HD Pinhole

I'm shooting some spec spots on Monday with a Varicam, and it occurred to me that it would be fun to try some pinhole shots using the Varicam's slow speed option. Anyone want to wager my chances of success by using a piece of foil pierced by a needle and wrapped around the lens mount?

Art Adams, DP [film|hdtv|sdtv]
San Francisco Bay Area - "Silicon Valley"
http://www.artadams.net/
Local resources : http://www.artadams.net/localcrew

Use a bellows with it so you can focus.

Mark Forman
http:screeningroom.com

You need a special pinhole designed to compensate for the prism -- I believe BandPro sells them as DigiHoles.

(Well, if one called the hole a pinprick, there'd be another name for
them...)

Jeff Kreines

>You need a special pinhole designed to compensate for the prism -- I >believe BandPro sells them as DigiHoles.

Hmmm. Well, I won't have time to get one of those so I'll just have to see what shapes up. Could be quite interesting.

If all else fails I could probably turn off all the colors but one primary and get a useable image that could be made black and white.

DigiHoles? Let me guess : they have two settings, 1 and 0.

Art Adams, DP [film|hdtv|sdtv]
San Francisco Bay Area - "Silicon Valley"

Art wrote :

>DigiHoles? Let me guess: they have two settings, 1 and 0

No Art... If we only had 1 and 0 Tim would never get a nice smooth color gradient. The DigiHole is designed with extreme care and can do 0-1 in .009 increments for smoother transitions. It also compensates for pixel size and varies it's "aperture" for the DPM sensor in the Viper. I here talk from the factory that the zoom version will have .00009 precision.

Michael Bravin
Chief Technical Official
Band Pro Film & Fantasy

Michael Bravin writes :

>The DigiHole is designed with extreme care

Check out :

http://www.loreo.com/pages/shop/loreo_products_online.html

Mac users also worth checking out :

http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyetv500

A $350 computer-based ATSC/DVB receiver and PVR. View, capture, and time-shift SD and HD on your desktop. I'm getting better reception (much!) on it than I am from local analog stations. Works fine with my Powerbook, but capturing HD rips through disk space like nobody's business. Be great on the road.

Tim Sassoon
Sassoon Film Design
Santa Monica
(on the seaward side of the 4th street hill, with no good multipath sources)

Jeff Kreines writes:

>You need a special pinhole designed to compensate for the prism

Will the Kinetta be pinhole-agnostic?

Dan Drasin
Producer/DP
Marin County, CA

Dan Drasin wrote :

> Will the Kinetta be pinhole-agnostic?

No, we will take a firm stand on pinholes.

Jeff "waiting for someone to make a Superspeed pinhole" Kreines

Michael Bravin writes :

>The DigiHole is designed with extreme care

Rumour has it the Genesis has a PanaHole available as part of the pkg complete with supporting rods.

Tom McDonnell
Director/DP
New Orleans, La

>...Anyone want to wager my chances of success by using a piece of foil >pierced by a needle and wrapped around the lens mount?

Use black-wrap! If you use regular foil, you'll get a lot of fog/blur from internal reflections.

I'm guessing the effective speed of the Varicam won't be fast enough (even with gain pumped) if you have a pinhole small enough to have a decent image.

Try to get some very fine needles. Any chance you could borrow some proper pinhole plates from someone? These would definitely work better than the blackwrap/needle technique.

David Perrault, csc

You should be able to get it to work. I've seen pinhole films shot at 24fps with Fuji 500 and a two stop push. Not sure of the size of the pinhole, it was larger than one would want for a good image but the effect was still cool, if hazy.

Luckily you can experiment in real time to balance exposure vs focus.

For whoever suggested a bellows to adjust focus--won't work. That's what you use to change focal length. Apparent focus depends on the size of the hole relative to the size of the image sensor/film.

Steven Bradford
Collins College
Tempe AZ

Steven Bradford wrote:

>For whoever suggested a bellows to adjust focus--won't work. That's >what you use to change focal length. Apparent focus depends on the >size of the hole relative to the size of the image sensor/film.

And relative to the distance from the sensor/film but that is a pretty fixed equation, it's in or out, you can't pull focus.

I would be surprised if you got an acceptable image on the Varicam. I haven't found a video tap that could pick up an image from an acceptably small pinhole (on 35mm) and even using a night vision eyepiece, it's tough. I'm talking about a working EI of 3200 and a stop of approximately t150 or so, 12-24 fps in desert sun.

Good luck ... I'd like to see the results.

Best,

Anders Uhl
Cinematographer
ICG, New York

I shot three PSA's in one day today and never got around to trying the pinhole thing. I'm bummed, although the footage turned out nicely.

The Varicam still seems a little noisy, but I'll be able to judge better at the edit session. The colors are absolutely MARVELOUS. They track, they're real, secondaries look the way they should.

Art Adams, DP [film|hdtv|sdtv]
San Francisco Bay Area - "Silicon Valley"