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Dom Jaeger

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About Dom Jaeger

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  • Occupation
    Other
  • Location
    Melbourne, Australia
  • Specialties
    Cinema camera and lens technician

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  • Website URL
    http://cinetinker.blogspot.com.au

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  1. The 13mm f/0.9 is an amazing lens for sure. You know you can use the octameter viewfinder on a Rex camera too?
  2. Yes, the wave spring washer sandwiched between flat washers, should exert some pressure to create friction. Make sure to grease the assembly. Bolex had a special tool to press down on the washer while pushing in or out the pin.
  3. Well if both adapters are accurate, and allow clearance of the lens, then together they should seat the lens at the correct depth. You’re just making a Hasselblad to Aaton adapter in two steps. No need to compensate aperture unless there are optical reducers in there but it sounds like these are just mechanical adapters right? The lenses might be a little soft for 16mm, but worth a try. How does it look in the viewfinder?
  4. Glad to hear you got it working. It is indeed a clever and simple mechanism.
  5. Fitting a 435 movement is not a trivial job, even in the highly unlikely case that you unearth one somewhere for cheap. Have you looked into the labour cost of converting a 435? There are a handful of people worldwide who could do it nowadays, and most of those probably wouldn’t want to take it on, especially for the low cost you seem to be hoping for. What are you actually trying to achieve? You have a “dormant” camera that needs a new movement?
  6. The way the double rotation stop works is that the stop screw should be short enough to pass over the fixed stop pin, but not the steel ball in that groove. So the stop screw hits the ball, which does another rotation until it hits the pin. If someone lost the ball, they may have fitted a longer stop screw, not understanding the mechanism.
  7. I think the stop should allow a double rotation of the focus ring, to get into the macro range. Perhaps the mechanism has been incorrectly adjusted or something. It uses a small steel ball as an intermediate between the stop and the stop screw.
  8. The Eclair TS mount was used for many years by Chrosziel in their collimators and lens projectors. Chrosziel made adapters for lots of different lens mounts. I suspect a lot of older rental houses may have a bunch of these lying about. At the last rental house I worked at they had adapters for Arri S, Arri B, Mitchell BNCR, OCT 18, Aaton, Cameflex and Nikon. Where I now work has less - Arri S/B, Arri PL, Panavision, B4 (with corrective optics) and a BNCR that I cannibalised to make an EF one.
  9. There are no cheap super wide angle Super 8 cameras. Only a very few, like Beaulieus, have a C mount that allows you to interchange lenses, but super wide C mounts like the various Century ones tend to be rare and expensive. As someone recommended above, your best option is probably just a fisheye converter but it won't look that great. You'd have more options in 16mm, where you can rent various 6mm lenses, but that still won't be as wide as those Fallen Angels shots, and if you have a limited budget that's probably not an option either.
  10. Yeah this is hogwash. C mount lenses can be very accurately set for back-focus, I do it all the time for Bolexes, Beaulieus, ACLs etc. They absolutely have a hard mount, that repeatably allows a lens to seat within 0.01mm variation. You don't need to collimate each lens to each body, you set everything to the C mount standard, cameras and lenses. It's 17.52mm, a standard that goes down to 1/00 of a mm for a reason. What lets C mounts down usually is wear to the focus helicoid, and obviously it's not a good mount for heavy zooms. A 6mm lens can be calibrated on a good collimator. I've collimated plenty - Kinoptik 5.7mm or 6mm Ultra 16 or 6mm Optex for example. For fixed focus (meaning not able to focus) wide angles, like an Angenieux 5.9mm it's a little harder as the lens focus is set to around 8 ft, but some collimators have optics that allow you to check collimation at closer distances, or a tech can project the lens if their projector has a C mount, which my old Chrosziel projector has. A final option is to check it through a reflex viewfinder or gate focusing tool, which works but is not as accurate.
  11. It's a non-reflex Bolex, so there's nothing in the camera that would make a lens "work well" or not, if it's a good lens it will work well. The only thing you need for SLR lenses is a decent adapter that seats the lens at the right flange depth, and a manual aperture lens. The main problem with using 35mm stills lenses is that you'll struggle to find the sort of focal lengths that are commonly used on 16mm. A typical wide angle would be 10mm or less, and a normal lens around 20- 25mm. Your 52mm Vivitar is essentially a telephoto lens on 16mm format. If the Vivitar isn't focusing it could be a few things. We'll assume the lens itself is OK. The adapter could be out (although usually a small flange depth error will just shift the focus scale a little, you should still be able to form an image). Alternately maybe the adapter is not screwing all the way in, so check nothing is obstructing it. That issue would make the lens only focus on close objects. If you have some C mounts, you can check if the top viewfinder works for them to rule that out. Presumably you have read the manual and know to adjust the viewfinder focus for your eye.
  12. There is a standard winder without the gear that sits more flush to the camera. You can still use the Rex O Fader winder, it just sticks out more.
  13. It's really very straightforward. Unlatch the arm from the variable shutter lever. Unscrew the winder lever (turn it clockwise). Undo the single screw in the middle of the Rex O Fader and lift it off.
  14. Ultra 16 is a bit of a dodgy format honestly, a sort of cheap DIY attempt to replicate S16. Many of these conversions have been done by amateurs who just roughly file out the gate on both sides, though it should be OK if Bernie O’Doherty did it. The gate extends a bit into the S16 side, and also into the side where the perfs are, so you end up with an image that has the perfs cropping in top and bottom. On some cameras like the K3 this allows light leaks from the perfs, like this: You end up having to crop the top and bottom to remove the perfs, and then crop in the left side to remove the perf flare, and you end up almost back where you started. Some cameras are a bit better with perf flare, but you still need to crop the height to remove the perfs. You can also sometimes get scratching between the perfs since the film slides over a support rail there, and there is an opening for the pulldown claw. It’s also the area where edge code is printed on the film stock. Here’s an Ultra 16 conversion by Bernie: Below is roughly where the original 1.37 gate would be, to get a wider aspect ratio like 1.78 or 1.85 you also just crop top and bottom. As you can see, a good Ultra 16 conversion does give you a little more width, but as mentioned not all scanners are set up for it and not all wide angle lenses will cover it. I would definitely ask for footage from any Ultra 16 converted camera, to check how bad it might be. The other thing to consider is that the original viewfinder optics and ground glass may not cover the expanded area, so you might not be able to frame accurately.
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