Dom Jaeger

There was a thread about this some years ago: http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=49183 I think your only option is to fabricate a long extension.

Yes the M4/3 craze has indeed pushed up prices, along with some of the S16-sized sensor digital cameras now available. You should avoid the RX branded lenses because they were designed to optically compensate for the reflex Bolex prism, and at wide apertures they will introduce some spherical aberration if used on your Beaulieu, but those manufacturers also made non-RX lenses. Some of the better names in C-mount were Kern, Kinoptik, Taylor Hobson (Cooke), Angenieux, Schneider and Kodak Ektars. Older lenses will generally have less contrast than newer ones, and manufacturers often had different quality series, so it can be a minefield. Sometimes lesser known brands like Elgeet or Zeika produced excellent lenses. Personally I think anything over a couple of hundred dollars is over-priced when it comes to C-mounts. Some of the most expensive (Hugo Meyer, Dallmeyer, Ross) are more collectors items than optical gems, and anything very fast (like the various versions of f/0.95 25mm) tend to fetch prices way beyond their real practical value. A lot of people are looking for lenses that have an unusual look, and get sucked into paying thousands for an old lens that looks like you shot through a coke bottle. One of my favourites is this particular 25mm lens: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Som-Berthiot-Cinor-1-1-4-f-25mm-c-mount-Bolex-Beaulieu-/221557189787?pt=Camera_Lenses&hash=item3395d66c9b A lot of Som Berthiots are rather low con, but that one is a very nice lens that may not fetch the same price as an Angenieux or Switar.

That's an Eclair Cameflex or CA-1 mount.

The only way to free them up really is to have the rear part with focus helical dismantled, cleaned and relubricated, something a lens technician familiar with Kern lenses could do in about an hour per lens. It's not something I 'd recommend you try yourself. Gently warming them up can temporarily loosen them by softening the hardened grease that is causing the stiff focus, but they tend to go stiff again on cooling. Don't try spraying WD 40 or Silicone into a lens, you will just ruin it.

All those Cooke zooms are great, I just finished servicing a 20-100 as it happens and they're gorgeous too but yes sensor coverage could be a problem. Both Varotals only cover an image circle of a bit over 28 mm at the wide end. The Zeiss Standards generally cover about a 31 mm circle. If it's to help get more camera rentals, you should try to work out what your clients would generally want. The Varotals are quite large, the 20-60 and 15 -40 relatively compact, the Standards are tiny, all suited for different jobs, or often just part of a bigger package.

Hi Luuk, First thing you should do is download a manual, plenty of options, this site is good: http://www.apecity.com/manuals/ If you can get hold of some old film on a daylight spool to practice loading that would be worthwhile. The camera is reflex so you can look through the taking lens (middle port) to focus using the viewfinder mounted on the top right. The side-finder that fits to the door is called an Octameter and should have 8 settings. Because the reflex viewfinder only gets a quarter of the light via a prism it can be dark if the lens is stopped down, so the side-finder can come in handy for framing in those situations. The zoom is from the mid 50s when zoom technology was primitive, it's not as good as the Switar primes. If you want to use it you don't need the viewing finder fitted, the camera is already reflex. But the zoom mount thread should be rotatable to align the lens if you wish. The black dot inside is part of the lens reflex viewing system. At 24 fps the shutter speed on a reflex H16 is 1/60 sec, but because the reflex prism diverts a quarter of the light to the viewfinder you need to overexpose a bit, so the "adjusted" shutter speed you should work with is 1/80 sec. The manual will have this information. Good luck!

Well the obvious thing that defines those 3 pictures is the period, they all come from what looks like the early 60s, but one is a photo from Life magazine, one is a family snap, and the other is a postcard. So the technical processes of creation and thus the whole "look" of each of these images is completely different from one another, but the common evocation is of a period, no? I'd explore the technology of the era that created them.

No, but importers and local manufacturers have to abide by safety regulations and certifications and can be held responsible if a product is found to be dangerously faulty. That's a powerful incentive that doesn't apply to manufacturers of knock-offs who sell via ebay and ship to your door with no repercussions for negligence beyond a bad feedback score. If a product sold through B&H for example had the power cable repeatedly pull out of the wall plug there would probably be a recall and the product would be discontinued.

I'm surprised there haven't been any electrocutions or injuries reported with these sort of fixtures but I suppose people expect them to be a bit crappy so they're careful. One YouTube comparison review I watched recommended the "As Arri" knock-off over an original despite the fact that the lens had developed a crack and the power lead had pulled right out of the wall plug. In the comments section someone had written: "My glass also cracked on 2 off 4 1k lights that ive got. But i'm using them whithout glass, works fine, maybe even better!" Maybe these things are a Darwinian mechanism to thin out the ranks of the dim-witted. :) Many years ago when I was at a different company I remember someone got a nasty electrical burn because the back cover of a fresnel switch had fallen off, and the poor devil had gone to turn the light off and grabbed the bare contacts. He was lucky not to be killed I guess. We discovered a whole batch of lights where the self-tappers holding the back covers on had been over-tightened at the factory and cracked the plastic studs they screwed into. The company changed switch designs if I recall, but some of these Chinese copies look like they use the old switch design. Of course one of the problems with reviewing these knock-offs is that there are probably 20 different factories churning them out with different levels of quality control even within the one factory. The CE conformity markings that Aapo mentions are on his lights are as easily copied as the lights themselves, according to Wikipedia there is even a very similar logo that apparently means "Chinese Export"! If you buy products direct from China via ebay you have zero consumer protection.

A design they borrowed from the Mitchell BNCR?

The difference between Super and Standard is only about 1.5mm, not much compared to the 17.25mm offset of the 15mm Studio rods.

I believe the 15mm studio rod standard was introduced by Arri in the 70s for the 35BL. (I can't see Panavision having anything to do with a metric standard, and before that Mitchell had their own 5/8 and 3/4 inch rod systems.) Since the 35BL was designed to be a hand-held as well as studio camera, I'd say the rods were offset to better balance the camera for hand-held work. The rods are more or less centered around the camera mounting screw, which is aligned with the camera's centre of gravity.

Your choice of lenses is very much dependent on a few other factors that you haven't mentioned - what would suit the film and probably most pertinently what your budget is. Proper cinema lenses are extremely expensive to buy (Cooke S4s for example retail at around $20,000 each), so I assume you mean to rent the lenses? Rental houses may not be receptive to letting you take their lenses "far abroad" if you're inexperienced and unknown to them, so you may need to rent the lenses abroad. Something for you to look into anyway. The needs of the film should determine what sort of lenses you might look for. If you're doing a lot of shoulder mount shooting in a documentary sort of style you might find a compact zoom gives you more flexibility and saves time changing lenses. If you're not expecting any low light or night shoots or don't require fast lenses for a shallow DOF look you could try something like Cooke S4 minis, which are just like S4s only smaller and only open to T2.8. If you're on a very low budget you might want to look into Samyang or Rokinon Primes or other lower cost options. Anamorphic lenses have a specific look that doesn't suit every type of film, and they are often bulky and heavy, with rather slow apertures. Using 2x anamorphics on a 16:9 sensor you will end up cropping a third of the image to achieve a final 2.40 aspect ratio, so you'd want a very good reason to use them. If you still like the idea, the Kowa anamorphics are the most compact and lightweight I've come across (I'm talking about the Prominar cine lenses, not the projection lenses).

Ok, yes the Zeiss ones don't rotate inside the camera mount, so if yours is stiff to focus it needs to be dismantled, cleaned and relubricated.

Hi Bill, is the lens an early standard mount whose mount rotates inside the camera lens port? The focus ring is solidly connected to the protruding rear of the mount on those lenses, so that the whole outer bit rotates while the internal part with the key slot remains held by the key inside the camera port. With those lenses it was recommended to lightly lubricate the mount to facilitate the rotation. Of course there could be other reasons it feels stiff - contamination inside the camera port, a burr or out-of-round bump on the lens mount, damage to the groove at the very rear of the lens mount, or damage to the spring arms that lock in to that groove and hold the lens in. Or the lubrication of the lens internal helical thread could be dried up and gummy. If it's a standard mount lens that doesn't rotate inside the camera lens port, then the stiffness will be due to internal lens lubrication.

In theory they should intercut fine, though you might notice if the zoom is used wide open, and older zooms can vary. Coating damage, potentially re-coated elements, yellowing due to age, shiny iris blades, internal haze etc could all contribute to colour or contrast shifts. As always, shooting a test will give you a better indication than generalisations from the internet. B) But if the zoom is in good condition it should be fine.

They came in both C-mount and Bolex bayonet mount. I haven't tried an M43 adapter on them, but I doubt a C-mount to M43 one would fit, the lens throat is too large. I'm not sure a Bolex bayonet to M43 adapter would work either (or if they even exist). Besides that, they were designed for reflex Bolexes, (which may or may not be an issue at wide apertures), and they have a 2 blade diamond-shaped aperture, which is not everyone's cup of tea in terms of the out-of-focus character.

Looks like the camera is intermittently only pulling down one perf instead of two. Presumably not a loading error like an incorrect loop size unless the same error was made on every mag. What does the rental house say?

Hi Michael, Have you read this history of Cooke lenses: http://www.fdtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Cooke-Book-2013-FDTimes.pdf Lots of interesting info. According to that, Series I Speed Panchros came out in the 30s, cover a smaller image circle than Ser II and III, are f1.8 rather than f2, and are uncoated. Ser II came out in 45, and we're redesigned by Gordon Cook to cover a larger frame, Ser III from 54 are only the 18 and 25 mm. I haven't used or projected Ser I Panchros, but I imagine they would look similar to the later series, just with less contrast and more flare and they're probably not quite as well corrected. You'd also find the mount options a bit obscure, Newman Sinclair or early Mitchell (plate) or Debrie sort of mounts.

On late models with the declutch button, it's meant to be a feature, but Super 8 cartridges aren't really capable of being rewound much. The older Standard 8 format is much better suited to in-camera effects like double exposures because it uses spools, and lots of cameras have rewind facility. Or use something like a 16 mm Bolex.

Try this: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/like/251393083950?limghlpsr=true&hlpv=2&ops=true&viphx=1&hlpht=true&lpid=107 It's a little confusing because most Standard mount lenses will fit a camera with Arri Bayonet mount (Arri designed the newer B mount to still accept older lenses), but it usually doesn't work that way with adapters.

There are plenty of matte boxes with 360 degree rotating 4x4 stages, but they tend to be noisy and not designed to be smoothly or continuously rotated. The RotaPola filter holders Greg linked to seem more like what you're after in that you can hook a follow focus or motor up to the turn wheel and they rotate pretty quietly, you'd just need to source circular filters to fit in them.

The only real way to increase the depth of field is to stop the lens down. To make a fixed-focus lens like the 10mm Angenieux focus closer you need to move it away from the film plane a bit. Re-setting the lens back-focus as Jean-Louis suggested is easy enough for a lens technician, but another solution that doesn't interfere with the hyperfocal factory setting is to cut a washer-shaped shim out of some thin plastic sheet to a size that just fits over the lens mount threads and fit it before screwing the lens on. The thicker the shim the closer the lens will focus (and the more out-of-focus infinity will become). One or two tenths of a mm are enough to shift the fixed plane of focus substantially closer on a lens of this focal length. By simply removing the shim the lens returns to normal. For fixed-focus wide angles like this shimming the lens out (or adjusting the back-focus by other means) is a better solution than using close focus diopters.

Somewhere in the world there's a kid envious of your sneakers, it's all relative isn't it. Most of the issues we talk about here are first world problems. As far as I know they've always had this policy. They're just nitwits I reckon.

Yes, could have been. It was the rehoused first zooms that were made in the UK, so a company like TLS makes sense. The Pro Primes and later zooms were apparently made in Japan, according to Mitch Gross on an old REDuser thread. Funny to read some of those threads now, people were claiming the RED Pro primes were better than Zeiss Ultra Primes, even giving Master Primes a run for their money! Four years later and you can pick up a RED Prime on ebay for less than a 30 year old Zeiss Super Speed!