Rent Anamorphic Arri Standard for 2C

[Guest Glen Alexander]

anyone have recommendations on where to rent good glass?

[Christian Appelt]

Do you mean Arri Standard lens mount or has your camera been converted to single PL mount?

[John Holland]

Havent we been here before with you and this question !! ?

[Guest Glen Alexander]

Havent we been here before with you and this question !! ?

 

No, for the standard original Arri mount, trying to rent anamorphics. Not a PL mount.

[Stephen Williams]

No, for the standard original Arri mount, trying to rent anamorphics. Not a PL mount.

 

Hi,

 

I would think very few rental houses will still rent out any lenses in Arri Standard let alone Anamorphic lenses.

 

Stephen

[Christian Appelt]

Stephen is right. I recall vaguely that one rental house had older 1970s anamorphics (Kowa, IIRC) in Arri Standard, but that was 15 years ago.

 

Glen, why don't you just email or call the rental companies and ask about it? It doesn't really matter what you find a company's online rental lists, most of the time they will be able to pull something out of storage that has not been asked for in decades and make you a decent offer.

From my experience, they even will tell you to whom they sold a vintage piece of equipment years ago so you might rent it from that person. I never met a person at any rental house with anything but a helpful and friendly attitude. Talking to people is extremely important and will get results.

 

If you want to shoot 4-perf anamorphic, there a some options:

 

1. Rent a modern camera and modern anamorphic lenses. A number of well known rental companies offer that service.

 

2. Try to buy a Arri Standard mount anamorphic lens . Good luck, I tried this for years and gave up. Not even a single prime lens was to be found, not to mention a zoom lens or a set of primes.

 

3. Rent a Arri standard mount anamorphic lens. As I said above, you have to be persistent and talk to every rental company in the area. Maybe they have an old lens - which may have certain drawbacks for your project or not (lens speed, image quality, weight etc).

 

4. If you absolutely want to use that particular Arri 35, consider having the lens turret replaced by a new PL mount hard front. This will enable you to rent and use all the modern anamorphic lenses available and give you the maximum image quality possible with your camera. This may be much cheaper than trying to convert anything to Arri Standard mount.

 

In fact, buying a set of Lomo anamorphics converted to PL may cost much less than rental, depending on the time you're shooting and whether later additional shooting is necessary. Owning good quality lenses is a good thing, and the Lomos are fine.

 

5. Buy a Konvas 2M set or even a Kinor with a set of Lomo lenses. You will find dependable dealers and maintenance people at www.konvas.org - in my opinion the Konvas is even superior to an Arri 35 in terms of registration, and you can change mags very fast. If you want sync sound, there are some people on this forum able to give you excellent advice on Kinors and sell or rent one to you.

 

6. The cheapest solution is to get an anamorphic adapter lens to put it in front of your existing spherical Arri lenses. Will take some machining for support and restrict your choice of lenses (zoom lenses are out, wide angle below 45mm too), and you have to adapt your style of shooting to it.

Good quality front anamorphic adapters can be found in Rafael Pankratau's web shop:

 

www

 

There is definitely a solution for any kind of budget and film. Don't waste time trying to find exotic equipment unless you're a collector. If you want to make your movie, get the best tools available at your budget.

Edited July 31, 2008 by Christian Appelt