blades and their bokeh looks round.

[Max Jacoby]

Primos have 11 blades (although I think some of the wider ones might only have 10). In general motion picture lenses don't have as many blades, don't know why really, the more blades the better. Cooke S4s have 8, Zeiss Ultra and Master Primes have 9. The Hawks have 15. In the instance of Primos and especially Cooke S4s, the blades are not straight, but bend outwards, giving them a bit weird bokeh.

[Jarin Blaschke]

Older Panavision lenses, such as the US and SS MkIIs, and if memory serves - the Panavision Zeiss Ultraspeeds (USZs) have a large number of concave blades that create a very round aperture opening throughout the stop range. This is not the case with the many-bladed but odd-shaped iris openings of Primos and Cooke S4s (multi-pointed star bokeh) or the triangular, hexagontal or septangular openings of the generations of superspeeds. 48 hours probably used the older MKII lenses with their very round iris openings.