Anamorphic Lenses On HD

7th March 2005

Hi,

Been asked to shoot a feature on HiDef and the director has suggested using anamorphic lenses.

Anybody been down this road or do I get to be the guinea pig?

There will be issues of either remounting the lenses or using an adaptor and then installing a board in the camera to compensate for the flipped image...but in principle it should work right, or have I forgotten some fundamental issue.

Anybody any experience on this or ideas?

Thanks,
Ruairi O'Brien.

>Been asked to shoot a feature on HiDef and the director has >suggested using anamorphic lenses.

Hi,

Do you mean actual 35mm anamorphic lenses? If so your widest lens would be what??? 20something mm. Not very wide on a 2/3" chip.

In the July issue of AC there is a snippet (p.93) about Canon coming out with an anamorphic adapter/converter for use with HD primes lenses. It's called the ACV-235.

Check out www.canonbroadcast.com

Seems like a good idea worth investigating further for your project.

Cheers,

Daniel Villeneuve, c.s.c.
Directeur-Photo/Director of Photography
Montréal, Canada
demo à / at : http://dvdp.ca

One problem with using standard 35mm camera anamorphic lenses is that they have a 2X squeeze, so on a 16:9 HD camcorder, you will create a 3.56 : 1aspect ratio once unsqueezed (1.78 x 2). You'll be wasting a lot of pixels cropping this horizontally to 2.39 : 1.

Canon has a 1.33X anamorphic rear adaptor tube for pro video cameras, but it will be a few months before it's available. 1.33X will squeeze a 2.37 : 1 image onto a 1.78 : 1 CCD area. Apparently it requires that you flip the image in the camera's menu. It's rather long, making the camera a little awkward, but you'd have similar issues if you used the P&S Technik Pro-35 adaptor (although it's not as long.) And with the Pro-35 plus standard anamorphic lenses, you'd still have the aspect ratio problem to deal with.

Unless you want the optical distortions of anamorphic photography, you're better off using good HD lenses and cropping to achieve 2.39 : 1.

David Mullen, ASC
Los Angeles

>Canon has a 1.33X anamorphic rear adaptor tube for pro video >cameras, but it will be a few months before it's available.

I saw this at NAB, if we're thinking of the same item... My memory is that one was custom-made for a Japanese cinematographer for a project that's already been shot - that's the one that was at the booth, as there was only one made up to that point.

Maybe they'd rent it?

George Hupka
Director/DP
Downstream Pictures
Saskatoon, Canada

> My memory is that one was custom-made

I've seen articles, don't ask me to remember where, that have said it's going into manufacture and will be available RSN.

Cheers

Geoff Boyle FBKS
Director of Photography
EU Based
www.cinematography.net