Steve Switaj

First, definitely Courthouse Square set on the Universal lot (if you look carefully you can see where they tilted up a little early and showed a bit of the distant Warner Bros campus in the gap between the courthouse and the buildings to the left) In 1963 the way to do a shot like this would have been on a large riding crane. Remote heads weren't a thing yet, even for video applications, where you could see your framing in real time. Back in '63 video taps were a technology in it's infancy, and there would have been no way to accurately frame what you were shooting. They would have used a big motorized crane with the operator and AC riding it. Given the time period, something like the Chapman Titan would have been likely https://www.chapman-leonard.com/product/titan-ii/ While now largely outdated, these cranes were actually pretty cool in the day. They look low-tech, but they used quiet electrical drive, had really advanced steering that could crab all the wheels for tight turns, and had some kind of system that pumped mercury around inside the arm for weight balance. I don't know how many Titans still exist, but I'm willing to bet they were all built in the 50's and 60's The shot here starts with a straight zoom (itself a little novel for a big 35mm feature in 1963) which transitions to a big crane pullback. You can see that the zoom settles just a little too early for the two segments to perfectly blend, but hey - it was 1963, so lets give them a break. Interestingly, I looked up images of Courthouse Square just to see what was poking into the BG, and I came across this page at the Universal studio tour website https://www.thestudiotour.com/wp/studios/universal-studios-hollywood/backlot/current-backlot-sets/courthouse-square/ Check out the 3rd picture from the left in the top row. The setup would have been something exactly like that, minus the tour trolley. While we're on the subject of great olde-school crane shots I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout out to the famous Atlanta train station shot from Gone With The Wind. Imagine going back to 1939 and filming this shot with a 200 pound Technicolor camera while suspended in the basket of a construction crane. With a side finder. And no video tap so you don't know what you've shot till dailies. Don't even know how long that takes with Technicolor but it's not going to happen before you send 500 extras home. Victor Flemming got to yell cut and then holler up to Ernest Howard up in the crane basket with his megaphone "Yo Ernnie.... did you get it?" And Howard would yell back "Ummm yeah Vic. I'm pretty sure we got it" and that was that. Damn. I have to contrast that to the way that nowadays it often seems that every single person in the video village gets to opine on the simplest of shots.

Does anyone know why fungus has a thing for lens surfaces? I know that back in the days of olde they used to use finely distilled tree sap to cement optical elements together. Called balsam cement, It was clear, had about the right optical index, and would stick to glass but could be removed for rework with common solvents. I gotta think that we've phased that out a while ago, but in old lenses that used it I can totally see why fungus might find that attractive. But I am at a loss to understand why it likes to eat lens coatings. Seems like setting up a homestead on a blank glass surface, in an environment where there's vanishing little food or moisture or obvious energy and the only ample resource is anodized aluminum.... is not a life choice a lot of organisms would make. A quick Google search yields little, but I figure there might be an optics type here who could explain the phenomenon.

One more thought... I missed the bit where said you were using an Alexa. How wide does the shutter go? Some modern cameras have a shutter angle approaching 360 degrees, in that case there is no problem shooting any kind of scanned display - there is no capture deadtime to worry about.

This is a bit of a complicated subject, so for those new readers out there, let me recap the problem we have when shooting olde school CRT's With a CRT there is never one single image that you can simply photograph at a certain instant. Instead, there's a moving electron beam scanning over the surface, left to right, top to bottom. As it sweeps each point on the screen it flashes the correct color and intensity for that pixel, and moves on. The electron beam hits some phosphors on the back of the screen, and that spot lights up brightly, but the beam moves on and almost instantly the spot starts to fade. In a couple of milliseconds, it's gone. Here's a great Youtube video from The Slow Mo Guys showing a CRT scanning in extreme slow motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BJU2drrtCM At about 3:15 they show the scan line at 100,000fps. You can clearly see how bright the spot is and how it immediately starts to fade as the beam moves on. Each of those scan lines takes about 1/15700 sec to write, and. After 20 lines or so, the image is faded back down to black. We humans see this as one image through persistence of vision, but a film camera can clearly catch the image mid-scan. In order to get a clean photograph we have to lock the video and the camera shutter such that the shutter opens just as the video is about to start in the upper left corner, and closes just after the video finishes in the bottom right corner. If there are any areas where the shutter was closed early it will miss the beam and we will photograph a dark line. If there were any areas where the shutter stayed open too long those spots will see the beam pass twice and we will photograph a bright line. This usually takes some kind of a synchronizer control. We've had some good threads on these things recently, so I won't recap too much here, but you might want to look at those previous discussions: https://cinematography.com/index.php?/forums/topic/85750-cinematography-electronics-filmvideo-synchronizing-control/ https://cinematography.com/index.php?/forums/topic/76522-arri-sr3-filming-a-crt-television/ The specific issue that you're going to face is that you have more than one CRT in the shot. Since you can only have one camera shutter timing that implies that all the CRT's have to be synchronized so they are all scanning at the same time. If you are using video signals this is not terribly complicated. Synchronizing video signals is a common issue in places like television studios where everything has to run in phase so switching between the various sources is clean. Most professional video equipment has a 'sync in' or 'genlock in' connector on the back, and can sync lock to an external master signal (older professional tape decks are a little less precise because they are mechanical devices, but will still lock up close enough for our purposes). If your playback device does not have sync ability, there are external signal processors called time base correctors that can retime a 'wild' input signal on the fly. In practice, you establish a solid, stable sync source, and make everything else - all the tape decks and the film camera - slave to that master timing. In the video world this is called 'house sync' and every device will receive it so they can all work in parallel. It does not have to be fancy, just stable. A capped video camera sending black frames is just fine. Use a distribution amplifier to give each device its own individual signal. You have a more interesting problem, though. You specifically 'computer monitor' Since your'e talking about CRT's I suspect that you're driving them with an older analog signal format and it's usually pretty straightforward to pull a sync signal out of that, but you might not always be at a 'good' frame rate. Though you could synchronize the camera with one monitor, it's going to be a challenge to get the various monitors to sync with each other, because computers just aren't designed for that. Could you pre-record the monitor signals to some video format?

One thing to remember with wide angle lenses is that while they have great depth of field, they have shallow depth of focus, so holding correct backfocus can be very important with a short lens. And, of course, 5.9mm is about as short as short gets. That said, it's been a long time since I handled either an Angenieux 5.9 or an S mount Arri other than to move it to dust the shelf, so hopefully someone with more recent experience can offer an better answer.

I can recommend Ken Stone at Stone Cinema Engineering up in Antelope Valley. I've recently done a few projects with him and he's still in the game. He mostly does 35 and 65, with an emphasis on the specialty cameras, but he goes deep into the engineering side if you need a weird modification or find yourself with a one-off that needs some love. http://stonecinema.com/ Also Richard Bennett at Cinemagear. I seem to recall that he had some kind of senior position at Mitchell before they closed, and then he opened his own shop. He has a little place in El Segundo where he services cameras and runs a retail shop for older and collectible machines. In case you need someone to make a part for your 1920 Prestwich, he is definitely your guy. https://cinemagear.com/ Also, he posts an interesting blog on his website, updated it roughly weekly, about whatever he's working on at the moment. https://cinemagear.com/blog/

By the way, if you're working with an EF, RF or Alpha mount, a really good, inexpensive, macro solution is one of the old 55mm Nikkor still macros on a mount adapter. Those old 55's (especially the newer f2.8 version) were among the sharpest lenses ever made for 35mm still cameras and it intercuts well with cine lenses from the same generation. You can find them in excellent condition for $150. Buy a high-quality adapter ( I recommend Fotodiox, https://fotodioxpro.com/ ). You should keep the adapter attached to the lens and use it as a unit, and (after assembly) use a couple of small dabs of hot glue to prevent any movement between the lens and adapter. The focus throw isn't as good as a true cine lens, but macro work tends to be more focus-by-eye anyhow, and for a couple of hundred dollars it's a really serviceable option for the occasional macro need.

My day job is doing camera engineering for a very large stop-motion animation studio in Oregon. Pretty much our entire world is macro work, and we've come up with a whole fleet of really creative solutions to get our shots. We test a lot of lenses, and, because of the very large number of stages shooting at the same time, I pay particular attention to cost effective solutions. If you're going to do a lot of close-up work, I'd suggest you buy an inexpensive, dedicated macro lens. Macro is often tweaky and frustrating and if you can save time and aggravation on a busy set... well, that has it's own value, and a lens that just does the job without fuss can be worth it's weight in pixels. If you have $1500 in the budget I'd suggest one of the new Laowa Sword macros. https://laowacine.com/product/sword-macro-cine-full-frame-lens-series/ Laowa is one of the brands made by Venus Optics, a niche Chinese lens manufacturer that offers an eclectic collection of unusual lenses. We've worked with them a lot, and as far as I can tell the company is run by a somewhat eccentric optical designer who pretty much builds designs he thinks are cool. The Laowa Sword line are cine-style macro lenses in a PL mount. The 60mm and 100mm are the standouts in the line. At about us$1500 each, they offer better than 1:1, the image is clean, sharp and color-neutral, with good evenness and very little CA, the irises are nice and round with plenty of blades, so out-of-focus highlights look good. They cover full-frame and at t2.9 they're reasonably fast (though because of DOF considerations you almost never shoot macro full-open anyway) Mechanically, they are very good, with smooth, wander-free focus (IIRC the elements ride on rails instead of a helix), and a really pleasant, long focus throw of maybe 270 degrees. Working distance and space to light are always an issue with macro lenses, especially for cine lenses with a big 80mm front, but the 60 and 100mm Laowas have a nodal point pretty close to the end of the barrel when at close focus, so they offer a reasonable amount of working room (and don't forget that because of the way macro lenses work, at 1:1 both these focal lengths will approximately double) Now, the bad news. They are not compensated, like, say, some of the Signature Primes. They are simple lenses, so they have all the optical issues that you find with any old school macro lens... They breathe - like a lot, and because of bellows effect, they have a really dramatic exposure shift as you get more macro (like 2+ stops, it's an optical consequence of moving the focal plane farther from the exit pupil as you extend out to focus close), so don't plan on a lot of focus pulls from infinity, they're one-trick ponies. Also, like most simple macros, at very high ratios they do that thing where they seem to dolly forward as you focus (because the nodal point of the lens moves forward down the barrel by a good few inches). So... are they a match for $35,000 Signature Primes? Well, no. But at literally 5% of the cost, they are a shockingly good tool if you use them for what they're good at.

What camera, or more specifically, what mount are you using?

As Tyler says, there are two Berg-style belts in the BL4 that rot away with age. (There's a third, conventional, timing belt off the motor, but that one ages much better) The main main belt connects the drive sprocket, mag drive and movement. Once you get the camera apart it's fairly straightforward to replace. The second, smaller, belt is the issue. It drives the shutter from the movement, and sits under that shutter. Unfortunately, the front face of the camera has to come apart and the shutter has to come off to service this belt. Then it all has to go back together and be retimed and reset for depth. Richard Bennett has a post on his blog with some pictures https://cinemagear.com/blog/2024/08/16/arri-bl-4s-finally-on-the-bench/

This is why I love these forums. After 30 years in VFX I was pretty sure I had seen every single Mitchell product ever released, from the 16mm 'Monitor' instrumentation cameras up to the big 65's, with a couple of missile tracking cameras, aircraft nose cameras, and underwater rigs thrown in along the way. But I have never seen one of these before, and had no idea such a thing as a 'MK-III' even existed. Do you have any pictures of the movement?

Looks likely. You might want to contact Visual Products and ask. sales@visualproducts.com

We end up using a lot of adapters from FotoDiox Like every adapter these days, the actual parts are made in China, but FotoDiox seems to have better quality control than the mass-market eBay brands, and their products have always worked well for us. https://fotodioxpro.com/products/ab-pl-p Also, no set screws in this design.

They're not just different colors, they're actually different numbers The foot focus marks on the left-hand lens go 20-10-5-4, while the focus marks on the right-hand lens are 8-6-4-3-2.5 So.. not like they misunderstood what you wanted and changed the mount before shipping, it's definitely a different lens. On the plus side (such as it is), if it comes to this there are parts available to convert the lens to a PL mount. Check out Visual Products https://visualproducts.com/product/visual-products-canon-pl-lens-mount-for-s16-zoom-lenses/

I think almost all of the Vista productions were shot with the Mitchell 'elephant ear' cameras. There were earlier proof of concept cameras built by converting old technicolor bodies, but these were unwieldy even by the standards of the 50's. I shot a lot of Vista in my VFX days, but never got to actually use one of the old elephant ears. Every one I ever handled already had it's movement removed for use in a 'new' spinning mirror body. There were at least a few blimps made for tight sound work, but the blimps were _huge_ . I know this because I have a friend who has one in his shop. It came in on a pallet with some other gear and he initially though it was an underwater housing until he examined it closely. It's clearly a production unit though, with a body and hardware similar to the blimps for the normal rackovers. Lot's of access doors because the camera opened up on all sides for loading. It did not have the feel of a one-off, so I suspect there were probably a handful built by whatever company was making the rest of them. But I suspect the cameras were not all that loud to begin with. Even though the movements looked like an overgrown Standard, I think they might have sounded more like an NC, more muted, you might just throw a couple of blankets over the thing an live with it. I base this on fact that when I see a BTS photos of, say, a Hitchcock production, as often as not the camera is unblimped on the dolly, even though it's clearly a dialog scene. (I'm a VFX geek, I always look for the camera). Also, from my personal experience with the format, the sound of film going through a VV camera is different. It's more of a flup, flup thing and less the sewing machine of a Standard or GC. Maybe the bigger loops pitch it down a little bit? dunno, but it's different, and I could see where it wouldn't carry as far. The sheer _mass_ of the elephant ear cameras probably didn't hurt when it came to damping out the sound. You really have to see one in person to appreciate it, but here's some links... http://www.mitchellcamera.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=25 http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/wingvv2.htm Also, if you absolutely must have one for your very own, you're in luck right now because The Prop Store has one up for auction. Sadly, it's missing it's movement, but it would look great on a set of sticks in the corner of your office anyway https://propstoreauction.com/lot-details/index/catalog/449/lot/157100 It's serial # 21, which is the highest I've ever seen, so by VistaVision standards, it's brand new. Gotta hurry though, the auction ends March 26th. Also, if you want the matching blimp to complete your set, contact Joe Lewis at General Lift. I'm pretty sure he would entertain offers. Or maybe tours, if you want to check it out in person. Actually though, if people here are really interested in seeing the blimp, I'll ask him to post a few photos.