George White

I reported this (Aaton XTR) auction and another similar one to eBay last week. They took down the other aaton but not this one. What they had in common was they were each based, word-for-word and picture-for-picture, on items listed on a used equipment site called Kitmondo. The aution in question seems to be based on http://www.kitmondo.com/ViewListing.aspx?l...dName=AATON_XTR which is listed as being in Germany. The actual seller wants 8,000 Euros. ---george

Tommy I have a only a moderate amount of cinematograhy knowlege but one thing I do know is that you are unlikley to get useful responses to your post. If it were in the Frst Time Flimmaker section rather than the General section it would be slightly more imaginable. Even there, someone is much more likely to get a response to a particular question rather than "tell me everything". However, if you don't have that specific of a question right now, a new person who says "I have read the FAQs, perused the archives, read xyz book and am thinking of starting a project involving abc issues and constraints" and then asks for fairly general help has at least outlined where their starting point is and the context in which they are looking for help. Hope this advice on asking for advice is helpful.

Make a great movie and make sure you get all the rights and authorizations needed from your actors, collaborators and particulary music rights. You might look at: "$30 Film School: How to write, direct, produce, shoot, edit, distribute, tour with, and sell your own no-budget DIGITAL movie"

Not much in the way of data points, but one sold 4 days ago on eBay for $152. Seller is in the Netherlands, camera as-is with one known problem. Another from Canda sold for about $650. Also saw one that went in the high 200's near the end of April. To find them you need to search under "Completed listings" and try variations on the spacing and hyphens in the model number or search "canon super 8" and weed thru a couple of pages. --george

A quick google search shows it being used on Scrubs - if that is any help. ---george

I've never heard of an "animorphic" lens. An anamorphic lens does squeeze the image horizontally to fit more in horizontally. Sorry, I don't know anything about the specific lens you asked about. ---george

I was looking at GSMO on eBay a couple of weeks ago and researched this somewhat. A google search quickly turned up someone (on another cinematography board answering that same question in 2005 by saying a Culver City repair poutfit has developed a new board that goes in place of a bad circuit board. I do not know anything about it personally but you might want to do a google search on GSMO circuit board. ---george

I think its more (and and also less) complicated than that. There is a huge amount of information about depth of field on the net. I found this article http://www.bealecorner.com/trv900/dof.html that specifically addresses it for various size video sensors. I'm sure with a little digging you can find a better site and all the information on the topic you'd like. ---george

I have "Sound for Digital Video" by Tomlinson Holman and found it remarkable in its depth and breath of information on the topic -- technical specs on various microphone elements, issues of capturing clean production sound, sound "perspective" etc. It may not be as cook-book as you are looking for and is written assuming the audio will be single system recorded. He also has a book called "Sound for Film and Television" which might be better for your needs but I haven't personally seen it and it is a little older. Tomlinson is an impressive guy (the inventor of Lucasfilm's THX). ---george

I have "Sound for Digital Video" by Tomlinson Holman and found it remarkable in its depth and breath of information on the topic -- technical specs on various microphone elements, issues of capturing clean production sound, sound "perspective" etc. It may not be as cook-book as you are looking for and is written assuming the audio will be single system recorded. He also has a book called "Sound for Film and Television" which might be better for your needs but I haven't personally seen it and it is a little older. Tomlinson is an impressive guy (the inventor of Lucasfilm's THX). ---george

There was an article in the LA Times over the weekend about the "making of" which said that film was used for about 2% of the footage primarily for some slow motion shots because the Genesis couldn't go fast enough. Also talked about Mel Gibson teaching the cast how to run in slow motion, how cheap the extras were, etc.

I do not see a paticular rational for running that case, but there is an argument for increasing the 1/3" format by a factor of 2 (making it about 1/2 of the 35mm coc rather than 1/4). The rational would be that material shot in that format was likely intended to be viewed on a TV at home rather than the theatrical experience the 35mm was aimed at. The intended viewer's angle of view is a factor in coc. A bigger image (to the viewer) has to be better focused to be in-focus than a smaller image. If the total angle of view of typical home viewing was about 1/2 that of typical theatrical viewing then dthis oubling of the coc would be valid. Using .012 mm rather that .006 mm for the 1/3" format coc produced a 5 1/3 stop (f/1.4 --> f/9) difference. I would still say that the 3 1/3 calculation above (assuming no error on my part) would be the right answer if both images were intended for the same ultimate viewing angle. (I thought I already posted this info, but do not see it so I'm trying again --sorry if it appears twice) ---george

(1/1.4 should be f/1.4)

I did some calculations and used an on-line DoF calculator. I got 3 1/3 stops. Assumptions were: coc for 35mm = .001 in (.025mm) , coc for 1/3 " CCD = .00025 in. (.006 mm) Then I took three data points (angle of view of about 50 degrees, focused at 5 feet away and 10 feet away, and angle of view of 15 degrees with object 25 feet away) for each point I calculated the 35mm focal length and the coresponding 1/3" CCD focal length and then used www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html to find a pair of f stops that gave the same DoF. I used 1/1.4 for the 1/3" and at all three examples the closest 35mm f-stop was 4.5. I could not get the data to line up in a table but this should show my assumptions and method. format 36mm : 1/3" CCD coc: .025 mm | .006 mm angle of view: 49 degrees | 49 degrees focal length: 30 mm | 8.2 mm f-stop: 4.5 | 1.4 subject distance: 10 feet | 10 feet near focus point: 7.23 feet | 7.27 feet far focus point: 16.2 feet | 16 feet ---george

A couple of year?s ago I bought an XL1Solutions adapter to put my Nikon lenses on my XL1 naively thinking I would get 35mm-like DoF. It didn?t do that at all so I looked this stuff up. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field as well as many other sources, it is clear that DoF (for a given definition of ?in focus?) depends only on: 1. aperture; 2. image size at the point image is focused/captured; 3. focal length, and 4. distance to subject. (note ? details and quality of lens construction not on the list.) But furthermore: check this and other sources to see that focal length and distance to subject essentially cancel each other out. If you think you will change to a smaller focal length to decrease the DoF -- wrong. You will then need to reduce the distance to the primary subject at the same time to keep the framing of that subject constant. The math works out that you will be right back where you were in DoF. See the chart and other info in http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials...th-of-field.htm. What that shows is for a given format (imaging size) and a given % filling of the frame by the primary subject, aperture is all that matters. When you read odd things like ?use ND filters to get smaller DoF? or ?we add light to increase the DoF? they are inelegantly saying (correctly) it?s the aperture that matters. There certainly is no magic in lens design or construction that does it. There is a reason the P+S and other adapters have the mechanisms they have and unfortunately a $600 thing doesn?t do what the $7000 thing does. ---george