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Ben J. Abbey

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  • Occupation
    Cinematographer
  1. Sooo ... I bought a bunch of vintage Contax Zeiss glass and I take back what I said. I think it's an amazingly close approximation of the five thousand dollar lenses! The microcontrast and bokeh are just GREAT!
  2. Folks, I recently shot a short using a three-lens Zeiss CP.2 Super Speed set: 35, 50, 85. Mind = blown. Lens/picture quality aside, I found the standardized gear positioning and long throw to be wonderfully efficient and useful. Once I returned the set to Vistek I couldn't get the Zeiss look out of my head however CP.2s are cost prohibitive presently. I rented a Zeiss ZE 35mm f/1.4 and shot some video over the course of a day, with a variety of lighting and with a number of different subjects. IMHO the DSLR lens didn't deliver the same picture quality as the CP.2. My question is this: has anyone shot anything using Zeiss's ZE/ZF lenses and successfully intercut with CP.2? If you take the time to search you'll find that everyone says the Zeiss DSLR lenses have the same optical arrangement as the CP.2s, main difference being housing and 9 vs 14 blades on the aperture. That said, the DSLR lenses didn't seem as sharp and the cinema lenses popped more. Is there anyone who knows more than me about lens engineering who may have some ideas as to why? I'd love to get a Duclos set of Zeiss ZF primes, but it just doesn't make sense from a quality perspective! Back to renting I go... for now.
  3. Compression... what codec, what camera, etc?
  4. Yep send it over. Yes, larger pieces of noise might be easier to find but IMHO the recovery wouldn't be as crisp because the blowup was done on random noise, as opposed to a sanitized clip. If that makes any sense. Hard to explain :)
  5. Hey Freya, put it on Dropbox or Google Drive and send me the link via PM? How much upsampling are you doing? If you upsample footage before applying NR, you get larger pieces of noise, so I'd NR, upsample, sharpen.
  6. I swear by Neat Video. It turned ISO 12800 footage from the 5D Mark III into usable footage. Granted it looked a bit plasticy but it's an incredible plugin. As I understand it, video noise is a type of fixed pattern noise whereas film grain is random and therefore more pleasing to the eye. Do you feel like / are you allowed to be posting a short clip of the footage online? I'd be happy to run it through Neat Video as a proof point.
  7. Agreed with everything you said, Paul! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbiNdfHTtfU This is a quick shot with my "Poor Man's Anamorphic". I think the effect is convincing. Out to shoot some snowy Toronto sights tomorrow to play with it some more.
  8. I agree with everything everyone is saying. Again I'm intimately familiar with the desirable effects of anamorphic lenses. My whole point is that tutorials and posts always talk about how simply cropping is bad. Based on our discussion here I'd think the zeitgeist is changing and with the current large sensor cameras, it's time to correct that misinformation. I made a "poor man's anamorphic" with the Cinemorph filter and a 0.7x enormous wide-angle adapter in front of it. It looks SPECTACULAR, flares horizontally, stretches bokeh vertically, the lens introduces the compression both horizontally and vertically and on the z-axis, and a degree of barrel distortion on the periphery of the image. It's a convincing effect and my last doubt about its utility is now moot. Thanks to all!
  9. To David's point, the larger sensor also allows a larger circle of confusion meaning the bokeh is more out of focus.
  10. I'm intimately familiar with the optical effects of the anamorphic lens. Remember I said that I'm looking at resolution "in a vacuum" i.e. on its own. My point is that going from 1920x1080 full HD frame to 1920x1080 scope with bars is a resolution reduction, and my thesis is that there's inherent dithering when downsampling and why not just capture at the final resolution (or slightly over for safe area). I'd be interested in anyone's opinion/thoughts on cropping to anamorphic vs shooting, just on a resolution basis.
  11. So here's a thought... and sorry for the long post but this has been on my mind for a while. We keep talking about how an anamorphic lens uses the entire imaging sensor and is then compressed in post. We always follow up by saying that just cropping isn't the same. But isn't it? Warning that this is looking at cropping vs. squeezing in a vacuum - I'm not talking about the other archetypical considerations of an anamorphic lens. Bokeh, flare, compression can all be achieved to a degree with the right type of filter (see: Cinemorph by Vid Atlantic), and the compression can be achieved both H+V with a wide angle adapter, so let's just talk about the cropping vs. squeezing. Let me explain. With my camera, the 5D Mark 3, there's a fixed number of horizontal and vertical pixels which are available to be exposed. There's no in-between or random arrangement like there'd be with silver halide grains in analog film. When I record MLV at 1920 x 1080 I'm getting 2,073,600 pixels. When I record 1920 x 804 (scope) I get 1,543,680. So yes, 25.56% less pixels. But! An imaging sensor isn't a perfect pickup mechanism. It doesn't have pixels all over it. That's why it's digital - it's quantized. It's a representation, as best as possible, of an analogic wave, which turns into a stair-stepping wave when it goes through the ADC due to there being no infinite quanta (even the current standard 64 bit is "only" 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 steps). What happens when you squeeze an image from 1920x1080 to 1920 x 804? You don't gain any resolution. In fact you may introduce aliasing due to lines being squeezed which weren't squeezed before, and the stair-stepping we're all familiar with (jaggies) comes out. Yes, we started with more pixels, and I understand the value in starting with more instead of starting with less. Analog mediums - sure - squeezing leads to resolution advantages. But digital is a fixed number of lines. But if in the end it all has the same aspect ratio, just one didn't have any squeezing done to it (and thus no pixels deformed and/or aliased), wouldn't just cropping make sense?
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