Robert Hart

Thank you for your replies. All seems too be good regarding the iris.

If you want plain bad, an old TV Nikon B4-Mount ENG zoom lens in a poor condition plus lousy colour correction might suit. On that day, everything which could go wrong, did. Took the train with everything on a furniture trolley. Wheeled it some 2km from the station. All of three audio cables failed. I forgot my colour temp setting. Member of the public stepped right back into the shot after being asked to move. The TV Nikon lens requires a correction optic behind it for use with single CMOS sensored 2/3" cameras.

Are they new pieces or projects he shot before he broke through?

Nothing really new. The Kodak Brownie 127 snapshot camera of the mid 1950's ran roll film over a horizontally curved film plane. It will be interesting to see where they go with a spherical sensor. There will be all manner of possibilities with VR image aquisition.

There is a Cinema Products ( by Kowa ) 9mm fast lens,T1.3 or thereabouts from memory. It remains quite sharp at its widest aperture. It was made for the standard 16mm frame and unless modified it will vignette the corners of the Super16mm film image. The modification is fairly simple and one that a lens tech could manage easily. They are fairly scarce in the used market. Into the corners of the Super16mm frame the image sharpness suffers a little on the specimen I have. For curiosity sake, this little clip shows the 9mm,12.5mm, 16mm and 25mm CP Ultra T* lens images in a low light setting on a SI2K camera. The CP Ultra T* 9mm lens has a little quirk in its focusing system. There seems to be a combined helicoid and cam actuation in which the rate of focus change alters abruptly towards the close end of focus adjustment making smooth focus pulls whilst rolling, difficult and unpredictable.

35mm stills lenses to the Super16mm frame may be disappointingly soft even though you may be aquiring from a possibly sharper centre area image within the much wider image circle of the lens.

The CP16 transport received a bit of negative regard when it came to steadiness. Some years back, Ken Hale at Whitehouse Audiovisual did a double-exposure test on a CP16R which had been properly serviced and adjusted with clutches at correct frictions. Despite there being no registration pin on the CP it was rock steady. Many complex machines are only as good as their ongoing care and maintenance.

Subjectively to my eye, when they started doing digital intermediate, something seemed to change in the cinema viewing experience. The colours did not seem quite right and the sharpness seemed to be a bit off. Maybe it wasn't but that was my observation. Probably the colours were more "right" than in the traditional all-film process to distribution print. The perceived "sharpness" might have been conveyed by all the defects including white dust and whiskers off the negative and dancing processing bands down the image which made it onto the prints in earlier days. I do not miss some of the prints in which there seemed to be spill of light within the print film itself from highlights to the adjacent image. To be honest, the story ruled. It was only when I was playing projector operator at a local outdoor cinema using old carbon arc lamps and trimming the focus that I started taking notice.

In the final dressing of the gate corners and new extended edges for Super16mm, I was careful to use a thin piece of smooth file steel. In that instance it was the handle end of a very small flat file.

The oil on the iris leaves on my lens was plain stupid carelessness on my part, grabbing a lens out of long storage, taking off the CP-Mount, shoving on the PL-Mount, shimming it to infinity-focus and straightaway using it. If I had bothered to just look, I would have seen that something had got on the leaves from somewhere inside. With the iris leaves, the big challenge was getting the last four in because the first has to be slightly raised for the last leaves to be inserted beneath and registered into their pivots. As a lens, the 10-150 is not all that good, softer with a warm cast compared to the 12-120 which was on the older CP16 non-reflex camera. It works well enough now. I just have to get that rear optical group centred, which is a tiresome but essential business. I have a lot of respect for the people who make those iris leaves. I know there is developed craft and methods to make it easier. Cutting one out by hand from shim metal was a real challenge. It is not impossible but very, very difficult. I have an old Cine-Zenon 28mm f2.8, which is also goat-eyed from misadjustment of the mechanism and overclosing of the iris. Those old lenses have only five iris blades. One has a cut-out to enable assembly. That leaf is extremely fragile as the cutout leaves only about 1mm of metal.

For curiosity sake, I tried the Century Anamorphic on a Nikon lens which itself was attached to a Nikon F-Mount Metabones Speebooster focal reducer for the BMPCC camera which I modified to fit the SI2K IMS-Mount. Via a focal reducer, the Nikon lense return excellent sharpness numbers to the SI2K. Ignore the colour saturation in this clip. I adjusted the image in DaVinci Resolve which was learning at the time. The Speedbooster method to sharpen 35mm stills lenses will not be an option for an S16 reflex film camera bcause the Micro 4/3 mount flange-to-focal plane distance is 19.2mm. Because of the shutter mirror, there is not enough workspace for any modification to be done to the ARRI camera. You might with a Micro4/3 to C-Mount adaptor get it to work on a Bolex H16 RX or other C-Mount non reflex camera. You would need a seriously skilled camera tech to collimate the whole thing but with the Bolex, you would at least retain a reflex finder.

You will observe, especially near the left edge, some chroma artifacts. With the Proskar lens, you may find you cannot achieve infinity focus. The attachment thread on the rear of the Proskar lens is not a standard 0.7mm filter thread but a finer pitch. You would have to get a lens engineer to remake the rear section of the Proskar lens with the correct thread. With this sort of improvisation you will find focus pulls near to impossible, in fact actually impossible with lenses which have a rotating front barrel as the anamorphic stretch will rotate as you focus with some lenses. If your director is just after arty flares, then you might try stretching a spiderweb fine piece of fishing line in front of the lens when there is strong street illumination. Nikon 35mm stills lenses are going to be softer and adding the anamorphic adaptor will make the image softer still. My best Nikon against a chart returns 62 sharpness numbers on the SI2K camera. The best of the CP Ultra T lenses gave 115 under the same lighting conditions. It is going to be a pity to waste 16mm film plus the processing on a mediocre result.

Film is awfully costly stuff to waste if something does not work quite right. My personal preference would be to use purposed anamorphic lenses. I have not used anamorphics on a film camera I have had a play on the SI2K with anamorphics on front of CPUltraT* lenses, the Century Optics flavour for PD150 4:3 video cameras and the Proskar anamorphic 16mm projection lens. They were really only satisfactory on the 25mm lens. The Century was the version which fits to the bayonet mount which the lens hood attaches to the PD150 camera. I made an adaptor with 52mm filter thread for the CP Ultras and some Nikon lenses. The CPs have PL-Mounts on them. Natively they had the CP or ARRI standard mounts on them. Ken Hale sold me some PL mounts he made in stainless steel for the CPs which attach directly. Here are a couple of samples.

There is another system, which was discussed on the dvinfo.net forums when groundglass based 35mm film emulation adaptors were being made. The lens image from the 35mm format lenses was normally cast onto a groundglass screen in similar fashion to a camera viewfinder and that projected image was itself aquired by a small chip video camera. Many builders preferred the traditional "ground" glass, which was spun, oscillated or vibrated to eiliminate by motion blur, the texture of the finish. Others employed another method which was a thin layer of a special blend of beeswax and paraffin wax which when it set from molten state, coalesced into a very fine crystalline finish. It was so fine as to barely show its texture in an image taken from it. To control the uniform thickness of the layer it was in its molten state, wicked up in between two warmed thin planar sheets of optical glass and allowed to cool slowly and set in place. In large format plate stills view cameras, screens made by this method were called Boss screens after the inventor/manufacturer. They yielded superior light transmission and sharpness of image in view cameras for focusing prior to inserting the sensitised plate or film back for exposure. In hot conditions, the Boss screen can be adversely affected. So far as I am aware, the Boss screen was not adopted into widespread use in 35mm format stills camera viewfinders. I attempted to make a spinning disk with a wax layer between two disks but the variable density issue with the wax thickness I could not control with my backyard methods. The image was very sharp and clear but also the was a bad flicker artifact. There you go, a bit of useless history you did not need to know.

As with any older standard 16mm lenses, if they go faulty, they may be assessed as uneconomic to repair. Hence I have been compelled a few times to repair my own. I have an old 10-150 that came with a CP16R camera years ago. I had it professionally repaired for a separated element about 1993. The repairman enquired if I wanted him to split the remaining optics, clean and reassemble them with the then revolutionary UV-cure optical cement. Thank goodness I did not because the element which was repaired with UV cure is beginning to become a little smokey with some sort of crystalline deterioration. After having the lens stored for some years, I bought a PL-Mount from Ken Hale at Whitehouse AV and fitted it. Unknown to me was that the iris blades must have had some stray oil creep onto them and within a few hours of use on a SI2K camera, I observed a weird bokeh. On a closer look I saw that the iris blades had gone goats eye in a sort of an onion shape. I took it apart and found four blades were damaged, one snapped and three with their pivot pillars stretched out of their holes. After a few years of looking at it, looking on the net for parts and putting it away again, I finally found that Pillefilm in Europe had some blades. They are not cheap but given the difficulty in making them, that is to be expected. I know they are difficult because I made one. I bought in five from Pillefilm and set about re-assembling the iris cell. Iris blades are the devil's own concoction to fit. There is a method which is the direct opposite to the assembly sequence one would expect. To stop them from sliding around all over the place in the final assembly of four blades, I found that placing the cell on a business card sized fridge magnet sign, that they were immobilised sufficiently but still could be moved when needed. Maybe that's how they do it in the factory. I don't know. The blades appear to have been stamped or cut from fine steel or spring steel shim metal. My question to anyone who can advise is, can I expect any issues from the iris blades becoming magnetised? Maybe it might help keep them together. Maybe magnetic attraction will provoke more friction and more problems. Any advice appreciated.

The mount on that lens seems to be an ARRI standard mount. The lens type is scarce. I had not heard of it. As Dom Jaeger suggests above, the example illustrated appears to be incomplete, either a lens block with missing focus and iris control or has been modified. In original or mint condition it may appear different, possibly styled like Cook Speed Panchros. I expect that it might have once had focus numbers on what is now stained bare metal near the front of your example lens and in front of that and reaching down inside the lens barrel with a sort of a cone extension, another ring on the front to control the aperture like an old Cooke or Schneider. The example lens would not be practically usable on the ARRI camera as you would have no predictable control over it. The 35mm T1.2 Optika Elite I have was a cheap price off eBay a few years back. Allan Gordon has one listed on inventory but it is a fairly gold-plated price about six times what I paid for mine. https://www.alangordon.com/sales/used/lenses/super-16mm/primes/35mm-optika-elite As Dom Jaeger advises above, a 35mm focal length is a telephoto lens on a 16mm/Super16mm film camera. Of more utility might be a lens in the 16mm focal length or 12mm focal length. What mount does your ARRI S camera have on it? Has it been converted to PL-Mount or is it ARRI B or ARRI standard. I regret I am not familiar with the ARRI 16mm cameras. There are on eBay and other sources, Super16mm capable lenses of T1.3 or near-to. Some such are Cinema Products CP Ultra T* which were made by Kowa. Most are in CP-Mount but some are also found in ARRI mount. Ken Hale at Whitehouse Audiovisual was doing stainless steel PL-Mounts for them. The 12mm and 25mm were sharper wider-open before they flared than the Optars and preferred by a cammoe I worked with for a job he did. The 16mm on a digital cinema camera seemed to generate a central internal reflection in the centre quarter of the image area. On a film camera, I expect that would not happen. There is a partial CP Ultra T* set from a vendor in Hong Kong, missing the 9mm wide-angle. The CP Ultra T* 9mm was a tricky lens to focus in that it had a strange focus arrangement which feels like a combination of helicoid and cam/slot actuation, is very sharp but hard to achieve repeatable focus moves with. It also corner-vignettes a Super16mm image. It was designed for standard 16mm. It can be modified by Ken Hale at Whitehouse A/V or Visual Products foir Super16mm. It is a fairly simple fix but wide-open, the focus goes soft in the edges and corners of a Super16mm image. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Cinema-Products-25mm-f1-1-T1-25-Ultra-T-Series-Arriflex-B-mount-50161-/371795878641?hash=item5690c2e2f1:g:DdEAAOSwiDFYND3S The Zeiss Distagon 12mm, 16mm, and 25mm T1.3 examples on Allan Gordon are priced higher. The eBay asking price on a similar lens seems similar. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Arri-Zeiss-Super-Speed-MKII-16mm-T1-3-PL-Mount-Lens-Arriflex-Super-16-/222482205484?hash=item33ccf90b2c:g:nsMAAOSwTuJYod8Y There are the Optar Illuminas which can be found can also be found in PL-Mount and ARRI-B mount. The ARRI B-Mount specimens may pre-date the lenses imported to the US by Lumatech and their mechanical build quality may be inferior to the Lumatech imports. The least costly specimen is a 16mm at this eBay address. It is in PL-Mount. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Optar-Illumina-16mm-PL-mount-Lens-for-Aaton-Arri-/302306198074?hash=item4662da823a:g:-0gAAOSw~CFY5Jzk Please take more notice of the advice from other commentors rather than from me.

I have been in touch with Ari Presler relating to the P+S Technik/Silicon Imaging camera-recorder and there is re-assuring news. His reply conveyed that the operating system is locked down pretty well. One does not typically use the system to to go browse the Internet or email. "You can't change the registry unless you remove the lock to install new software." I was concerned about re-using courier drives or USB sticks back to the camera-recorder if they had been in contact with a computer linked to the web. "Even if something gets in during one execution you simply reboot the system and you're back to the same starting point. That was one of the reasons we put in the whole operating system embedded lock." Historically, my camera-recorder has recovered from a few abuses, disconnected power whilst shooting, a dud drive and a remote camera disconnect. A reboot, normal shutdown and reboot to re-establish stability has been all it took to bring it back. With systems using a tethered camera feeding a laptop/notebook recorder with Silicon DVR installed as an application, operating within Windows XP under Windows 7, then it would be appropriate to enable Windows security updates for the primary operating system.

Ransomware and windows xp. It is a scary thought but maybe the SI2K's XPe operating system could be affected by this particular malware. I am too technically illiterate to know, so my comments should not be taken as valid. I would hope that the SI software protection of the camera operating system prevents this new threat from taking root. For the time being it would probably be prudent for the cameras and recorders to be quarantined from unprotected computers which remain connected to the internet and that internet computers have their system update function for Windows enabled. There has been a software patch for embedded Windows XP provided freely by Microsoft although Windows XP itself is now EOL and normally only supported by custom contracts between existing large scale users and Microsoft. Because the SI version of Windows XPe and the embedded applications on the P+S Technik camera-recorder are highly customised and protected, it might not be affected. I have not used or installed the PC or laptop versions so I don't know if the SI system protection is also available on them. Until I can enquire with Ari Presler at SI or P+S Technik, I shall endeavour to keep my camera-recorder and editing computer quarantined with courier drives like USB sticks or portable drives used only on a one-way path from the camera-recorder and editor.

For what it is worth, here is a link to an unscientific test I did with Optars and a 35mm T1.3 Optika Elite lens. The Optika lens was not the Mk4 version. I did not caption the image from each lens. The Optika lens image was indistinguishable from the Optar lenses but was sweetest at T4 - T5.6 compared to the Optars which were sweetest in the zone T2 - T4. To force the exposure to be within the aperture sweet spot of the lenses, I used ND and IR filters and retained the 1/50th sec shutter on the SI2K camera.

Perhaps you might define the lens with a little more detail. There will be qualified and smarter people on this forum who can advise but in the meantime my inferior comments follow below. By "35mm" I am assuming you are describing the film format the lens is designed for, not its actual focal length. There is as far as I know no Kinoptik 35mm focal length lenses wider than T2.4. That lens has a focus adjustment. There is an ultra wide-angle lens for this format, the Kinoptic Tegea 9.8mm and on my specimen only f1.8 at its widest aperture with no "T" markings. This lens also has a focus ring at the rear. If you were intending to use this lens on an ARRI 16mm camera, you might be better served by the S16mm lens offerings from Optar illumina in 8mm and 9mm which are T1.3 or thereabouts but better at T2 and seem sweetest at around T4. The Kinoptik 9.8mm for 35mm may be unacceptably soft to a 16mm film frame. As for Zeiss Superspeed, I have to defer to the knowledge of someone else because I have not used Zeiss superspeed lenses on a 16mm format film or digital cinema camera. Their slower CP2 series for 35mm film/digital cinema returned good sharpness numbers wide-open on the SI2K 16mm format camera which surprised me. The Kinoptik 5.7mm f1.8 lens has only an aperture ring and no focus adjustment which is as you describe. It is normally collimated to a camera so that sharp focus is about three feet from the focal plane. The extreme depth of field from such a wide-angle lens was deemed at the time to take care of the rest to infinity especially when tighter apertures were used. For slightly sharper results at wide-apertures on the SI2K camera, with the C-Mount version I have, I have collimated the lens mount to infinity focus and either temporarily unscrew the lens slightly forwards in the C-Mount for closer focus or use an external shim in front of the flange face to restore to the normal focus point. ​Forget about focus pulls with camera rolling with this arrangement. Image shifts during the pull are likely. The Kinoptik 5.7mm ultra wide-angle achieved some revived notoriety after upcoming director, Robert Rodriguez used one to shoot interiors for his film "El Mariachi".

For what it is worth here is a short bit of playing around we did after doing a plate of a train passing for a book promo teaser. © S.Rice, Darling Films, Thornlie, Western Australia. Some years back, there was this spooky film which opened with a tall skinny, almost cadaverous man walking with a strange fluid gait along a small-town USA main street. The look was achieved with a slow-motion camera effect combined with a faster pace of walk, a technique more commonly associated with music videos these days.

Michael Rodin. - About "Why not call a spade a spade, i.e. an amateur an amateur." - Yes I agree. Wordiness is a fault of mine. - I do tend to be a bit pedantic as I write more than I film. - I guess it comes down to "Why use just a few concise accurate words when a thousand and four elaborate words will do". It is frustrating when some individuals find difficulty in heeding what is accurate advice, go off down a dead-end, waste time, only to arrive in the afternoon where the original advice would have taken them in the mid-morning. As you correctly define - amateur. I cannot lay claim to being a professional, far from it. I do have the benefit of age and a few years of the learning and being prepared to pull my head in and listen to the right people.

Here is the plywood mount. I couldn't load the image here and dvinfo.net/forum seems to have gone down so I have loaded to reduser.net. Here is the link. http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?156963-CAMERA-SUPPORT-THE-BACKYARD-BUILDER-S-WAY&p=1724963#post1724963 You may need to be a logged on user at reduser before the image or its thumbnail may show. Sorry. That's as best I can do.

I second Jason's comment. We tried jigging an ARRI Standard mount Speed Panchro Series 2 50mm and 70mm to a Canon 7D with a view to taking measurements for making a dumb adaptor mount and found that the rear structure of the lens itself and rear element runs foul of the mirror. I think the mount itself runs foul of part of the camera internal structure as well but I am not so sure of that any more. It may have been the ARRI standard mount on an Angenieux zoom which fouled the internal structure. We established it could not be done with those lenses.