Ultrascope anamorphic lenses

[Saul Pincus]

A little while ago I had the opportunity to shoot some tests with a 75mm Ultrascope anamorphic prime. I did these tests at night racking from an actor in the foreground to the city background and back again. I was looking for anamorphic artifacts while closely focused and sure got them!

 

I was just wondering about the vintage of this lens. Does anyone have any experience with them, or any knowledge they would be willing to share?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Saul Pincus

[Guest Daniel J. Ashley-Smith]

anamorphic artifacts

When you say that, do you mean wide angle distortion?

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I imagine he's talking about things like out-of-focus objects being vertically elongated, horizontal flares, barrel distortion, etc.

 

Phil

[Saul Pincus]

Hi,

 

I imagine he's talking about things like out-of-focus objects being vertically elongated, horizontal flares, barrel distortion, etc.

 

Phil

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

You're correct, Phil.

 

Daniel, perspective-wise a 75mm anamorphic lens is about half way between a "normal" lens and telephoto one. There is distortion inherent in the glass ? particularly noticeable on close-ups of actor's faces ? but it isn't of the "wide angle" variety.

 

Saul

Edited November 5, 2004 by Saul Pincus

[Christian Appelt]

UltraScope primes were made for Arnold&Richter by a company called Ultra Gesellschaft für Optik at Munich, Germany from late 1950s to mid-sixties. These are fine lenses, but avoid the anamorphic zoom, it always can be spotted in old UltraScope movies because it looks soft and has all kind of strange reflection problems.

[Guest Daniel J. Ashley-Smith]

I don't get why exactly people use animorphic lenses. I think it'd be cheaper to pull the ratio in post.

 

And from has been posted here, they seem to have a lot of problems with them.

[Max Jacoby]

If you want to know more, just do a search in the archives about the advantages and disadvantages of anamorphic lenses. It has been discussed many times before and all the information is freely available.

 

I for one LOVE anamorphic.

Edited November 6, 2004 by audiris

[Saul Pincus]

UltraScope primes were made for Arnold&Richter by a company called Ultra Gesellschaft für Optik at Munich, Germany from late 1950s to mid-sixties. These are fine lenses, but avoid the anamorphic zoom, it always can be spotted in old UltraScope movies because it looks soft and has all kind of strange reflection problems.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Thanks, Christian.

 

Saul

[Max Jacoby]

These are fine lenses, but avoid the anamorphic zoom, it always can be spotted in old UltraScope movies because it looks soft and has all kind of strange reflection problems.

Can you name any films shot with the UltraScopes?

[Guest Daniel J. Ashley-Smith]

Could they shoot the film, running horizontally? This could let you shoot anamorphic with a HUGE resolution and superb quality.

[Adam Frisch FSF]

That system was called VistaVision and is still used today sometimes for effects and such. Wasn't viable as a projection format due to having to replace every proj in the world, but it was used for some features. I think Hitch's North by Northwest was shot in it. Mind you, it did use twice the amount of film, so it's not like you got anything for nothing.

Edited November 6, 2004 by AdamFrisch

[Guest Daniel J. Ashley-Smith]

Wasn't viable as a projection format due to having to replace every proj in the world

AH, yeh.. Didn?t think about that..

 

Still though it could be beneficial for Imax presentations. You could do a transfer from the 35mm to the 65/70mm or whatever the hell it is.

[David Mullen ASC]

VistaVision used spherical lenses and was 8-perf 35mm running horizontally, so the negative was naturally 1.50 : 1 shaped. Most VistaVision films were composed for slight cropping to 1.85 : 1 for projection (the image was reduced to a standard 4-perf 35mm print).

 

Technicolor converted some old cameras to 8-perf 35mm but put a slight anamorphic lens (1.5X) to squeeze 2.35 : 1 onto the 1.50 : 1 negative (as opposed to normal 35mm anamorphic, which has a 2X squeeze put onto a squarer negative.) They called this Technirama. A few years after they invented it, 70mm printing came out for the Todd-AO/Super Panavision process, so Technicolor unsqueezed the Technirama image onto a 70mm print and called it Super Technirama 70. "El Cid" and "Spartacus" were shot this way.

 

VistaVision and Technirama both died before the decade was over, within a few years of their introduction. 15 years later, ILM bought a bunch of these old cameras to shoot efx plates for "Star Wars" in the mid 1970's. They shot with spherical lenses and composed the 1.50 : 1 negative for cropping to 2.35 (for efx for scope movies like "Star Wars".) VistaVision is still used for some efx shooting, especially when the live action is shot with anamorphic lenses but they want to shoot the efx with spherical lenses (like for miniature work) but don't want to use Super-35 since that is actually a smaller negative than anamorphic if you are framing for 2.35.

[Filip Plesha]

Daniel, anamorphic format uses a bigger negative area than any of other popular 35mm formats, and has finest grain and sharpest image. This is the advantage.

Edited November 6, 2004 by Filip Plesha

[David Mullen ASC]

The ideal format for blowing up to IMAX would be 5-perf 65mm (Super Panavision 70 / Todd-AO) rather than 35mm 8-perf, since there are no modern quiet sync-sound 8-perf 35mm cameras but there are some modern 5-perf 65mm cameras designed for sound shooting. These were used on some of the last 65mm movies, like "Hamlet" and parts of "Little Buddha". "Contact" and "The Patriot" both used 65mm for shooting dialogue scenes that would have efx added to them.

[Guest Daniel J. Ashley-Smith]

anamorphic format uses a bigger negative area than any of other popular 35mm formats

Wah?! I thought it's basically a 4:3 image (shooting 4 perf for example), but only 2.37 of it is being used. So technically, less of the negative area is being used. But it doesn't make a difference to the quality, because all you have done is chopped the bottom and top off. It's not like your stretching anything.

[Filip Plesha]

Nope. It is a full height of the frame (18mm) , and 21mm wide, and the image is squesed 2 times. THe negative area is about 1.2:1 and this is more than any other format exept full aperture (which has the same height, but is 24mm wide), but it is not used in cinema.

 

The image is squesed 2 times, so when you unstrech it in the cinema projector

it is about 2.4:1 (usually 2.35:1 is mentioned in texts)

 

No other format will give you 18mm of image height on screen.

 

What you are refering to is super35 format. The image is half of still 35mm image,

24mmx18mm and then top and bottom is cut out to have a 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

 

The height is only about 10-11mm compared to 18mm of anamorphic format.

[David Mullen ASC]

Anamorphic photography means using a lens that squeezes the image horizontally. The lenses have a 2X squeeze, so if the unsqueezed image is 2.40 : 1, then the area on the negative and print being used is 1.20 : 1 with an image with a 2X squeeze.

 

It's the Super-35 format that involves cropping a normal spherical image top & bottom to 2.39, then taking that cropped image and stretching it vertically to become a 2X squeezed image so that anamorphic prints can be made and projected.

[Christian Appelt]

Daniel J. Ashley-Smith

I thought it's basically a 4:3 image (shooting 4 perf for example), but only 2.37 of it is being used. So technically, less of the negative area is being used.

 

- Scope does NOT have a 4:3 aperture/image on film.

 

- Neither Scope nor Super 35 has 2.37, it used to be 2.55 (magnetic sound), later 2.34/5 and was for practical reasons reduced to 2.39.

 

- BOTH original CinemaScope (magnetic sound format with Aspect Ratio of 2.55:1) AND CinemaScope/Panavision/other vintage or today's anamorphic formats with 2.35/2.39 have LARGER image areas than any other 4-perf 35mm formats (so 8-perf VistaVision and Technirama are excluded here).

 

So technically, what you said is wrong.

Many years ago, my English teacher told me how to memorize the word "assume":

 

IF YOU ASSUME YOU WILL MAKE AN ASS OUT OF U AND ME :rolleyes:

 

Recommended reading:

 

Of Apertures and Aspect Ratios (AWSM)

 

 

@Max:

 

You asked about Ultrascope titles. Most films shot with these lenses are what we like to call "Eurotrash" today. Most of the German/Italian Karl May western series starting 1961 was shot in Ultrascope, the same goes for those Edgar Wallace murder mysteries made until the early seventies.

 

Unfortunately IMDB has incorrect data about UltraScope, for example the first Karl May western TREASURE OF THE SILVER LAKE, starring LEx Barker and Herbert Lom,

is listed under Cinemascope. Here are some titles:

 

Treasure of the Silver Lake (1962)

Rampage at Apache Wells (1965)

L'ultimo paradiso (1958)

(beleived to be the first Ultrascope film)

 

The Treasure of the Aztecs 1965)

Pyramid of the Sun God (1965=

Panamericana - Dream Road of the World (1968)

Siegfried (1966)

 

The UltraScope list at imdb.com, although incomplete, will give an overview of what European feature production looked like during the 1960s/1970.

 

There seem to be many films using UltraScope lenses under different process names. A director of East German historical films told me that sometimes the GDR production company DEFA leased anamorphic lenses from Arri at Munich, but the films were uniformely billed as "Totalvision", which was the wide screen designation for films in the German Democratic Republic (some of the must have used Lomo too, and the first GDR scope films might have used the then popular Cinépanoramic adapter that was billed as Naturama in the U.S.).

 

A dealer told me in 1992 that he sold quite a few Ultrascopes to India during the 1970s and 1980s because Indian filmmakers liked the quality and did not care about high speed lenses, which the Ultrascopes are definitely not.

Edited November 7, 2004 by Christian Appelt