Dom Jaeger

Good question Satsuki, I don't know the answer. According to Kingslake the first Tele adapter was patented by Dallmeyer at the turn of the 20th century, but he's a bit vague about wide angle adapters. I suppose technically Chretien's anamorphic adapter from the 20s was a wide angle attachment, though only affecting one dimension. Until aspheric elements became widely available in the 50s I imagine any wide angle adapter would have been pretty crummy, as David's anecdote illustrates, and even top of the range aspheric attachments like the Zeiss Aspheron from the 70s or 80s weren't all that great. Often it was amateur film equipment where new technology was first implemented, and I know there were wide and Tele adapters made for 8 and 16mm camera as early as the 40s, but I don't know when they might have first been used with larger professional formats like 35mm.

Could just be that we kept using what we had used in earlier times, knowledge gets passed down in this craft. But I also think distances are easier to judge in feet and inches, rather than metres and centimetres, the scale of measurement is better suited for filmmaking. Larger discreet units (inches) and smaller groupings (feet). It's easier to pull focus to these units too. At least that's my feeling, but maybe it's just what you're used to.

On the right side (feed side) just beside the top of the lens port, there is a small Allen socket and lock ring. Undo the lock ring with a 2 prong driver, just a couple of turns, then use an Allen key (2mm from memory) to turn the inner socket anti-clockwise. That turns a worm gear which slowly undoes the big geared viewfinder lock ring which is directly above the lens port. Undoing that ring reduces pressure on an inner friction disk, making it easier to swing the viewfinder over, or reposition its height. Undo it too much and the viewfinder arm won't keep its position. Once the friction is right, tighten the the little lock ring around the Allen socket with a 2 prong driver again. Good luck!

Yeah forget 'run and gun', I like 'cuss and blunderbuss'!

Yes, British and American lenses of this era (and later) were often labelled in inches, and generally the conversion to mm is done roughly, 1" to 25mm. Curiously, the prewar German lenses were often marked in cm. The Super Baltar set we have is marked in a combination of metric and Imperial: 20mm, 25mm, 2", 3", etc. The film industry is rife with this sort of confusion, here in Australia we prefer lens focus scales marked in feet and inches despite the fact we've been metric for decades!

That would be Astro Berlin, German firm.

If the motor spring is broken it usually just keeps winding without winding up. If something is jammed, like a broken gear tooth on the motor, or if it's wound all the way up, it won't wind at all. If the spring is wound all the way up but the release is jammed, when you remove the front the spring will unwind with great speed. Watch out for that..

This is a subject I'm very interested in myself, and one that seems not particularly well covered in the various books I've read on cinematography or film style history. 24mm was indeed very wide when Toland shot Citizen Kane, the widest professional cine lens available at the time, as far as I'm aware. Despite there having been very wide angle lenses since the beginning of the 20th century, including over 90 degree fields of view from lenses designed for large plate architectural photography, and the first fisheye lens being made for cloud studies as far back as 1923, cinematography lenses had particular requirements - more stringent aberration correction and higher resolution for the subsequent big screen enlargement of a smaller negative, tighter tolerances in centration of the smaller glass elements, and faster apertures for the shortened exposure times of motion capture - which in the 1920s limited professional cine lenses to a minimum of 32 or 35mm in focal length, eg Bausch and Lomb had a 32mm Tessar (licensed from Zeiss), Cooke a 35mm Anastigmat. By the early 30s, Cooke had a 32mm series 0 Opic, forerunner to their Speed Panchros, and Zeiss had a 27mm Tessar. Within a few years Cooke had released their 24mm Speed Pancho, Goerz had a 25mm Kino-Hypar Anastigmat and Bausch and Lomb had their 25mm Baltar. There were no doubt other examples in this range around this time. Certainly by the end of WWII there were several 1" or 25mm lenses available for Eyemos (the most ubiquitous 35mm documentary camera of its age) though this was probably dictated more by the need for wider coverage than the excellence of the image itself. Despite their obvious technological advancement in the field of optics, Germany's Arriflex 35 (the original Arri 2C as used by German WWII combat cameramen) had a lens hood that vignetted on lenses under 28mm. Of course with its newly developed spinning mirror shutter they had a much deeper flange depth to overcome. After the impact of Toland's deep focus and wide angle style had sunk in, many features were shot almost entirely on 30 to 35mm lenses, including some by Welles himself, but 24mm was still seen by many cinematographers as too distorting, unsuitable for anything but landscapes or wide establishing shots. Another limiting factor for wide angle lenses for cine cameras (and reflex cameras in general) was the problem of very short back focus distances and the need to clear a reflex mirror or prism. Cooke had already provided a solution back in the 30s when they had modified a 30mm anastigmat to clear the beam splitter prism of Technicolor cameras by utilising a reverse telephoto design that extended the back focus distance much further than the focal length. This opened the way for further short focal length designs for reflex still and cine cameras, something Angenieux began to specialise in by the 1950s with their 'retrofocus' lenses. According to the Cooke webpage a series II 18mm Speed Panchro was released in 1945, but it was not perhaps fully formed, as cinematographers don't seem to have embraced the Cooke 18mm until the series III version was released in 1954. It became something of a classic, deposing the Angenieux 18.5mm that had briefly reigned after its release in 1951. Around this time Mike Todd created 70mm Todd-AO as a single lens answer to Cinerama, and utilised a specially designed "bug-eye" lens with a 128 degree field of view to attempt to recreate the 3 camera view of Cinerama. See http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/wingto2.htm. In the late 60s the French firm Kinoptik released their 9.8mm Kinoptik Tegea, a fixed focus lens famously used by Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. This was probably the ultra wide angle cine lens of choice for some time, before other manufacturers like Century and Zeiss began perfecting ultra wide lenses, culminating in Zeiss releasing their 8R UltraPrime which blew everything out of the water. This is something of a potted history of wide angle use in cinema (and also avoided any mention of 16mm or anamorphic or Panavision or standard 65mm), I would heartily welcome any corrections or additions. Not sure about the first use of an actual fisheye lens rather than just a very distorted wide angle, possibly HAL's viewpoint in 2001?

The model name is actually written on the side, Kiev 16 C-2. As Freya said it's a Russian copy of the Bell and Howell magazine-load 200 series cameras from the 50s and 60s, taking 50 ft cartridges long discontinued. The lens mount is nearly C mount but not quite, something like M27 I think. The camera is spring-driven. Not particularly valuable or rare, but quite compact for a 16mm camera.

Replacing the mirror is honestly a professional job, many important settings such as ground glass focus and position and camera timing will need to be reset, not to mention the very crucial checking and adjusting of the mirror flatness - if this isn't set to within ten or so microns the image in the viewfinder will vibrate, making critical focus impossible and giving the operator a headache. I would strongly advise against trying to do this yourself, unless you don't mind spending time and money turning a professional camera into a doorstop. Unfortunately it's a big job, and when you include the cost of a new mirror it may be cheaper to buy a new camera these days.

The Mk1 Standard Speeds are the small barrelled ones with Bayonet mount and very early coatings. They look completely different to the later versions, which look more like the Super Speeds.

As a rental tech I used to shoot steady tests on SRs every time one went out for a feature or long hire, must have shot dozens. I always twisted the chart (a grid) very slightly as Greg describes for the 2nd pass, makes it much easier to see any movement. I would also shoot the 2nd pass all at 24 fps, no need to shoot different speeds again. Also each mag got its own test, since SR mags are an integral part of the film transport and can affect steadiness. It's very important to have the camera firmly locked down to prevent vibration from appearing like camera unsteadiness. Make sure to only look for movement between the 2 exposures, not of the overall image. A serviced SR3 should be rock steady at all speeds. I used to project the developed neg onto a 10 ft screen to check for movement, and usually couldn't see any. These days with everything getting scanned and corrected in post it might not be as big a deal as it used to be, I don't know I'm not a post guy. It's possible for a camera to get steadier at higher speeds if the fault is say a particular wear in the movement which is masked by faster motion of the linkages, but usually yes steadiness is better at normal speeds.

That's right, there won't be any framing or tracking issues, those are determined by the lens mount centring and ground glass format. On the face of it I can't see any reason why you'd need to swap the viewfinder back if the N35 frame is visible, but presumably there is one or the designers wouldn't have gone to the trouble of making it convertible. Perhaps to keep the glow mask in position? We just used to swap it all over as a matter of routine, so I can't recall what issues might exist, sorry!

Yeah it's a bit of a squish sometimes, but you might be able to see the edge of frame with a tiny bit more adjustment. The locating pins are on the moveable plate with the connector, no? The engraved plate fits over that connector plate and shifts it to one side or the other. From memory the 3 adjustment screws just above the connector (looking at the photo) are to fine tune the position of the engraved plate, they should be eccentrics that control the x,y and tilt parameters. The middle one I think controls left to right adjustment. So you might be able to shift the plate (and thus the viewfinder) across a fraction more. All the best!

Hi Satsuki, Did you sort this out? I'm away from cameras this year, so I can't grab an SL to check, and it's been quite a few years now since I changed an SL over, but from memory you just undo the 2 screws holding the little engraved plate and flip it over. That recenters the mounting holes for the viewfinder locating pins, and shifts the viewfinder over by a mm. The viewfinder mounting screws are held in elongated holes so they can shift over. It's a very small shift, just to keep the widened groundglass frame within the viewfinder's image area. If you can see the whole GG frame when the VF is refitted then all is good. Sounds like the plate never got flipped to Standard in the first place, so you can just leave it as is.

Under the front plate is a thin layer of mechanisms including the run/single frame/lock mechanism, which holds or releases a stop located on the shutter axle. The gate/pull down assembly needs to be removed to access it under a thin cover plate. I wrote a disassembly guide for the Bolex D8L which has the same basic mechanism as the P series cameras, and contains photos of the area you're interested in: http://cinetinker.blogspot.de/2013/01/servicing-bolex-d8l.html?showComment=1438311633962

From the description that lens is made for a reflex Bolex, and even it wasn't, the Bolex prism tends to introduce aberrations rather than dramatically alter the focus mark, and only at fairly wide open apertures. There's a few reasons why a lens might read off compared to the viewfinder. Most likely is that the lens itself needs a bit of adjustment. Or the camera flange depth is out, or the groundglass is out. Or it's a combination of these. A simple reason might be that the zoom is a bit heavy for the c mount turret and is pulling the turret plate away from the film plane ( but then that would cause the focus marks to be shifted beyond the measured distance not before it). Another thing is that it's important to set focus at the long end, then zoom out to the required focal length, rather than just try to focus at 30mm. If you have another lens you could check whether its focus marks line up, which might give you an indication that the camera itself is correctly set up. The zoom should be parfocal, it was designed as a cine zoom, but if the back focus is off (or indeed the camera flange depth is out) the zoom will drift out of focus as you zoom from long to wide. If the zoom stays in focus (which admittedly can be hard to properly judge through a Bolex viewfinder) but reads the wrong distance it's likely the focus ring itself has slipped and needs adjusting. Sending both camera and lens to a technician for checking is the best way to guarantee that your footage will look as good as it can, and a check of the basic settings shouldn't cost more than the cost of a wasted roll of film and its processing. Otherwise the safest bet is to rely on the viewfinder, which is less likely to be out of adjustment than the lens. But as mentioned it's sometimes hard to critically judge focus through a Bolex viewfinder.. Someone else may have a tech recommendation that's closer, but Jean-Louis Seguin is in Montreal.

There's no reason Alura zooms shouldn't work on an SR3, in fact the Arri website specifically mentions that "while optimized for digital cameras, they are compatible with film cameras". "Optimised for digital" I would assume means the lens has a large enough image circle to cover current cinema camera sensors, and is also PR speak for "really sharp", though in truth they are no sharper than the last generation of zooms designed for film cameras like the Angenieux Optimos. There are no specific coatings that are only compatible with digital cameras. Some lenses designed for specific digital stills cameras may have a small amount of spherical aberration built in to them to optically correct the effects of that particular camera's OLPF stack, but as far as I'm aware this is not the case with digital cinema lenses. As Satsuki said, with occasional PL lenses there can be issues with clearing the mirror on a film camera, but the Aluras are OK. The main thing to watch out for when using 35mm format lenses on 16mm cameras is shiny surfaces inside the mirror cavity around the gate, since the lens image circle is much larger than the camera gate aperture, and the excess light can bounce off a surface and potentially flash or fog the film.

The sprocket roller in the mag throat keeps the loop size constant, it's very unlikely to slip and change size because of a tight take-up clutch, the perfs would have to rip. More likely the loop is too small to begin with, or the film is being laced in the gate at the wrong perf. Always manually inch the camera over a few frames before rolling to check that things are correct.

Lenses in the UK and US were sometimes marked in inches rather than mm, a 2" lens is basically a 50mm. Like Chris said, the 75mm and 2" should cover S16, the 10mm may exhibit corner darkening. The Vario-Switar won't cover at the wide end, the Canon TV zoom might be OK if it was made for 1" tube cameras. TV lenses were often lower quality optics than cine lenses. You can examine the camera gate by removing the pressure plate, a S16 gate will have the opening extend closer to the edge on the non-claw side.

In short - not easy, but after a year of effort, possible. Well done Jake!

Zeiss Super Speeds are about 30 years older in design than Cooke S4s (or SK4s) and about a stop faster so a different choice, subtly different in look unless you shoot the Super Speeds wide open. Either choice is fine in my opinion, but the best option would be to test them yourself.

Clarity and brevity are the advantages to internet information sites like this one. It's actually quite useful to practice condensing your knowledge for others to properly make use of it.

Cooke SK4s are among the best lenses ever made for the Super 16 format, it doesn't really matter what capture technology you use, they will "work well" with whatever you have. I mean it's not like certain sensors will work better with crappy lenses rather than good ones. You should be happy that production is willing to pay for top quality glass. The 35mm format S4 lenses are perfectly useable for smaller sensors.

Speed Panchros were 35mm format lenses, the 16mm format lenses were branded Cooke Kinetals. If ever in doubt, a simple trick is to point a lens up to a bright window (preferably one with contrast detail like slats or blinds) with the iris wide open, and hold a piece of white paper about an inch or so behind the rear element. Play with adjusting the distance slightly until a sharp image forms, which will give an indication of the image circle size and whether or not it covers a 35mm frame.