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Aapo Lettinen

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Everything posted by Aapo Lettinen

  1. mechanical and optical parts tend to last well if they are properly maintained, or in most cases if they are NOT improperly handled all the time and just treated with respect when using them, that is all they ask... in the case of used cameras one would rebuild the crystal sync modified one from best parts taken from multiple camera bodies to get it working optimally. not cheap but still much cheaper than a 5.5k new camera and cheaper and easier to service if needed because there is reasonably priced spare parts left from the build. anyway the video viewfinder can be useful when operating as long as one can see it clearly and focus properly. for "professional use" I am very sceptical. Maybe a single dream or flashback scene shot on it and the rest done with a proper camera. but shooting a whole movie with it would only make sense if - the budget is low enough so that the producers and financers don't think it is too large of an risk - one wants to prove a point (that a camera can be used to shoot a movie no matter what camera it is. and that a movie can be chosen for a camera if wanting to shoot with a certain camera) - one seeks marketing value from the Super8 origination as it is kind of interesting and people might watch it only for the format value - one really likes the Super8 look just all day everyday, or alternatively the story suits the super8 look really well. in practice, however: * One needs to choose the movie for the camera, not the other way around. So one chooses this interesting piece of gear and then makes the whole movie around the idea of forcing super8 format no matter how well it fits the original idea: one changes the movie if it does not fit the format and camera perfectly. Can be interesting but it is kind of similar than the "vimeography" projects where one wants to show off cool camera bodies and lenses and thus just shoots SOMETHING COOL LOOKING and stitches something watchable together from the collected material
  2. another market are "cool gadgets collectors" who are interested in the video viewfinder system and new camera body designs. for them it is not necessary to have best reliability or features as long as the gadget looks super cool both on paper and on the shelf, if they will shoot one or two test rolls on it total it would already be a lot ? It is possible to get existing super8 cameras completely overhauled and with crystal sync modification installed for little over half of the price of the Kodak camera. If the Kodak camera is relatively silent, then it might be advantageous for short film use though. video viewfinder can be useful for some shooting scenarios but for real use it is not mandatory. But we'll see how people will actually use this camera and how it performs in the real world ?
  3. yes the whole Super8 genre is a bit weird and by my opinion mostly economical for "home movie emulation" type of content and scenes. Of course the highest end cameras can make really good looking images but most often it costs almost the same to shoot the same stuff on 16mm if having suitable camera around. And very expensive super8 camera negates the perceived price difference even more... one could buy an working Aaton or Arri or two or three working Eclairs with the price of that kind of super8 camera so the main advantage of it would be size and weight and low weight and fast loading of the film stock needed for the shoot which can be handly when travelling or shooting weddings and such. Actually the main market for the camera might be wedding photography type of content. explains a lot and the price is not that bad for such use. Of course one could make short films with it too but I don't believe that is the main market of it because it makes more sense to shoot short films on 16mm (whereas the wedding stuff is absolutely mandatory to get specifically on super8 for nostalgic value. same reason why Polaroids were revived and are incredibly popular for wedding use)
  4. I think the biggest difference is the filtration needed to get the T-stop to suitable level for filming, the colours about right and especially how much this affects the practical use of the stock in the planned shooting situations. Generally speaking it is often wise to take as slow speed stock as possible because this makes filtration much faster and easier and you can see the viewfinder image much better. For daylight outdoor use the 250D or 500T for example are often too high speed and it makes using them more difficult and slower which affects the shoot. The often used argument is that one always wants to match grain level for the entire film. But most often it is much more practical to just match grain levels within a scene and allow more freedom between scenes to be able to handle the shoot more practically by for example being able to shoot desert daylight scenes on 50D instead of trying to manage the entire shoot with only 500T (which was needed for low light night scenes) and then try to manage in the super bright desert daylight shoot with huge amounts of ND, a 85 filter and without being able to see the viewfinder image correctly ? As others said, the Vision stocks are made to match as closely as possible and it should not be an issue to use two different stocks to manage the shoot more practically and economically
  5. would it work to just precision machine the round corners out of the original gate edges? could be easier if machining needs to be done anyway?
  6. what controller do you mean? most cameras don't have any original external controllers and there is pretty much none available used either. the LTR has only one built in crystal sync speed (either 24 or 25fps) which on some cameras is changeable between 24 and 25 and other cameras (like mine) is permanently set to either one. All the other speeds on LTR are generated with a simple RC oscillator and are typically off by about half an fps or so. Originally I developed this controller because aftermarket or used ones are not available and I needed crystal sync 24.00fps with the camera. But I just used a bit more effort on the design and made a device which can output from 1 to 50fps crystal speeds in 1fps increments with the 23.976, 29.976 and 33.333fps included. The 33.333fps is especially helpful as that is the most used MOS framerate for slow motion effect on feature and tv-series productions. So this controller is meant to expand the features of the LTR camera so that it can be used better for serious filmmaking on indie shorts and features. Additionally it is lot more affordable than original Aaton accessories as well, this device costs 300usd + shipping and if using it with direct connection of wires to the 9-pin connector on the camera like I do, you don't need anything else to run the camera with it. A piece of velcro is recommended though so that you can attach the device to the camera or onboard battery
  7. Assembled two final devices today. will keep one for tests, the other piece is for sale. Will make more sometime later if having time or there is demand for them
  8. Daniil Nevskiy does 2-perf conversions to Eyemos. That could be very useful for low budget stuff I think
  9. Some kind of old synchronous motor. You can run it from single phase 220v by connecting one of the motor phases with capacitor. Pretty simple modification but can be very dangerous if done wrong so let a certified electrician do the job. Things like small industrial/agriculture fans, laundry machines etc. use similar kind of capacitor arrangement and any electrician familiar with those can do the modification for you. Cameflexes never had brushless motors, they are 40's/50's cameras and brushless technology was not available for cameras back then
  10. You may want to experiment with vertical led tubes to figure out what kind of reflections you would want on the glass and from which directions to bring out its shape. then you can use something larger to make the final lighting setup if led tubes are not enough to do the actual job as tubes may be too thin to get wide enough reflection (they are often great supplements though if you need a thinner reflection from the surface to for example bring out the edge etc). as others said, lighting glass and metal is all about reflecting large bright surfaces from it to bring out its shape. Adding just small specular sources does not help, no matter how much light you pump on it... you could use 100kW of light and at most it would just show more dust and fingerprints and the shape of the object still staying a mystery ?
  11. by my experience, one often has most problems with Soviet 16mm lenses as they have weird back parts geometry easily hitting stuff inside Western cameras for the Western cameras made assuming that the lenses would have more compact rear mechanics. for example the Lomo 10-100 is just barely possible to fit to the Aaton LTR if you mount it really slowly and carefully, there is just like half a millimeter or quarter millimeter of room even if it is perfectly aligned in the adapter. Other lenses like 16SP and Krasnogorsk lenses often don't fit at all and are practically only compatible with the camera they are made for. Soviet cameras were made for cheap so of course they wanted to use simpler optical and mechanical designs, thus often making the lenses more "camera-specific" and less compact . Most Western lenses usually have more "slender, conical style" back parts whereas the Soviet ones are more commonly "just large bulky cylinder" type. On most Western lenses it should usually be relatively easy to figure out from photos if a lens might potentially cause issues or not. On higher end lenses and especially on 35mm format ones the most common issue is the lens body not clearing the viewfinder assembly well enough, for example Ultra Primes come very very close to the viewfinder though should still be usable if carefully mounted.
  12. I would rather take clipped and crushed image than needing to have my hand on volume button all the time when watching and still not hearing a good enough mix to complete understand what the characters are talking about. One could shoot the movie on umatic and still have better end result than the current stuff where the soundtrack is crushed and inaudible even when the picture is gorgeus
  13. I find it very funny that distributors are furious about staying inside "written in stone" picture standards with no possibility for any kind of artistic expression in term of how things clip or crush, but inaudible dialogue mix and horribly loud music with almost unusably low foley+atmos+dialogue is somehow magically OK and allowed as an artistic method even if it makes it impossible to watch the end product without the viewer self adjusting the volume continuously up and down to be able to follow the program
  14. I had some extra casings and thus decided just to move on with the pre-production version and start assembling them. A batch of 5 will be completed in the following weeks and are available for order now. Price is 300usd a piece + shipping. There has been very little interest so far and thus it is likely that I will not make a "more refined" version of this simple controller and this white "pre-production version" will be all what is available for now. I will finish the batch of 5 and will then wait for them being sold out before planning anything else for the LTR.
  15. You can easily emulate a saturation roll off on any video footage in post but most fanboys like to use off the shelf luts and think cameras have very "fixed" look for not trying out stuff by themselves
  16. Originally it came from how the saturation rolls off in highlights. Remember that alexa came out in times when it was normal for video cameras to have very saturated highlights just below the clipping point so alexa was much closer to how colour film handles saturation. They really dont look like film but saying it looking like film helps to sell it to producers who seek production value
  17. It looks like I will have exactly ONE extra 12-speed kit available in late November. The rest of the motors are either already sold or are otherwise reserved. The total batch size is 5 pieces of these 12-speed kits, after which I will discontinue the ACL motor v1.0 motor unit and the controller line. I am planning on making some other kind of motor for the ACL next year if getting enough funding for the project. Will redesign stuff and use different parts for it. It will be more expensive as well if it is possible to make and will take long to finish. Just wanted to mention that there is this delay of at least half a year, maybe more during which nothing is available for the ACL
  18. Actually the edge of the mirror is so close to the opening shutter angle when the mirror is on the right side that it is easily possible for it to shadow the gate especially if the taking lens has certain characteristics which have potential enhancing the effect (large back element etc.) UNMODIFIED N16 CAMERA, MIRROR ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE CAMERA: THE SAME UNMODIFIED N16 CAMERA, the mirror position referenced to the moment where the shutter edge is on the center of the gate. See how much closer the mirror is to the gate edge when the mirror is on the camera right side: COMPARED TO MIRROR ON THE CAMERA LEFT (operator) SIDE:
  19. nothing wrong with the motors either because the flicker is not caused by them. Converting the camera body to S16 which often requires changing the mirror movement path and/or shutter angle and alters the centering of the optical axis would cause changes to how the camera flickers because the mirror swing axis - optical centerline relationship, angular velocities and shutter clearance would all be changed at the same time. this would mean that some S16 conversions would flicker more and some less. Don't know if it can be made completely flicker free but some people never complain about ACL flicker so I belive it can be made low enough level that people don't notice it anymore. But as said it would require large mechanical changes to the camera body itself
  20. No, I was talking about full shot frame on the film negative. Every other frame had couple of % more exposure on the wavefor monitor. I checked my camera again and now I see exactly what the issue is about. It is definitely the mirror and only the mirror. The issue is that the pivot point of the mirror swing axis is not perfectly centered on the centerline of the optical axis and gate. When observing it very carefully, you can see that the swing axis is actually a tiny bit on the operator side of the gate (camera's left side). You can see this by checking where the mirror edge is located when the shutter is opening and closing: when the mirror is on the operator side, there is lots more room between the gate edge and the mirror edge, whereas when mirror is on the camera's right side, the mirror just barely tries to clear the gate edge when shutter is starting to open and can even shadow it a little bit if the taking lens would have certain output geometry of the light rays to enhance the effect. The asymmetrically centered swing axis means that the angular velocity of the mirror is lower when the shutter starts to open when the mirror is on the camera right side compared to the camera left side. This kind of variation in the mirror speed could cause even larger exposure variation between the adjacent frames and I am surprised that is is as small of a variation as it is. So it is a design fault or design feature depending on how one wants to see it. The asymmetrical mirror swing axis helps to make the camera narower which makes it more compact and helps weight distribution too (when operating on the right shoulder like most people do, there is more of the camera's mass on the operator side so that it does not "twist" the camera as much and makes operating a little easier. I think though that the only reason why they made it asymmetrical is getting the camera body physically smaller. But it had this downside that the exposure is not exactly the same on adjacent frames and one can see it in certain conditions and lens choices may make the issue worse. But it is clearly a design feature, there is nothing wrong with the camera. Mirror timing may be a little off of course to make it even worse but you can't remove the effect completely unless recentering the whole thing and machining the camera body to enable recentered mirror system to fit there
  21. If a camera fits almost every project you are likely going to shoot in the next couple of years, then that is likely the right choice. it sounds like the Arri S may not be versatile enough for the work and might necessitate an upgrade pretty soon after which you would still need the NPR and may not end up with ideal lens choices for the NPR kit if the lenses were only bought the Arri in mind assuming the NPR would not be needed. Arri bayonet can be used on NPR with adapters so that should not be a problem though, just make sure when buying lenses that your possible future cameras can use them too and them not being too camera specific lens choices... it would be very critical to be able to use your lens inventory with as many different cameras as possible because lenses are expensive to purchase and you will want to avoid needing to purchase new lenses (even the same lens just a different mount) just because a camera has different mount, it must be possible to just use an adapter to get the existing lenses to work so that you can manage with one lens set no matter what camera body you use. The NPR is not ergonomically as great as the ACL but is supposed to be easier to find original motors for and has more powerful motors so running 400ft mags is easier. the NPR is mechanically a bit complicated, especially the magazine, so it would be a pain to service it if doing it by yourself, it just has bazillion small screws and tons of unnecessary additional parts making it mechanically 5x more complicated than it should be by my opinion. if you have a good technician available who is familiar with them, then it would not matter at all and the camera is otherwise great if it is serviced well and if the weird motor placement does not cause problems with operating. But just don't expect to be able to CLA it by yourself even if familiar with cameras... the professional technician costs need to be calculated in the total price when considering the NPR ?
  22. btw, lowering the shutter angle dramatically should completely eliminate this kind of issue if lowered enough so that the mirror is always very far away from the optical path until shutter is completely closed. this would result in limited performance of the camera system which is likely why it was not done in the first place. For a camera made for tv-documentaries and such broadcasting on analog TV, it is likely that no one could detect any couple of % flicker with any kind of instruments from the output stream or even the telecined version. Exposure, on the other had, mattered quite much with slow stocks so one would want all the shutter angle one could get no matter the cost ? today when everything is file based, digitally shown and 4k or 5k scanned with great quality scanners, the small imperfections in the image will really start to show. everything just too clean and well done nowadays ?
  23. it seemed to be pretty much the whole image, one could see the whole waveform "jumping" up and down when advancing frame by frame. It was Heikki's own material so I deleted it after the waveform tests but with only couple of % difference in exposure it would be pretty impossible to see any recognizable pattern in the exposure even with adding contrast. I can confirm though that it happened all the time, just was not apparent to the eye most of the time if there were no darker areas in the image where it is easier to spot. The waveform could detect it in all the material and it stayed pretty much the same. The reason why I am extremely sceptical about the friction theory is because it is pretty much impossible for a friction based issue to stay the same in every frame, all the time, in different conditions and framerates and torque levels. So it can't be something happening "randomly" but rather has to be something built into the device. Because the motor's running parameters change continuously during operation it and changing a different motor to a camera (different technology motor, different parameters, all the variables different) would still result pretty similar flickering, it has to be something mechanically linked happening inside the camera. It would be possible to make a measuring device to detect a flicker like this directly from the camera gate if running without magazine. the simplest method would be to use a properly tuned phototransistor or a small array of such transistors and then monitor the output signal with oscilloscope when running the camera at different speeds measuring the duty cycles of each exposure, adjusting the light source in front of the taking lens and changing a taking lens between traditional and telecentric so that the angle of the light rays in the mirrors path would be different which could affect the amount of flickering by altering the point where the mirror edge starts to shadow the still exposing frame in the gate. Alternatively a video camera could be used which would be synced exactly to the camera's running speed (in practice both have to run at 25.00fps to ensure it is exact during entire process) and observe the mirror shadow patterns at slow speed. Personally I just inched my camera manually and observed the mirror path... it was easy to observe that it is extremely difficult to try to make that kind of device moving exactly symmetrically and it can be easily seen how it can cause such issues especially if the light rays from the taking lens are coming in certain angles so that the mirror edge has possibility to shadow the frame more
  24. I checked Heikki's scanned test footage with waveform monitor, advanced it frame by frame by carefully checking the waveform at the same time. One can very clearly see the exposure jumping couple of % up for every other frame resuming back in the intermittent frames and that was consistent on all different framerates tested without the pattern changing in any way. This type of method is much more sensitive than just trying to catch the flicker by eye and one can detect any flicker even if the footage seems fine by eye. If a motor itself would cause that kind of thing it would need to happen for every other frame so for every other revolution of the motor, NOT on every revolution it rotates (motors work symmetrically in full single revolutions divided in steps symmetrically, in the case of my motors divided by 8). If a motor controller would be so faulty that it would create huge oscillation at 12Hz to the output it would sound so horrible that no one in their right mind could use it and additionally it would cause tons of resonance which would likely break something pretty quickly. With such a resonance being even worse at 50fps for example
  25. the ACL camera has a clear design compromise on the mirror design so that the camera body can be very small and relatively lightweight. in the original use it was a very good choice but on the current indie use these cameras are used for it may sometimes matter more than the original designers would have expected. if made differently (like having different relative size of the mirror and different swing distance so that the relative mirror speed when shadowing the gate would be as high as possible and the slow down would be phased on the very ends of the cycle well clear of the optical path instead of doing the slow down on the edges of the frame) it would likely have so much less flicker that it would be unnoticeable in almost every shooting situation
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