Marc Roessler

I love optical viewfinders... Last month I shot an S16 short which took us three days, and we had to change batteries once and that was on the last day. Quite impossible with any non-OV digital camera at present.

But besides the higher price, don't forget that an optical viewfinder also makes the camera much heavier. Nevertheless I'm all for an OV model of Alexa. It's just the question how this goes together with ISO 800 and upwards...

The mechanical shutter has some advantages with regard to rolling shutter as you wrote - whether that's an issue depends on the type of scene you are filming. On the other hand you can open the digital shutter to > 180 degrees, but that gives you a different rendition of motion which I don't like as much.

I like shooting from the shoulder (if it fits the scene), so I'm a bit biased for the lighter Alexa vs. the heavier D21.

Greetings,

Marc

David is right... how could I forget the beloved anamorphics! A 4:3 version of Alexa is planned though.

Hey guys and girls..

Thinking about toying around a bit with some older glass.. Most of it is NOT in PL mount (which is my "target mount".. S16). What's the best way to to approach a conversion? For those who have done this: do you do the adapters etc from scratch (CNC?) or do you use something as a basis?

As an example I got an interesting "ilex cinemat F3.5/25,4mm" fix focus lens here I'd like to try to convert it to PL mount. Currently it's in a CS mount (flange distance 12,5 mm vs the 52 mm for PL!) - sounds crazy right? But it's possible: it still clears the mirror shutter and the lens is so small in diameter that it is easily inserted deep into the PL mount.

Greetings,

Marc

Alexa: lighter, smaller, much higher EI, less noise, on board recording, on board battery possible (Bauer mount). Integrated 15mm rod mounts which is very nice (already liked that about the Aaton Prod). No optical viewfinder but a nice temperature compensated (and thus color stable) digital viewfinder. Easy to use on-board display for control, vs. the D20/21 where you needed an external PAL display for changing the settings. Easier to remote-control via Ethernet (via www browser... the D21 can do this via remote text console).

I see really no pros for the D20/D21, besides having the OV and being totally noiseless because of the fan-less cooling system. The Alexa fan is also very quiet, though. And the Alexa already seems to be easier to rent, they are popping up in just about any rental right now whereas the D20/D21 always was a bit rare.

You can find most of the info on www.arridigital.com

Greetings,

Marc

Georg, I'm actually one of these developers working on Alexa in Nuremberg. Drop me a message when you happen to be around, we can meet for a beer.

Richardson is a great DOP, looking forward to what he will do with Alexa and how it's going look with his trademark lighting style..

Greetings

Marc

Can anyone here suggest a halogen replacement for photo floods?

I'd like to use this with china balls, so wattage should be between 150 and 250 Watt, E27 socket (european style), and (important!) 3200K color balance.

I've found the JDD and Osram Halolux Ceram series, but most of these either state no color temperature or something between 2800K and 3000K. I'm not quite sure whether those sellers labeling them "3200K" got the real deal or are just misinformed. Many won't reply to inquiries, the others just don't know. Often "3200K" seems to be used for "incandescent color temperature", grrr...

(I just bought a bunch of 500 W R7s quartz bars, "3200K"... ha! 3000K at most.. so I'm careful.)

Filmtools.com sells 250W JDD edison socket halogen lamps, supposedly 3200K. But they are located in the states and shipping to Germany will kill me (and besides I need those bulbs within the next 2 weeks...).

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Marc

I'm currently toying around with a Mole Richardson 4k/5k softlight (the less common one with the two-part silvery reflector and 4x 1250W or 4x 1000W quartz bars.. quite similar to the Quartzcolor softlights).

This light has got me wondering a bit... how is this beast is actually used? I mean.. at EI 200 it gives me almost a T5.6 when I'm at 3 meters distance... when I switch it down to 2k/2k5 it is still a T4 (as expected).

Nice for lighting a high-key soft-light low-speed-stock/high-speed-framerate video clip. But what else is this used for? It won't be of much use as a fill light at this intensity, and if you back up farther away the light will become harder so it won't be a softlight any more. I'm considering to lamp it down to 4x 800 Watts (needs modifications to the lamp sockets), but I'm still wondering...

So I'd like to hear how you use these lights, what lighting style/stock/T-Stop range etc, if you use them at all.

Thanks,

Marc

I'm sure some of you have already used the Prod with Superspeeds and (of course) a mattebox, usually this will be a Chrosziel for Aaton. And if you do this from the shoulder, you also need the hand grip.

It just occured to me that you can't really use the handgrip in this scenario: obviously you can't mount it to the rods in front of the mattebox, and it also won't really fit between the MB and the Aaton because the Superspeeds are so short.

Any tips? Or are you using some extender to position the wooden grip further below? (Which would also be much more comfortable...)

Greetings,

Marc

Hi Alex,

I've seen pulse jet based foggers being used... those make quite some noise but generate really massive amounts of smoke. Those fog thermally. The principle is also used for military foggers.

Here you can see (and hear...) a DIY pulse jet fogger in action.. using diesel oil as a fogging fluid - I don't recommend this!!

the commercial ones are more efficient and a bit more civilized... they also use healthier fogging liquids!

You probably will have to wait until the wind subsides, though... no worth fighting it.

If I remember right Christopher Nolan used a portable pulse jet fogger for the fog scenes in "Insomnia". I remcommend watching the Making Of on DVD, I think they talked about the problems of fogging the woods.

Greetings,

Marc

What I haven't seen yet (even on CML): are those rules for 120 V or for 230 V lamps?

There should be quite a difference as the filaments are much heavier for lower voltages and thus flicker less...

Tim, I just browsed the site a bit, stumbled across this:

http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=30872

There you stated that the Kinetals reach into the camera pretty deep, which is confusing me a bit. So they are better than the Schneiders... but which lenses would be less critical than the Kinetals then?

Just to make sure I get all of this right ;)

Thanks,

Marc

Hey Tim,

the Schneider 10 mm and 16 mm works on the 16BL, tried this myself. Can't speak for the others but according to http://cinematechnic.com/resources/arri_16bl.html most (all?) of the other Schneiders work as well. (Terrible camera (the BL), though).

Do you know if the Schneiders fit the SR3?

I quite liked the 10 mm, although it seemed to me that it showed quite some brightness falloff towards the corners when shot wide open. Concerning sharpness, they all aren't that sharp...? But I guess that just part of their personality. I've been using them on my little 16S.

The Schneiders seem to cover S16 nicely, easily visible on the Aaton where you can see a large portion of the image circle even outside the frame. Can't speak on how much the falloff there is in the corners, though... not easily visible on the ground glass.

I've been thinking about the Cooke Kinetals, but they are offered at insane prices and are mostly sold in the US, which is a bit risky for me (located in Germany, so I can't check quality beforehand and customs can be a hassle...). You can buy a used Schneider for about 200 to 250 EUR... the Cookes seem roughly double of that! Is the quality (image or mechanical) really that much better? Also they will need to rotate in their mount for focusing, so it will be harder to get a suitable mount converter? Unfortunately I never had a chance to use any of them personally so far...

In case anyone has some a set of good quality Kinetals for sale (or for trade for the Schneiders) I'd be interested...

Greetings,

Marc

Hi,

does anyone know if there's any way of using the named lenses (Schneider Cinegon, Cine Xenon) in Arri standard mount with an LTR/XTR?

Tried with a Arri std to PL adapter... it seems the 50mm will fit, but the 10 mm, 16 mm and 25 mm won't. It's not possible to fully insert the lenses, it seems they either hit the two plastic parts at the sides (light meter?) or the front part of the ground glass. Quite a pity, because those are very nice lenses with a distinct look.

Any idea how to make it work?

Thanks,

Marc

Not to forget "Brazil" from Terry Gilliam...!

Hi,

some years ago this already has been discussed here:

http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?sh...828#entry124944

Does someone know who still sells these WPI connectors? Any idea what the actual part number is?

It just occured to me that the connectors of the old Atari/Amiga joysticks look very much like that... does any Aaton owner have one handy for trying this out?

Thanks,

Marc

Hi,

I'd like to grip a 8 kg kamera inside a streetcar. The streetcar has lots of steel bars about 40 mm in diameter, for passengers getting a grip. Obviously, the camera will be most stable when gripped to several bars at a distance due to the minimized lever effect.

Fast rigging is a big plus.

What equipment would you suggest, starting from the 3/8 screw to attach to the base of the camera.

Thanks,

Marc

Also looking for the Aaton groundglass extraction tool.

Otherwise just as the topic says... locations in Europe very much preferred

Hi,

have any of you ever used an Aaton (LTR, XTR) with Orwo stocks?

There's been some discussion and some have claimed the Aatons do have issues when used with Orwo stocks, because of the critical pressure plate adjustment or whatever. Any experiences here?

Thanks & Greetings,

Marc

P.S.: You can find the discussion in german language here http://www.am-neudeck.de/forum/messages/1/...html?1266775872

Stephen, how do you come to this conclusion? It may be that Red's M sensor is especially problematic here, but the general issue exists with all digital cameras so far?

I fully agree that incandescent/halogen looks better than HMI, though... it's just the question whether you can translate these good looks to your captured image data...

I like tungsten lighting as well: cheap, lightweight, no worries about color balance. Works great with film where you can choose D or T... but when you're shooting with a camera that's native EI 320 daylight balanced, when correcting this camera to tungsten this would be around EI 80. Or the other way round, when lighting for EI 500 you'd need to set the camera to EI 2000. You can also use the camera unfiltered, but this will still lower the sensitivity/dynamic range, because the usable range is defined as the area where none of the color channels either clips or drowns in the noise floor.

Maybe dynamic range of the camera will grow so large that you don't have to worry about any of this. But I somewhat doubt it...

Inspired by a posting by Adrian Sierkowski on this forum concerning price stability/ROI for lighting equipment...

It recently occured to me that basically all digital cameras (that I know of) are daylight balanced. And the current trend seems to be towards digital capture.

Everyone who has used conversion filters with tungsten lamps (incandescent/halogen) to get daylight color balance knows what a hack it is, light loss and power (and filter!) consumption and all...

What does this mean for owning native tungsten balanced lighting equipment? So far prices have been quite stable, so lighting equipment has always been a good investment. But will it stay like that? Used HMI prices always have been much higher, but it seeems to me that this trend has increased with all the Red owners looking for daylight balanced lighting equipment. Let's say I buy a used halogen Dedo kit for a 4-digit-amount of dollars now... with the 100 Watt dedos this kit will be basically useless once you start to filter the lamps for daylight... will anyone care for this stuff in 5 to 10 years?

Yes, you can still use it with tungsten film. But the general demand on the market will dictate price, and in case everyone shoots daylight the market will be flooded with native tungsten balanced equipment.

Your thoughts on this?

Greetings,

Marc

Take a look at the ASC journal of last month. There was a rather long article about the RED in it.

It didn't quite go without controversy, some have claimed the author has an anti-RED bias (though I wouldn't agree here). No matter how you take it, it's a nice first-hand writeup about potential pitfalls to watch out for.

That's right, stiching does not mean to "fuse" different parts of the wafer together. It's still one piece that's cut from the wafer. As Georg wrote, stitching is referring to the optical masks used, not the wafer itself. It thus doesn't bring down the exponential cost factor, it just lowers the total cost/effort. The way my post was written was a bit misleading in this regard.

Stitching is critical because you always have some "interesting" effects where the different sensor parts meet which are somewhat hard to get rid of.

Let's say, "the majority of the larger sensors are stitched"... it is not a must. You can see whether a sensor is stitched with your bare eye by examining it closely, by the way.

But we're straying too far from the intial topic I suppose.

Greetings,

Marc

However, way too many 35mm venues around the world are using second-rate and/or badly focused anamorphic optics in their projectors, often rendering their 'scope image softer than the 1.85:1 in my experience. :(

Antti, I agree. In practice, a scope film may look worse than a 1.85:1 film in a run-down theater. There are still lots of old anamorphic lenses from the 60s in use, unfortunately. I don't think that this should be an argument against 35mm scope quality, though. With new lenses from Isco (Bluestar... my favorite) or Schneider a scope projection has the potential to just blow you away. And that's what the first class theaters (successfully) strive for.

Greetings,

Marc

I've heard reports that 35mm print projection is in the 1K resolution range, which is why 2K digital projection tends to look sharper to our eyes, close to what optimal answer print projection looks like in terms of sharpness.

David, I think I've read that report that you're probably referring to and I think that it was somewhat strange.

These tests where shot in the 1.85:1 format, where 35mm has a definitive disadvantage and digital projection has a definitive advantage (it's the other way round for 2.40:1! yes, this means that 2.40:1 won't be the "best" format any more when projected digitally...).

Besides, with the tests everything was listed, down to the camera serial number.... but not a word about the type of projectors or projection lens being used. I know from personal experience that there are major differences between the various projectors and projection lenses on the market. Sharpness also depends very much on the proper alignment of the optical system (i.e. lamp house - gate - lens) of the projector.

So these reports (which happened to come up just as the switch to digital presentation was around the corner) should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

Greetings,

Marc