Panavision Anamorphics on the 5D2

[Tom Lowe]

If you are just shooting day exterior time-lapse, is there much reason to use anamorphic lenses versus just cropping your 12MP images to 2.40? Are you really going to see a lot of anamorphic lens artifacts to make it necessary to use the same lenses as the main production, which I assume is shooting on film anyway?

It's not my choice, David. I had initially thought the same thing you are suggesting. I was going to offer my 14-24 Nikon or 24 f/1.4 still lenses but the production seems to want anamorphic. We will be shooting quite a bit of night timelapse stuff around the city, with lots of shimmering lights.

[Andrew Walker]

It's not my choice, David. I had initially thought the same thing you are suggesting. I was going to offer my 14-24 Nikon or 24 f/1.4 still lenses but the production seems to want anamorphic. We will be shooting quite a bit of night timelapse stuff around the city, with lots of shimmering lights.

I'm interested to see some city stuff from you Tom. I don't think I have seen any yet. All the clips I've seen have been the awesome star fields. The city is fun to shoot but it can be a little rough sometimes.

[Pietro Impagliazzo]

Anamorphic timelapse...

You're heading to the right direction Tom.

:)

[David Mullen ASC]

That sort of answers the question because at night, wide-open, you can get a lot of anamorphic artifacts which are interesting, especially on longer lenses with out-of-focus planes. So I can see why they want you to shoot anamorphic for that, just make sure you use primes with front anamorphic elements. There's no reason to use an anamorphic zoom because a rear-anamorphic lens hardly has any anamorphic artifacts.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

If anyone is interested I will try to get some more pics and info as the shoot progresses.

"If anyone is interested".... don't be coy Tom. Who WOULDN'T be interested? :D

[Kenneth Elkington]

So how do you measure it? The image area the 5D2 captures with the Primo 50mm is roughly 4K x 4K - not quite but nearly square. So do you expand horizontally to 8K x 4K? Or reduce vertically to 4K wide x 2K tall and just gain all the extra detail?

I guess you could just figure out what your final post width will be -- 4K or 2K or whatever -- resize it to that width, then squeeze it vertically to fit?

You're getting eactly as much resolution as you're capturing from the sensor. I think you're a little confused by the anamorphic, because you can only ever capture as much detail as the camera has pixels(or in your case the number of pixels being exposed). The captured resolution would be 4kx4k or ~16 MP.

[Dominic Jones]

Kenneth's bang on - the "extra" resolution you get from anamorphic is due to not cropping the sensor (or film gate, of course!) down to the 2.40:1 ratio and loosing a lot of information.

Now, if you are finishing for a non-anamorphic projection, then you're probably going to loose that resolution at some stage anyway (as you'll convert the image and squeeze it back down to fit in either a 2K or 4K 16:9 frame), but at least that will be later on, once CC and effects have been applied (or at least, one hopes so). But if you finish for an anamorphic projection, it all stays in the frame...

Sounds like a great project by the way Tom, congratulations on landing it - judging by your previous work it certainly seems like you deserve it...

Cheers,
Dom.

[Matthew Bennett]

Wow, RAW timelapses, I always just end up shooting small jpgs....

What kind of rigs are you going to be using, Tom??

Still with your own motor driven dolly, or getting into more advanced motion controlled crane moves and the like??
Lately I attached a wee motor to my Kessler pocket dolly, and then put the dolly on a severe tilt, do a timelapse, and the result is like a small crane-move in timelapse... good stuff!

[Matthew Bennett]

I'm interested to see some city stuff from you Tom. I don't think I have seen any yet. All the clips I've seen have been the awesome star fields. The city is fun to shoot but it can be a little rough sometimes.

Andrew should know... he seems to have done time under every dark, seedy bridge in the LA area... way late at night with an expensive camera clicking away...

[Craig Meadows]

Tom gets to have all the fun!