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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Bees at 300fps using an antique Lens

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Meryem Ersoz

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ok, this was a double test - sorry no booty girls or guns here :crying:

Back in the very early days of PL glass shortages, I bought an $800 Angeniuex 25-250mm T3.9 lens so I would have *something* to slap on my RED ONE. As I was shooting with it one day, the front optical element fell into my hand - the rings holding it in place had rotted away.

So I sent it to Duclos for some TLC and they told me it would cost $1300 to repair. Of course, I was tempted to leave it for dead at that price, but I felt like I was pulling the plug on my grandfather or something, so I bit the bullet and had it fixed.

It sat on a shelf for a long time, once it returned, so I decided yesterday to pull it out and try some macro with it and test the 300 fps function and the lens at the same time. It isn't too easy to shoot bugs with this lens at 250mm, but I fun trying and putting grandaddy back in the game for the day.

The lens is pretty soft, but it has a nice antique quality, for a garden shoot. And bees at 300 fps are pretty fascinating. I'm going to shoot more bugs, for fun - but the Angie goes back on the shelf for a bit. Until I shoot my 19th-century period piece, anyway....

In its defense, this nearly 40 year old lens does not seem to vignette on a 5k sensor at 25mm, proving once again that they don't make em like they used to -

http://www.vimeo.com/29348970
 
Heh; my buddy Tom you met at NAB has a twin to that lens (bought at roughly the same time and roughly the same price, for exactly the same reasons).

No sooner had I finished e-mailing him he might want to hang onto that and his other vintage glass, with links to a few recent REDuser discussions on the topic, than I hit "New Posts" and found your thread. IMHO tiny, high-res, wicked fast, low-noise digital cameras give these older, smaller, slower "more forgiving" lenses a whole new lease on life.
 
Looks beautiful Meryem but on the Epic if you focus is closer than 10' at 25mm you will most likely get vignetting up to 30mm. I love this lens but it breathes heavier than a pedophile on a bus full of kindergartners.
 
Meryem.......nice! it is soft, but has a look to it.

.....now, i'd like to know HOW you scaled the video (im an idiot with scaling/post work) so that there is no letter box'ing....IT was shot at 2k & 2.4: 1 yes? then, when you transcoded or worked in whatever post software...HOW did you get so there is no letterboxing?? That said....what is the size? wasn't 16:9 you went to but 2:1 ? would LOVE to know more on that....
 
I did a bit of experimenting, Johnny - since I was going to upload it to Vimeo and wanted to squeeze the most out of Vimeo specs, I figured it needed cropping or the bees would look too small, if letterboxed using its source aspect ratio. So, using the framing tool in Redcine-X, I just applied a 1280 x 720 center crop frame to both clips in the timeline (easy to do with bees because they're small and all that was lost by cropping from the source file was more foliage). That eliminated the letterboxes, but you need to set the 16:9 guides for framing while you shoot, if you want to keep your subject in the safe zone, not essential with small subjects like bees, but definitely with humans or other subjects which will fill the frame or bleed out of the frame guides.
 
Thanks for posting that. I'm not sure if the Epic shutter settings are the same as the R1, but from the subtle motion blur it looks to me like you had your shutter in "Normal" mode instead of "Relative", so you're basically using a 360 shutter at frame rates over 48 fps. Am I correct?

I wish Red would rename this so that "Normal" meant what it does on a film camera, that no matter what the frame rate, the shutter time changes so that the shutter "angle" stays the same (usually 180). This yields, in my experience, much sharper images when over-cranking.

Didn't mean this as a criticism of your footage at all. It's just something I've been noticing in a lot of the 300 fps footage lately.
 
I welcome the feedback, Julio - this is the very first time that I pushed a record button on a 300 fps setting on the Epic, so I'm not that clear on how the camera calculates shutter speed. I thought if I had it set at 180 degrees that it would remain at a factor of that shutter. You are saying that is not what happens? I should probably switch the shutter to read in degrees when shooting higher frame rates - otherwise the numbers get a little confusing. I'm going to go back and double-check this - seriously, thanks for the help, I'm always psyched to learn new tricks.
 
Yeah, I always leave the shutter in degrees so I know what kind of motion characteristics I'm getting. I'm pretty positive that if you have the shutter in "Normal" mode, it will leave the shutter TIME the same no matter what the frame rate. So if you have a 1/48 shutter in 24 fps, you will still have a 1/48 shutter when you change to 48 fps, giving you a 360 shutter with motion blur.
 
well - if you figure that one out, Johnny - I have 10 terabytes of 2:4:1 footage on a RAID that would like to know the secret as well...
 
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