Aapo Lettinen

There is arri standard to PL focusing adapters available so they are possible too.

There is couple of different round mounts which turn when focusing. The arri standard, the Soviet aks4 and oct18 mounts are few examples. I use teflon grease on the oct18 mounts if shooting in cold and vaseline will do in warm climate. Just a very small amount needed. My Lomo 12-120 actually covers s16 but not at all focal lenghts and focusing distances. I don't have the 10-100 but from the construction of it I would assume it have pretty ok coverage on most focal lengths. Havent tested the kinor16 primes other than the 10/1.8 which did not cover. Oct18 primes can be adapted to pl with proper focusing adapters but you are very limited with focal lengths. Basically the good ones which are possible to get are the black versions of the Lomo 28/2 , 35/2, 50/2 and the 75/2. The rafcamera adapters work great but don't fit all PL cameras like Alexas or Amiras. With pl-C adapters they should not have problem. These are N35 lenses which just cover S35 on the 28 and 35 and should just cover FF on 50 and 75. For 16mm you might be happier with a bit more contrasty lenses though based on your OP

I believe the Lomo 10-100/2.5 made for Kinor16cx-2m could fit the Eclair pretty well but cannot test it. It can be attractively priced at least at around 300 - 400 bucks. No idea if it would fit the Eclair PL adapter with a screw-on Kinor to PL adapter on the lens but from the images I believe it would be possible. (I only own the 12-120/2.4 lomo which I don't recommend for this type of use)

when you start to look at it, the "new designs" may be just altered versions of old stuff... like the Hawk C-series based on Lomo Roundfronts (they even look pretty similar externally and weight and dimensions are a match) . Or the Canon 50-1000 clearly based on their ENG zoom with better mechanics added and extender added to get S35 coverage. Or for example the Atlas Orion anamorphics which are claimed to be based on copied optical plans / possibly stolen IP from another manufacturer which is possibly why they could make them so affordable (no need to design your own optics, just the housing and fine tuning the result)

as others said, most of the FF zooms are short range or not very good quality or have awkward mechanics not really suitable for cine use. Most good stills zooms and lower priced "prosume cine zooms" tend to be about 3:1 zoom ratio especially if they need to have any kind of usable image quality. Compromising size, weight, speed, optical quality, price is easiest by lowering the zoom ratio and making electronic focus tuning tricks to try to mimic parfocal behaviour so that complex heavy and expensive mechanics don't need to be used. designing and manufacturing good high performance lenses is among the most challenging jobs there is in cinema equipment manufacturing. making cameras is relatively easy if someone manufactures good quality sensors for you, and making other cine equipment like lights, dollies, follow focuses, remote focus, crane, stabilizers etc etc. is something a handy person could do at home if determined enough. designing and manufacturing optical elements for great quality lenses is the tough part. lots of custom equipment and expertise needed. and it just takes lots of time to get any usable results. You surely have noticed how often "new cine lenses" are just rehoused stuff by the same manufacturer with mechanics and maybe the coatings changed but otherwise they are optically the same? every Chinese sweatshop can do basic rehousing and custom mechanics (there is eBay "cine rehoused" still lens stuff available for reasonable prices) but actually designing and manufacturing a completely now great performing optical system from scratch is not that simple anymore and will take lots of time and expense. even big manufacturers don't want to do that unless absolutely necessary and unless there is a huge demand which is why companies like Samyang etc just rehouse their old designs releasing them as "new lenses" instead of making anything totally new and we rarely see any new designs even from the largest manufacturers. with "real cine lenses" there is the additional disadvantage of low demand which does not encourage any real development in the area. the "prosume cine range" (low budget/corporate/documentaries/owner-op) has lots more demand but they rarely can afford 50k+ prices so have to live with lots of compromises in the designs

that Elokuvakonepaja solution would be one of the "really nice and compact" ones. probably more reliable as well than my Chinese eBay parts

the cost probably depends on how nice you want it to look like and how compact and sturdy it needs to be. if just wanting to get SOME KIND of relatively well working adapter for single v-lock boosted to 24v with proper connector, the parts would probably cost something between 50 and 100 usd or something like that and a handy person could assemble it by him/herself. But that is just me and my DIY solutions, they tend to look like crap but it does not mean they wouldn't work ?

I thought that the problem was having some kind of coating layer which has formed on top of the original ink and cannot be dissolved with simple ethanol. Seems to be that the problem is that black spot which needs to be get rid of to make the slate clearly readable again. So the best approach is to just test other solvents from mildest to strongest until some of them works. A little bit of dissolved plastic would probably be tolerated if the black spot goes away :) Every chemical can be handled with proper safety measures. In case of this type of bentzene derivatives it should be enough to have a respirator and protective clothing including proper rubber gloves. Petrol contains bentzene derivatives too and would be bad to get on skin or to breathe the fumes. Acetone is milder and isopropanol among the mildest there is which is why it would be best to try it first and if it does not work, then acetone very carefully applied to limit the surface damage. One possibility would be to use very fine sandpaper to take the surface layer away to get to the black color layer and then remove the color with isopropanol

isopropyl alcohol usually works for permanent markers. You should be able to get 100% stuff easily because it is not suitable for consumption /is dangerous to drink so is probably not regulated in Saudi Arabia I believe. it has the additional benefit of being usually very pure unlike ethanol products which contain denaturing agents like methanol or other stuff. acetone or toluene or xylene could work if isopropanol is not enough. these may heavily dissolve plastic so use with extreme caution. Petrol/gasoline could also work but I would not try it unless absolutely necessary.

in the productions I have been in the F5 was usually rated between 1000 and 1600 ISO if light levels allowed. These were mostly for large screen cinema release almost exclusively shot in RAW and for less demanding applications the 2000 may be OK depending on the shot type and content. It is a wonderful multi-purpose camera with clever intermediate lens mount system with sturdy adapters. There is still no good alternatives to it for higher budget doc uses we need it for (the DP upgraded to F55 and the newer X-OCN capable recorder when it came out but still the same system. if you need raw with it, don't bother with the old recorder unless you can get it for free. the x-ocn is much better format especially if shooting larger amounts of material... the old almost uncompressed raw is complete overkill for any application and just uses lot more storage space) . There is noticeable difference in colours between F5 and F55, the F5 being a little more video-ish especially on greens

that type of error may be caused by for example the corrupted partition table. easiest way to get partition table damaged is to take the card off the camera in the middle of recording a clip but sometimes cameras or readers may do this by themselves. I have once seen an Alexa Mini do this to a single card. data recovery programs may help if the card is not physically damaged

if there is underwater cinematographers in your area they would have a easy solution for this. would cost something of course but probably not that much. the way you describe it you would most probably manage with some kind of splash bag and swimming on surface with snorkel and mask. generally it does not have to be the same camera than the rest of the movie, underwater shots differ so much from anything else that no one would notice if the camera changes. maybe you could do something with a large aquarium, don't know. depends a lot on how wide shot you'll want. If it would be tight shot it could be possible to do a "snorkel aquarium" with angled mirror on the bottom and the camera pointed to it from above, could make the operating easier? it might be possible to tune Laowa to focus to infinity by adding negative lens in front of it. I don't own a probe lens so can't test it but I believe it should be possible. One of the possible issues would be that there tends to be relatively low light levels underwater and adding a very slow probe lens to the equation would not help at all.

it may partially be because Nazi and Communist themes have already been exhausted years ago. another thing is that in recent socioeconomic times the viewers like to distant themselves more from reality which traditionally asks for more fantasy +scifi+ distant history films instead of ones based on today's world. the third reason is that the things leading to the Nazi regime and the WWII are too close to today's political climate.... we don't want to see Nazis and other right-wing extremists on screen when we see them in everyday life? so the WW1 is distant enough past that it is possible to write reasonably good movies of it which are not too connected to todays world. good entertainment for the masses and the companies know it. Remember that a movie can be good in other ways than just based on film theory analyzing. A film can for example be "Financially Great", like the Star Wars series, without being good as a movie in theoretical sense. Or the Marvel flicks, they have all your favourite characters and familiar plots and they give you exactly what you wanted but are pretty boring and predictable and they even tend to all look the same (one of the reasons may be that Ben Davis has shot most of them I think) . they are good fan service but not much more. Same thing with Disney movies, they very rarely present anything new and are mostly concentrated on endless remakes of their old classics instead of inventing anything new. Like the Lion King or Jungle Book, they have the same characters and songs and everything...just the graphics updated a little

personally I use custom frame lines in almost every project. that is because I shoot 2:1 pretty often and also shoot regularly with lenses which don't cover the whole sensor so horizontal cropping is also needed (for example some of the Lomo oct18 lenses on Nikon Z6 10-bit which means about 30mm horizontal sensor width but the lenses cover about 24mm horizontally. and switching to DX mode would mean too much cropping and lower image quality by my tests when comparing to cropped FX image)

you need to set custom frame lines from the menus. I don't remember where it was there (always used a rental fs7) . A framing chart will help to verify that the custom lines are definitely 2:1 . when taping on monitor you would benefit from the framing chart as well. if the monitor has custom frameline option you can just setup them from the menus just like with the camera itself. You will crop vertically when wanting 2:1 ratio whether shooting 2k/4k or hd/uhd so you will only need to know how much the image will be cropped vertically so that your vertical framings are not too tight. If you don't have any kind of framing guide available then it makes sense to shoot dci2k or dci4k because the native aspect ratio, about 1.89:1, will be close to the 2:1 ratio and you know you'll be OK if you leave just a tiny bit of headroom to the shots.

the shortest lengths need to be covered with dedicated 16mm lenses but for normal and long focal the 35mm lenses are great. using larger format lens on small format may cause additional reflections in lenses and camera and lowered contrast depending on the scene. you can control these with hard mattes or if unavailable, carefully masking the mattebox front with black tape lens-by-lens to reduce unwanted light outside the picture area

For low budget and indie stuff it may be better to get couple of good light stands and couple of decent size reflectors to control light. The main problem tends to be that there is enough light but it is of wrong quality and from wrong direction or is just too harsh. I like to use couple of foldable Lastolite style knockoffs which have changeable silver, white, black and diffusion surfaces. They are handy on small shoots. Can also use styrofoam with one white on other side and black on other and the other having silver on other side and white on other. You can do these by yourself for couple of bucks if needed. You may want to have one led light which is easy to adjust and is about 40 to 100w range. I like to use daylight led for more output and just gel it down if needed. You will lose light with adjustable leds because they are rarely used on colour temp setting where all leds are on full power. Probably you would like to have another light which has lots of output. I would personally use something on 1kw range tungsten for that type of shoot. It can be controlled with the aforementioned reflectors to get the light look nice without making too artificial classic tv interview look (unless you really want to make it look like that) I personally like to use 2 light setups and control it in other ways like flags and reflectors to make the output look nice. I think the worst thing one can do is to purchase 3 similar lights like a redhead style kit with similar stands and everything

the thing with digital cameras is, you can't really "measure" their usable dynamic range because it is a matter of taste how much noise you can tolerate in the shadows to still call them usable. Camera manufacturers tend to measure the underexposure stops by calling all the stops above noise floor usable as long as they can be in any way differentiated from plain noise. So if there seems to be SOMETHING which resembles a stop then they call it usable. But in real life no one can use them for imaging purposes. The manufacturer stops are only for marketing purposes and for real life performance it is thus important to know how they measure them... then you will know this "last stops not usable for real life purposes" thing and will treat the dynamic range of the camera system correctly :)

they not seem to quote any USABLE dynamic range, only the specs listed by the manufacturer which are normally exaggerated by one or two stops. You tend to be pretty safe if you take about 1.5 or 2 stops off of the underexposure latitude, then it better resembles the real life performance of the system. AND you definitely don't want to try to get 5 stops underexposed details out of film... if the specs list -4 then you can treat it as -3 maximum. Advanced noise reduction can do wonders to image but it will take forever to render (even days) and will create artifacts. for stuff like 5dmark2 details underexposed 7 stops it would probably not help no matter how much heavy noise reduction you use on it

There is one good application for low range still lenses in cine PL mount world...that is shooting macro stuff with extension tubes and bellows. You don't need to worry about the ffd and you hqve unlimited possibilities compared to a dedicated PL macro

The problem with PL adapting is normally that the back part of the lens is too large diameter and does not physically fit inside PL mount. The maximum outer diameter is about 50mm and most still lenses are much larger on the back part of the housing. This makes it impossible to adapt shorter ffd lenses to PL without rehousing which tends to necessitate at least redesigning the iris mechanics and in most cases also the focusing system needs to be redesigned and rebuilt. That is way too much work and expense to spend on a low or mid quality still lens. For very special lenses with distinctive look it may be feasible but for most still lenses it does not make sense in any way.

no, it was not a problem for them and they did not see any risk in it. they were intending to shoot to a half inch thick piece of plywood "because the bullets will not go through it" but I insisted they WOULD definitely go through because I had shot with similar caliber gun in the past and knew the plywood would make nothing to stop the bullets and they would ricochet around in worst case. it was a low budget non-paid indie production but can't give more details. Haven't worked with them since, that's mainly because the scripts were not very good but also for the safety issues and cheap ass budgets in general. It is much more typical in indie productions to go to places where there is risk of falling but no one has safety gear. It may be very easy to find safer workarounds so these situations can usually be easily avoided.

I made them rip out the bullets out of the shells with pliers to make "blanks" so that there was less risk shooting them indoors. They hated me for that of course and did not understand the safety points ? The funniest thing was, in the final film one could not even clearly see the gun being fired (no muzzle flash or not much smoke etc) so they could had as well faked it in post and made the scene with empty gun and adding just the bang afterwards XD It is common to use airsoft guns in indie productions and add cheap ass muzzle flashes afterwards to sell them. real guns may be used in productions with proper budget but they are always using blanks of course

you can manage most archiving/file corruption related fears with off-site backups and verified transfers. Memory cards may sometimes have problems but it is relatively small risk. Just don't store all your files in one place and you'll be fine :) My biggest fears are usually workplace safety related when working on indie productions. I am trying to analyse the situation and find workarounds the best I can if there is even a small risk of accident to happen. Most indie guys don't work like that as far as I have seen... there has been lots of small incidents in the past which could have ended badly (shooting just past the camera operator with real gun and bullets, the actor's head almost smashed by a 50lb block of wood, the stairway almost falling on an actor when being moved... badly rigged lights, not using sandbags to secure stands in heavy wind and so on) so careful approach is definitely needed. As a cinematographer you may be the only person on set who can say NO to the director... it will be appreciated if you are clever enough to find safer workarounds without wasting too much time

I believe they are the same. I have always purchased their adapters via eBay from this seller https://www.ebay.com/usr/ciecio7?_trksid=p2047675.l2559