cablefreak's photostream  

Shot with the iPhone 4S, processed with Big Lens and Snapseed, and a slightest touch in Ps CS5 for perfection. :)

Shot with 'Mysteron' hacked GH2, Sankor 16C 2x anamorphic lens attached to a Nikkor AF 50/1.8D. The original ProRes file looks fantastic in 4K x 1K. This was shot and rendered as 3.55:1 widescreen in FCPX. A gentle color correction was added to each clip individually. It was dull weather so I was able to shoot without ND-filters. A Vid-Atlantic filter holder is on its way. I used +1 and +10 diopters for some of the tighter shots. This is my first encounter with an anamorphic lens, loving it already to bits and pieces. Thanks Evan Burns for delivering this excellent kit to me! Make sure to download the 1080p file! I'll see if I can make the full 3840 x 1080 ProRes available somewhere for download as well. It's a must see. :)

Music: "Chasing Time" by Dexter Britain (www.dexterbritain.co.uk)

Watch this video on Vimeo. Video created by Martin Wallgren.

This is my first anamorphic lens and I love it already. It's a vintage Sankor 16C 2x anamorphic projection adaptor for Bell & Howells 16mm projectors. It focuses down to 5ft but it needs to be focused in unison with the taking lens. Tricky!

In this case I use the cheap and sharp Nikkor AF 50/1.8D, which works a treat. But I will soon update this setup with a vintage russian HELIOS 44M 58mm f/2 lens which is supposed to be a perfect marriage with this adaptor. I got with the Sankor two dipoters, +1 and +10 which makes for some excellent macro and close portraits with the lens combo. What I lack at the moment is an adaptor to use regular threaded filters in front of the anamorphic, like Vari-ND and graduated filters. I just ordered a 58mm thread adaptor from Vid-Atlantic.com that will arrive in a week or two. The front filter thread of the Sankor is an old school 51.5mm thread used in the old Ednalite series 713 filter holder, which is what I use for the diopters.

For the monitoring I use a HDMI attached TVlogic VFM-056W which is capable of setting up custom sqeeze ratios so the monitor will display the true anamorphic signal, de-squeezed. It makes a huge difference when trying to frame and focus correctly. I also added a 2.66:1 aspect marker for cropping in post from the native 3.55:1 ratio.

Using a TVlogic VFM-056W external broadcast monitor makes such a difference in shooting anamorphic with the GH2 and lenses such as the 2x Sankor 16C. The monitor can be setup to de-squeeze the signal so that it looks like finished footage on screen.

Here are some mathematics behind the scenes:

The Sankor 16C lens is a 2x anamorphic lens, which means basically that it appears like a 2x wide angle adaptor for horizontal field of view (H-FOV) but in the vertical field (V-FOV) it maintains 1x field of view of the lens (no change). In other words it squeezes in double the amount of detail in the horizontal axis of the image, whilst the vertical stays intact.

So to de-squeeze the image when mounted on a camera shooting 1920 x 1080 HD 16:9, keeping the 1080 vertical pixels intact while doubling the horizontal 1920 x 2 = 3840 pixels will give you a normalized image again, but with twice the widescreen effect! Panoramic view. The aspect ratio is then 3840/1080=3.55:1. If you used a 50mm as the taking lens, the lens combo will appear like a 25mm wide angle for the horizontal axis and like a regular 50mm vertically. Got it?

OK, moving on... First off, how to setup the HDMI monitor properly. The display panel of the TVlogic is 1280x800 pixels. The squeeze works like you're entering new X/Y resolution that maps to the input signal. So instead of entering 1280x720 (16:9) for this setup it should be displaying 1280x360 pixels (3.55:1 aspect ratio) mapped to the 16:9 HDMI signal from the GH2.

For most footage though, the 3.55:1 aspect ratio could be a little over the top, so creating a 2.66:1 or 2.35:1 marker would ease a lot in framing the shot for your post production workflow if you intend to crop. In order not to loose too much horizontal resolution, I would go for a 2.66:1 aspect ratio and put it on a on/off switchable marker/matte shown in the image above. You can set the display to just darken the matte area slightly so you can frame your shot in both aspect ratios, and still see all the camera OSD controls etc. Handy!

Editing workflow in FCPX:
Ingest the footage like usual AVCHD from camera. Then create a 4K (4096x2304) timeline onto which you put the anamorphic clips. When the 1920x1080 squeezed material from the GH2 enters the timeline, it'll be upscaled to 4K by FCPX. Now select the clip and change the horizontal scale to 50% by using the 'Transform' section of inspector. Now the footage has regained its original proportions 3.55:1. Using a 4K timeline will ensure that you won't lose any detail in the stretch. Now you're free to edit your story and when it comes to finalize, create some Compressor templates that output your story in either full 3.55:1 4K or downscaled to 2K, cropped to 2.66:1 or anything else! I also created an overlay which would letterbox your footage to 2.66:1 directly on the timeline, in case you like to crop your output it's so much easier if you can see the effect directly in the editing. By using the TVlogic monitor and the crop marks, I will get the exact same results in post as expected in the field.

Excellent!

Framegrab from footage shot with the Panasonic GH2 and Sankor 16C anamorphic lens adaptor attached to a Nikkor AF 50/1.8D lens with Vid-Atlantic's VAMP Clamp. Using hacked AVC-Intra 1080p setting 'Mysteron' to desqueeze and upscale 3.55:1 aspect ratio 4K 4096x1152 footage in Final Cut Pro X. Since using a 4K timeline in FCPX, the output can be cropped and scaled to other aspect ratios and resolutions without losing the original 1080p vertical resolution. These are just the first few frames of testing with this lens combo, it's tricky to achieve focus since both lenses has to be focused in unison. This aspect ratio here is the widest, but it can be easily cropped to 2.66:1 or 2.35:1 for more regular cinema crop.