Dom Jaeger

Good on you Will, I like a man who shoots home movies on 35mm just for fun. B) I'm planning to shoot my own 35mm home movie on a 1927 Zeiss Ikon Kinamo, once I've finished servicing it. It only takes 80' at a time, which is probably for the best considering my bank balance. One of the benefits of larger formats is that the lens resolving ability doesn't need to be as great as it does to achieve a similar sharpness on smaller gauges. Hence the stock Eyemax lens looking sharper than some of your 16mm work (at least in the centre). Those old Eyemos could be quite steady too, in terms of registration.

From the movement design it looks to be an Arri 35IIA (or just 35II) not B or C. For a description and history of these iconic cameras: http://www.cinematechnic.com/resources/arri_35-2.html This one looks in pretty bad nick, and the cracked part mentioned is actually the all important pull-down claw. You don't know if it's even got a mirror/shutter. Parts for these babies are very hard to come by, unless you buy a clapped out one for spares. Which is basically what this one is.

Of all the genres in cinema history I love noir the most. I can't help myself, if an old noir movie comes on telly late at night I have to record it, and then cancel any social engagements I may have agreed to the next night in order to sink into a chiaroscuro bliss, replete with doomed dicks and dangerous dames. So I thought I would mine the considerable knowledge bank of the cinematography.com community to get some recommendations. To make it more interesting, how about listing your favourite old classic, favourite modern, and favourite obscure or under-appreciated noir? My pick for classic noir would be 1947s Out of the Past. Beautifully shot by Nicholas Musuraca and flawlessly directed by Jacques Tourneur, Robert Mitchum's portrayal defines the noir hero for me - tough, laconic and smart, but vulnerable too, and while he fights against the noose that slowly tightens around his neck, he also knows deep in his heart that his fate is sealed. The film contains some of the best noir dialogue ever put to film. Favourite modern would be China Town, which plays with the noir conventions to create something wonderfully fresh. I also thought Brick was an excellent recent take on noir. And my choice for lesser known examples would be Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin, from 1952. A taut, thrilling little B film, perhaps not exactly noir, but close enough. See it just for Charles McGraw as the toughest, gruffest cop you ever saw. It has some great handheld work, some of the first, along with On Dangerous Ground. Anyone else care to nominate their faves?

Looks like a BNC-R mount to me.

Did you guys miss this thread? http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=48608

Fair enough. Good on you for being so generous. I'm happy to take people into my projection room or spend some time explaining how something works, I just don't like an audience while I work. Probably just me, I'm grumpy til the third coffee. <_< Apologies if you took offence, none was intended.

Hi Lance, nice photos, I notice you've got a modified Special with a 4 C-mount turret and reflex finder! That's a rare bird. I'll PM you with my thoughts about lubrication.

From measurements I've got: On an O'Connor with a Mitchell base the doughnut shaped part that protrudes and locates the head is 4 1/8" OD and 3 1/4" ID. It extends almost 15/64" from the base. On Ronford legs the mount has a lip that goes inside the 3 1/4" diameter. The mount you pictured would locate outside the 4 1/8" OD. So you need the insert diameter to snugly fit 4 1/8" and be slightly deeper than 15/64", maybe 1/4". The key is 3/8" wide, centred 3" from the base centre. The hole size on a Ronford legs Mitchell base is about 2 7/8" diameter and about 1/4" deep. It can vary, as long as the lock-off covers the diameter and the depth allows you to get enough thread turns to lock off securely.

All high-end cine lenses, especially modern ones, have very accurately marked focus scales. If they check at infinity and also at say 6 feet you can pretty much guarantee they will be right through the range. Angenieux for example hand mark the scales on each individual zoom in their Optimo series, Zeiss have a selection of focus scales to match the small variations in machining that are then individually fitted etc. But there are always exceptions to the rule. I can't speak for other rental houses, but I regularly check all our lenses on a bench collimator at infinity and then on projection at 6 or 8 feet and minimum focus. Projection also gives you a good idea of how the lens performs optically and whether there are issues such as mechanical wear causing focus backlash or the image to shift when focus is pulled. The back focus is shimmed to a tolerance of plus/minus one hundredth of a mm for lenses under about 40mm. Back focus is pretty stable unless the lens is damaged, but things like wear over time, temperature changes and frequent travel can cause a few hundredths variation. Zooms are more complicated, and need a bit more checking. Obviously we can't check every lens for every job, and Murphy's Law works overtime in the film industry, which is why a prep day is invaluable. If an assistant picks up any issues we can take the lens straight to the projection room to have a look, fix it or swap it over.

No, most of the time eye-focus will be correct, unless the ground glass depth setting is out, which is less likely than the lens or flange being out. If either the lens or the flange are out, using a tape measure will give you a soft image, particularly with wide lenses. To properly check everything a tech with a bench collimator needs to look at the gear. But if you try the same lens in a different camera, and the focus scale is similarly out you can assume the lens needs adjustment. If it comes good then the first camera has a problem. It might be worth trying each of the mounts in the turret also.

Nope, you covered it. You're absolutely right that focusing wider lenses by eye can be tough. Unfortunately if the flange or the lens is out it's all you've got to go by. That's why a tech is a cameraman's best friend! :D It's good to know there are still film schools that teach students with film cameras. I just wish they would get their gear checked regularly. There's nothing more dispiriting for a student than spending all that time and money only to have the equipment let them down. For the price of a single prosumer video camera a school could probably have their entire fleet of film gear working dependably for a couple more years. At which point the video camera would be obsolete.. There, I've had my rant, I can go back to meditating in the yoga room. B)

Actually what you see is what you get even if the flange depth is out. The critical thing is that the ground glass is set to the same depth as the film plane. If that is good then no matter where the lens is seated or how out the back focus, the image on the ground glass will be the same as that formed on the film. On most reflex cameras the ground glass is the least likely setting to be out, generally because it's harder to fiddle with or damage. So the advice to rely on eye focus is a good bet. If only one lens is out it's probably the lens, but if every lens is out it's more likely to be the camera. You might have two lenses with back focus issues, but it sounds to me like the lenses might not be seating properly. The Arri standard mounts on an St are aluminium and prone to wear. The later S/B had one mount replaced with the much more durable steel bayonet mount. Tim Carroll is the long-standing expert here on these cameras, so I'd defer to his judgement. But the camera and lenses should definitely go to a tech to be checked.

Thanks Marc and David. What about the mechanical shutter in the D-21? My understanding is that this obviates the issues associated with the sensor's rolling shutter, giving a smoother, more film-like motion capture (at the expense of halving the EI). Is this seen as an advantage or is the gain in motion smoothness not worth the loss of sensitivity? What about the benefits of an adjustable shutter angle? For feature work with a larger lighting budget is the 200 ASA base sensor rating on the D-21 not regarded as fast enough? I had thought the low light capabilities of Alexa were more useful for TV work where the lighting budget is more restricted. I guess I'm curious to know whether the industry consensus is much like Marc's response, that there are no real advantages to using the D-21 over Alexa, other than an optical viewfinder, no fan noise and full resolution retention using anamorphic lenses. Please forgive any ignorance in my questions, my background is mechanical, but I'm trying my hardest to get my head around the digital stuff.

I think you'd need to redesign the whole iris assembly to match the unusually long throw on Cooke S4 iris rings. The S4 iris is designed to go from octagonal when stopped right down, to almost star shaped at 2 stops down, to round when fully open. The individual blades are shaped with a right angle cutout, and open more slowly than other modern cine lenses. An S4 iris throw is about 100 degrees compared to say a Master Prime which completes its range in about 65. It's interesting that Cooke favour this iris shape. Other top manufacturers (Zeiss, Angenieux, Canon) all prefer a more rounded, stable aperture, at least in their modern cine lenses. I've seen star shaped apertures in older lenses, like certain Taylor-Hobsons, early Zeiss Standards, spherical Lomos or Kodak Cine Ektars, and they often follow the same aperture transformation, with a pronounced star shape 2 or 3 stops down. Apart from bright, out-of-focus highlights, I'm not sure exactly how much the shape determines the bokeh. The internal aberations of an individual lens also play a part.

Mold on the inside of the barrel? Fungus attacks the surface coating of the elements, or the canada balsam cementing a doublet in older lenses. I've never heard of it on a lens barrel. What you might be seeing is white speckling around the edges caused by the refracted image of an element's black edge coating that has degraded. To replace the edge coating on high-end lenses like Cookes and Ultra Primes is a job I would personally leave to the manufacturers. But certainly take them to a respected lens repair house to properly diagnose the problem. Regarding sitting in on a lens tech to watch their work, I doubt many techs would be happy to do this. Not because it's a secret business or anything, but simply because it is distracting to have someone look over your shoulder while you do very delicate work. As a comparison, would you allow somebody to follow you around on set asking questions while you shot a film, simply because they were curious how it all worked?

Hi everyone, I'd be very interested and grateful if any professionals with experience in both these cameras would let me know their thoughts regarding how they compare. Thanks in advance.

A great mantra - I try to remember it in the good times as well as the bad.

This is a very interesting topic, thanks for the detailed explanations Carl. What seems really impressive is that the enhanced film signal retains its organic look. I look forward to more info on this.

If money is no issue, 35mm is still the superior format, unless you really want a digital look. Arri's D-21 is actually the better comparison with 35mm film, as it was designed for feature work, different sensor with a spinning shutter/mirror and optical viewfinder etc. The Alexa is a notch down, designed more for TV work. But between you and me, if you can afford it, I reckon you'd be mad not to shoot film.

What a fascinating piece of footage. I was initially amazed that there were so many automobiles in 1906, until I read the descriptor that mentioned the scene was probably staged to give the appearance of prosperity - a careful examination had shown it was the same few autos circling back and forth! I wonder if they might have used more than one camera? The cataloguer's remarks mention a section that is repeated. It also says that the repeated section of 2060 frames amounted to 70 seconds, which gives a frame rate of just under 30 fps. I've read that silent films were cranked at quite a variety of speeds, from Edison's early recommendation of 46 fps (quickly abandoned) to Bitzer cranking parts of Birth of a Nation at 12, so maybe 30 is not unreasonable? Edison films from around 1900 project well at about 24 fps according to this interesting article: http://www.cinemaweb.com/silentfilm/bookshelf/18_kb_2.htm A 1000 ft roll (rare but not unheard of at the time) would give about 9 minutes at that speed.

Very hard to choose just three, but... Ed Wood Shadow of the Vampire and of course Sunset Boulevard

An interesting old thread that probably needs updating by now. We can add the following to the S16 list: Choke Junebug The Hurt Locker The Wrestler Half Nelson The Squid and the Whale Look Both Ways Balibo Vera Drake Irreversible Pi (on a Bolex no less) Hustle and Flow Mean Creek Bad Taste (also a Bolex) Nine Lives And these in which S16mm was used extensively: 28 Weeks Later Babel City of God The Constant Gardener Factory Girl Capturing the Friedmans The Motorcycle Diaries Last King of Scotland I'm Not There

Aside from a devaluation of the term 'cinematographer' (which any halfwit with a DSLR now wants to call themselves) of course democratisation of film tools is a good thing. Personally I think it happened years ago with the advent of cheap 8mm consumer cameras. Many great filmmakers started there and learned the basics of movie making. But now it seems people want to jump to cinema quality before they know the difference between a t stop and an f stop. I think a lot of people have bought the idea (vigorously marketed to them) that access to an affordable camera with 35mm film quality will somehow solve all their problems. For documentary work or the like it's no doubt a boon, but for features the camera is only one factor. You still need a significant budget for script development, lenses, lighting, art production, post work, decent actors and crew. Without any of these your film will still most likely look rubbish no matter how good the camera is. In fact a super sharp, wide latitude camera sensor will just highlight the deficiencies in production value. Low budget indy films have been around forever but it's never the image quality that makes them a hit. You might be forgiven for thinking that the advent of cheap, high quality cameras would have freed up film budgets to spend more on scripts, art direction and paying for good crews, but it seems the opposite has happened. Because the camera package costs nothing producers now feel that the crew should come cheap too. (I know that's a broad generalisation, please correct me if I'm wrong.) Another thing that gets overlooked is that unless you're looking for theatrical release 35mm film quality is kind of unnecessary - the high end digital cameras already available (or S16) are perfectly adequate for most projects. And theatrical distribution will remain as hard to crack as ever. Investing in the latest RED camera in the belief it will be somehow revolutionary and cheering on the death of film won't change that one iota.

Isn't reduser the site for waffle like this? Since when did soundbites from a company's PR unit replace independent testing? Up until now precious few serious features have been shot on RED, but somehow a product yet to be even released will make it "game over"? Of course David is right that digital acquisition will eventually replace film as the dominant medium for major feature productions, but what I don't understand is the apparent relish some people display in pronouncing the death of film. Don't they realise this will reduce their options? Don't filmmakers want as many choices as possible in their range of tools to create their work?

I thought I'd recommend this great little film blog by Matthew Dessem: http://criterioncollection.blogspot.com/1994/09/index.html He is attempting to watch and write a piece about every film in the Criterion Collection, a rather daunting task to say the least, but he has so far managed to complete the first 100 or so. They are less reviews than discussions, with each piece being very well researched and nicely written. The words are generously interspersed with excellent screen grabs, and unlike many other film reviewers he pays particular attention to the cinematography. Highly recommended to anyone interested in great films.