3.5:1 Anamorphic on Epic: Questions about Shooting

[Ian Bloom]

Hi,

 

I'm shooting a brand film that will be incorporated as horizontal element in a website and a projection using Anamorphic lenses on a Red Epic camera.

My hope is to shoot the full sensor size and have the resulting image cropped to just around 3.5x1.

 

Does anyone have any experience doing this on Epic?

Are there issues with coverage etc with particular lense series.

What are your personal lense preferences for sharpness and other characteristic.

I don't believe the camera will desqueeze the image without cropping it to 2.35. Hence can anyone recommend an onboard monitor and a set monitor that will do the desqueeze well.

 

Many thanks,

I Bloom

[Guillaume Cottin]

Hi Ian,

 

The EPIC can't indeed desqueeze in another format than 2.35. You will have to go for the 5K 2:1 and then crop (it is useless to use the 5K FF mode since you are going to crop vertically anyways).

 

As for lenses coverage, some 35mm PL lenses will not cover the 5K sensor. As far as I know, the Angenieux DP lenses will not cover the sensor and they even might hit it since the rear element of the lens protrudes a lot.

There is no rule, and you should test the lenses before renting, but usually primes will cover, and big zooms will not. Angenieux announced new "expanded coverage" versions of the 17-80 and 25-250 so they can cover FF5K.

 

As far as on-camera monitoring is concerned, I can only recommend the TVLogic WFM-056WP, which allows to completely personnalize the ratio of your video. But it's a small 5.6" monitor, and your 3.5:1 image will be really tiny !

Unfortunately I don't know of a set monitor that has this function.

 

Best,

 

G.C.

Edited April 14, 2012 by Guillaume Cottin

[Ian Bloom]

I ended up going with PL mount Panavision lenses which I believe to be the rehoused Joe Dunton glass. Unfortunately ended up needing to get the lenses shipped and when they arrived I noticed some alarming chromatic aberration on two of them.

I had a hard time finding an HD monitor that could de-squeeze the image and ended up using a transvideo composite video onboard (thanks Steve Gal) to operate while we checked focus on the squeezed image on the Red LCD. This isn't ideal, and I'm hoping for a better solution in the future... apparently our client really loved the result and they are likely to ask for this crazy aspect ratio again.

 

Here are crop tests I made for the director in case you're curious. (I can't show any actual footage.)

Edited April 21, 2012 by Ian Bloom