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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 :)

Underwater Bubble Blowin' Users Group

You can see the images of and from the CinePort on my website. It has been available since 2007.
I do not intend to contact every manufacturer or potential client, but I will try to promptly respond to any enquiries :)
 
....yep, seen them on your site for years. Not sure those photos prove or disprove your assessment that your cineport glass is far superior to other glass....i'm sure you will agree that it's difficult to look at your pics and compare to what? Pawel, this is your claim....so asking you to back it up if you bring it public and additionally you said you were going to be offering your cineport up to Gates & Aquavideo....not "every manufacturer" in fact those are the only two that i know that keep up with this forum. YOu have had adequate time denouncing others ports and how they cannot resolve as your port does...you make this claim on many of your posts. Great. PLEASE share with us then....and find a way to make it available to a housing manufacturer....one that makes housings for RED would be a great place to start as we're on that forum....so only two i know are the above....Otherwise, to continue denouncing others dome ports is plain getting tiresome. I say this with respect and mean what i say....which is make that port available man---if it's what you say, you'll probably do pretty dang good in sales. Now, if you are going to start a machine company and begin making them available....when can we expect this to happen? Where can we see Cineport in the USA---don't imagine i'll travel to Tasmania to see it and see if it's what you say.....
 
Neither Gates, Aquavideo nor even RED has presence in Australia and I see no reason why I should have presence in the US.

The CinePort is available, you can have one within a few days delivered by FedEx, if you like. No waiting, no deposits needed :)
 
Pawel.....i'm stumped. Guess you have me there. How do you handle repairs/returns etc.......so do you make a mount that will fit Gates or AV housing or do they have to conform to your mount? Also, have you done any testing to see how your port mounts to OTHER manufacturers housings? Would be great to see some pics and specs of how your port mounts with other housings. I'm assuming if you are going to offer your port to mount up with other housings you have looked into different mounting options for each and what it takes (machining/time/cost) to get those made yes? I'm still interested to know more...price/bayonet mount to fit Gates housing.....also, can you give specific performance data on Cineport vs. 8" glass port from Gates & AV? Would love to see some pics showing how EACH resolve the same picture.....a test chart would be fine.

I think you'll have to convince the underwater public with resolution charts with yours vs. others instead of rhetoric. Again, if you have a superior product and price is right and i can use it now....count me in.
 
Housing repairs will be handled just the same way as Gates, Aquavideo or RED do: return to base. Service can be done by the user. Optics can be serviced and adjusted locally in the US. Details will be made available in due course.

There is no problem mounting CinePort to any Aquavideo housing. I can provide male and female bayonet mount and Auquavideo can make a simple front plate replacement and align the camera position to a specific lens. CAD drawings will be provided. It may not be as straight forward with Gates housing, I have not seen their DEEP Epic yet.

I believe Gates and Aquavideo are using Aquatica ports, which has 4" radius or use a flat port for 3D Deep Atom. I have only used and compared with SeaCam Superdome, which also has 4" curvature. The CinePort has about twice the area of the intersection with water than a 4" radius (8" diameter) dome , which vastly contributes to its superior contrast. It also has about 99.7% transmittance, compared to about 90% for SeaCam Superdome, further increasing the contrast and reducing glare. CinePort has 50% less field curvature than Aquatica or SeaCam dome glass ports, resulting in about 100% improvement in corner resolution, closer min. focus distance and no need for diopter. CinePort is highly optimised and aggressively buffed to a specific 90 degree field of view, further enhancing contrast and eliminating glare and reflections. CinePort has special coating (different inside and outside), further increasing the contrast, as compared to Aquatica and SeaCam Superdome. The CinePort is manufactured to very tight tolerances and each piece of glass is individually tested for uniformity, further contributing to high MTF.

At the moment I can only project an underwater zone chart and compare them by eye balling :) I am waiting for my Epic-X to shoot a unified zone chart with different lens and port scenarios and will publish the results soon after.
 
Sounds great---bring it on...when are you able to test Gates & Aqua housings and show the results. Too many numbers floating around with your specs.....they mean little to me since i pay little attention to those details and like to drink the punch when it's served and then make a choice.

Standing by for more info......should be soon yes? By the way, you have cineports ready to sell now? What is a ballpark price?
 
Yes, there is no one more eager to publish the results than I am :)

The CinePort is expensive: $20k for the glass only, $25k with SeaCam compatible bayonet mount. It should not cost more than a grand for Michael Hastings to make a compatible front plate, maybe bit more including aligning the camera position. You need to speak to him, I'm happy to give Mike all necessary information, but essentially it is just another simple front plate replacement.

The new optics, which I can't reveal at the moment, will be much cheaper, it will provide slightly higher resolution, but lower contrast than the CinePort.

If you shoot in less than ideal water clarity, CinePort is your glass. It "cuts through" milky and muddy water with amazing clarity. It is weird. You can not see through a diving mask what you are filming! You need to look in the monitor. It is like having a night vision camera, except it produces dazzling vibrant colour when everything around is washed out, hazy and muddy...sometimes you can't even see things in the distance, look in the monitor and it stands out sharp and clear.

If you are shooting in crystal clear waters, wait till December for the new optics.
 
OKay, gotta jump in here. Simply put, the cineport dome is basically a "slice" of a larger radius dome (can't remember if it is a 6" radius or 9") - same as seacam did awhile ago. The main reason for doing that is for over/under shots where you aren't really trying to correct for aberrations or distortions in the underwater portion- you are simply trying to avoid the split image you get with a flat port - i.e. think of the pencil in the glass of water.

On a dome port infinity is refocused to 3x the radius from the dome (and everything else is progressively closer - log scale to be precise) so at 9" on a six inch dome and 12" on an 8 inch dome. So if you do a split shot with a six inch dome a subject at 8 feet underwater will appear to the lens as 7" in front of the dome but the abovewater portion will be normal - a huge difference and while a superwide and small aperture can get you both because of DOF it is really pushing it and may not work particularly for higher res shots. So having a big dome simply moves the underwater portion farther away - a 6" radius 12" diameter dome will push the virtual image of underwater out to 18" so much less of a discrepancy.

The downside to this larger radius is that part of the theory of dome ports is to minimize distortion and particularly chromatic aberration you want all of the light rays to be perpendicular to a tangent of the dome and going directly to the optical center of the lens - in other words the lens should be at the center of the full hemisphere - pretty easy with a 3 or four inch radius but imagine a full 12 inch diameter half-dome - pretty cumbersome. So the solution is to only use a "slice" of the dome and to keep the size and setback manageable by "cheating" the lens forward into the hemisphere closer to the glass - but now the light rays are not converging where they should. In practice you can get away with this to an extent - we do it all of the time on our consumer housings - as do most video camera housing manufacturers in order to keep the size reasonable, but if you are claiming precision it is definitely a compromise. All domes (in contact with water) also create a curved image and the effect is somewhat proportionate to the radius, but it is still definitely an issue even on the larger radius ports. You also have to realize that just as most lenses will get both sharper and less chromatic aberration as you stop down, the same happens with the dome port.

Virtually all engineering is managing compromise and there may be lens, lighting conditions and subject combinations where the "slice of cineport" performs better, but I would definitely want to see it for myself before investing in it.

Finally, just to clear things up we do use the Aquatica ports for some of our acrylic ports on the RED1 and Epic housings, but our 8" glass dome is from our own source - very high quality glass - and it does have Anti-Reflective coatings on the inside (where it is protected).

The science of underwater optics has been pretty well understood for many, many years. It boils down to this: 1) flat ports are cheap, but reduce field of view by 25% (a huge penalty in terms of both color and clarity underwater) and are easily improved on dramatically by using a: 2) dome port. Dome port underwater optics are very well understood by anyone that takes a little time to study the fundamentals, can be as inexpensive as $199 retail even for broadcast and digital cinema size lenses and even extremely high quality large glass domes are on the order of $1000-2000. and 3) There are more fully corrected designs like the Fathom port but these are both expensive and quite heavy even for consumer/prosumer type cameras - $6000 or so and $4000 or so to replace the glass if you scratch it. Fathom type correctors for larger S35 type lenses would tend to be extremely expensive, large and heavy because the size of that front element tends to increase exponentially as the size of the camera lens increases.

I'm not saying that Pawel's new lens can't be great - we just don't know anything about it. As far as the older dome cineport, it may have some marginal improvements but I would have to see direct apples to apples comparisons to determine how much difference and how much it is worth. In the end, I would be very skeptical of any claims to be substantially better than a high quality dome in normal (F5.6 to F11) lighting conditions.

I'm curious and interested in seeing the new optic, but I am very skeptical that a single element will not create significant issues for stereographic 3D. Again, love to see, nobody wants it more than me - but I grew up in Missouri "the showme state"
 

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Now i'm not saying you guys are DUD's.....you guys spout a lot of numbers and what not.....most of your talk is like my dive physics class memory---and all i remember from any of it was KEEP ON BREATHING.....Same with RB physics....just keep breathing and let some air out before your lungs explode; maintain 1.2-1.4 ppo2 and everything is good.......

.....my analysis: I'll show you mine if you show me yours: i'll bet you don't get much more resolution after all the tweaking at the end of the day when it pops upon the tube...THIS is my $75 solution and worked perfectly: Of course my glass elements are far superior...UNDER the right conditions....but looking straight forward in well lit area at 5.6 to F8....shot crisp images:

....i now use this housing to take my small dog diving.....
 

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Johnny Friday said:
....but looking straight forward in well lit area at 5.6 to F8....shot crisp images....
Click to expand...

looks good :) In engineering we try to quantify the claims with numbers because what is "crisp" for one may not be "crisp" for another. If you could provide a 1:1 corner crop at f/2.8 of an underwater zone chart, it would be great way to compare apples with apples.

In practice the differences are as significant as difference between standard definition and 4k.

I will post 1:1 corner crops as soon as my Epic-X arrives, but I like what I see on my underwater lens projector :)
 
2011 Emmy's: OUTSTANDING INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN A CRAFT: CINEMATOGRAPHY - NATURE

2011 Emmy's: OUTSTANDING INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN A CRAFT: CINEMATOGRAPHY - NATURE

And the award goes to.......

....a whole bunch of talented cinematographers...congrats guys---you know who you are....Some of which are on this forum AND, some shot with the Red 1.....

Great Migrations: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/great-migrations-episode-guide/#tab-Videos/08661_00


http://www.tvweek.com/news/2011/09/32nd_annual_news_and_documenta.php - towards bottom.

Cinematographers
David Baillie, John Benam, Andy Brandy Casagrande IV, Martin Dohrn, Graeme Duane, Mark Emery, Justine Evans, Wade
Fairley, Richard Fitzpatrick, Richard Foster, Johnny Friday, David Hannan, Clint Hempsall, Jonathan Jones,
Dereck Joubert, Mark Lamble, Alastair MacEwen, John Mans, Skip Margetts, Richard Matthews, David McKay, Andy Mitchell,
Shane Moore, Bob Poole, Adam Ravetch, Neil Rettig, Joe Riis, Rick Rosenthal, Andrew Shillabeer, Mark Smith, Simon Werry

.....And a few more that were not mentioned on the press release......

Cool stuff guys and congrats
 
Well done Johnny, couldn't happen to a better bloke. I guess us Jellyfish stalkers are playing catch up now? Will be a long time for me matey. Bowing out of the Bubble Blowing lark, feel more at ease getting slammed in surf waves....

All the best dude, may this roller coaster ride continue onwards for you buddy.

Cheers,
mark.
 
Ha ha ha ha.....

Mark, Ken et.al:
National Geographic Migrations Jellyfish Lake Team which include:

Ken Corben, Adam Ravetch, Mark Thorpe, Stewart Mayer.......congrats on your Emmy win.....

...of course Jellyfish Lake was only one of SEVERAL wonderful segments......One that i know was shot 95% on RED1......
The Great Migrations team of cinematographers is a hard working bunch and shot some terrific stuff.......
 
Three things,

First, can we either choose this or the other thread on Red Discussion and keep one single thread, please? Whoever can do it, please do so or ask someone at HQ like Jarred to close down the "other" thread.

Second, congrats Johnny!

Third, Pawel, you are obviously a committed underwater film maker and, reading through many of your posts, it becomes clear that your knowledge and expertise on optics is second to none, but your claims about the Cineport are, well, greatly exaggerated, in my not so technically learned but nevertheless highly analytic and experienced opinion, having owned and operated most, if not all, of the relevant dome systems available , both for stills and cine, for the past 25 years. Which in no way is meant as disrespect to you. As you say, you may actually see all those things you claim in muddy, hazy water, and without a resolution chart or another cineport available to get a different perspective than yours, who are we to claim that you're wrong? But please man, those images on your website do not prove a thing, I have better looking grabs from decidedly inferior systems, so unless you post full frame TIFFs or 1080 videos while waiting to shoot your charts, I recommend that you not tout the virtues of your system based on those undeniably average images. You may remember how awesome they look on your system while grading/editing them at full res, but we, not having the benefit of that mental filter, cannot see anything extraordinary there. Like Mike said, the principles of underwater optics are really quite simple, and unless you are talking about corrected optics like the Fathom ones, you still are talking about nothing more than a piece of glass that must be built, cut and aligned to a lens. So how you can get results that are light years ahead of the best existing domes now available with what's basically the same principle is beyond me. I'm not saying that it is impossible, and actually, if it is, you can count me as one of your first customers. But again, to paraphrase you, what looks great to some may not be so to others. You also talked a while ago about this housing of yours that cost you in excess of $100K, and looking at it on your website, all I see is a polished and refined monstrosity of a cylinder, which may be built of titanium instead of PVC, but makes even an obviously tall man like you look small in comparison, and which even needs its own BC for compensation, and cannot be, under any circumstance, hydrodynamically efficient and thus, easy to move underwater. Based on those photos, I would never give it a second thought compared to the Amphibicam housings I owned for my two F-900s, for example. So again, a modicum of perspective and restrain would be advisable when promoting an end-to-all product to people in this forum who've been around for a very long time and, proverbially, seen it all, done it all, used them all...

Please don't put me on your shit list, I dearly hope your hyperbole proves undeniable fact, so I can send you my hard earned cash, unless you refuse me service for bad attitude :-)
 
Mark Thorpe said:
So this means I get another paperweight to add to the Antibes palme?

Thanks for the heads up.

Mark.
Click to expand...

.....COUPONS...... Coupons mate, get em, use em at McD's and Jack's.....or what have they there in Bali ? MonkeyD's?

Rudi.....my man....we talk soon....did the switch to Adobe PPro....trying to figure which graphics card. Getting another gentelman in France on this forum saying with Nvidia Card and Mac you CANNOT get 10bit output with PPro.....even with display port or others....not sure that's true, but not denying that either - you know?

....as for WHICH THREAD---sure makes sense to use this one since it is a STICKY.
 
Johnny,

Forgot about the whole Mac thing, the gentleman is probably right, I've heard about the impossibility of 10 bit out of Macs. Why don't you ditch them silver towers too and get yourself some less visually stunning but undeniably cheaper, and dare I say faster, PC machines to run your show? At any rate, your Nvidia options for Mac are pretty slim, I think only the Quadro 4000 is available now, whereas virtually anything else is usable with a PC, then again, PCs lack charisma :-)
 
Rudi....you are probably right...only i've vested in so much 3rd party Mac stuff now....HOWEVER, might just (in near future) build an edit only PC station.....

....Yep, looking at Quadro 4000 now...but have a look for any GTX 590 out there on web.....
 
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