Tim Naylor
Veteran
I've used almost all of the adaptors people discuss on the forum: Brevis, PS Teknik, SG Pro, Movietube and M2. My favorites for professional and feature use would be the PS Teknik and the SG Pro. Here's my following criterion:
1) Build Quality - must be rugged and precisely built for optical tolerances and the day to day use of a 12 hour day, six day week.
2) Optical Quality - sharpness and minimal to no grain are paramount as well as alignment for minimal to no edge to edge sharpness issues.
3) Vignetting - The only acceptable vignetting is no vignetting
4) Set up: No tools is ideal. Fast and simple.
5) Lens Mount: Sturdy enough to eliminate focus pull jiggle
6) Adjustability on x,y, and z axis so your camera can find the true center of the ground glass. Zooming in more than you have to in order to make up for uncentered imagers, causes edge to edge uneven focus, especially with wider lenses.
7) Light loss: More than a stop, I'm looking elsewhere. Somewhere the perfect
compromise lies between light loss and bokeh. My guess it's beween 1/2 and 1 Stop.
8) Sealed GG. Bad sealing is a real problem especially with oscillating GG's. More on that later.
8) Customer Service: A response time of more than 24 hours is unacceptable. I don't care if you're Gepetto toiling away in a little shop in fairy land, if anyone pays more than a grand for anything, prompt customer service as well as a maiing address and phone line should be par for the course. Work it into your price/budget unless you make a failsafe product. When the competition heats up, bad customer service will bite you in the ass, deservedly so. Slow or inattentative customer service for film gear deserves nothing short of a firing squad.
9) Price: Meet the above requirements and price fairly. Charge 300-400 bucks and something will slip, be it build quality or customer service. Charge 10 grand, well it better be perfect and I'll be renting not owning it. Between 1-2 grand, if you can nail 1-8, than your my personal savior.
So which are my faves:
PS Technik and SG Pro. The build on the PS is the kind of precision and duarability you want when money's being spent. If you've got a paying client you'll be in a world of hell if you're adaptor fails (and some will). Because of price, I use the PS with the Zeiss / Varicam combo for client or indie feature work. Here’s my favorite sample shot by Sam Chase for a something I co-directed: http://www.timnaylor.com/musicvid_richiespicevideo.html
Many folks think it’s 35mm film.
The build on the PS is unparalleled and completely reliable. But with the HVX, the light loss is a bit heavy due to the image flip. I wish they had one without the flip. That and price are my only beef. With a Varicam because it doesn’t have to go through another lens, light loss isn’t an issue. At about 3 g a week with lenses and camera it’s not a bad deal for indies. The price of extra lighting and labor with cheaper adaptor on an HVX may make up the price of the Vcam, PS combo. HVX is a light sponge.
So my advice on your feature, if you got the cash go for Varicam/PS/Zeiss package.
If you don’t and are considering a low cost adaptor, so far SG Pro gets my vote.
Build is excellent. Almost on par with the PS at almost 1/10th the price. Sharpness and Bokeh are truly cinematic. In fact, I dare say it surpasses the PS on image quality. And I’ve only used it with still lenses (albeit Canon primes). No vignetting! Nuff said. Light loss isn’t the best or the worst, I’d say about 2/3 to a stop. That’s the trade off for great Bokeh. Lens mount is solid – no jiggles. Ground glass is wonderfully sealed and it spins. Despite the debate of oscillating verse spinning, after dissassembling and rebuilding a less then good quality built adaptor twice on a job due to an errant and visible piece of dust lodged on the GG, well sealed and spinning GG is what I look for in low cost adaptors. The time lost in the rebuild cost production more than the price of the adaptor. PS is now oscillating but their sealing could withstand a dust storm.
I used the SG for the first time on a job this week for paying client. It was a five minute set up, built like a tank and has the most beautiful bokeh and best sharpness of all the low costs and high cost adaptors. No vignetting is a big deal for me. You just can’t write vignetting off as being a cool aesthetic and acceptable. It should be a choice – in post.. I’ll post images as soon as the job’s edited. The batteries are double AA’s and last about 24 hours. This is the first low cost adaptor that I’d say is ready for feature / pro use.
The only downside is the wait to get one. I ordered mine and must wait until mid July. The upside is the inventor Wayne Kinney gets back to you promptly and gives you an honest answer about turnaround so you can make plans. The one I tested was an older model (Rev 2) courtesy of Timur Civan. If the new Rev 3 I’m waiting on improves upon this – all I have to say is I’ll be ecstatic.
I don’t shill for SG Pro. I’m a DP who’s been workiing professionally for over ten years. I’m truly excited about the new wave of low cost cameras and adaptors and have made the investment. However, the 1/3 chip is still a drag.
You will not get minimal DOF remotely close to a 35mm imager on a clean HVX with a similar field of view. Optically impossible. The HVX’s 4.5 is about the same field of view as 25mm on an adaptor. A DOF chart will tell you the rest – or your eyes. Great films can be shot with a 1/3 imager but you have to adapt your aesthetic for deep focus (ie. Barry Sonnenfield, Orsen Welles, John Ford). Composition must be more meticulous unless lampposts sticking out of heads are your thing.
It’s common sense that any adaptor on a camera will technically make the image softer than without. But that’s not the case always with audience’s perception. With greater contrast between soft and sharp, our attention goes to the sharp portion of the image. With the right adaptor, audiences often perceive this to be a sharper image compared to the image without an adaptor and more DOF. It’s like white against dark as opposed to white against light tones. The former will be perceived to be brighter than the latter. In otherwords, contrast, be it light or dark, soft vs sharp plays a huge roll in our perceptions. However, some adaptors are just too soft and full of artifcacts to pull this sort of slight of hand. The two I mentioned are more than capable in doing it.
Concerning your feature, advice from hobbyist and amatuers who’ve yet to experience the demands features have on gear should be viewed with some discrimination. Many of the adaptor makers haven’t given their products the rigorous Beta testing to make improvements for truly professional / feature use. Minimal Beta testing to create a truly professional product should involve no less than 500-1000 hours (length of a feature shoot) of on set use. Otherwise, your product will be far from fail safe and you better budget for the onslaught on your customer service. Many adaptor makers are not cameramen or have spent time on a real set, so feedback is vital to them. But feedback from the weekend warrior or the once in a lifetime indy maker may not be as much value as someone who will try to make a living off the product. And unfortunately, I find the quality so poor on some adaptors that I feel they’re making them for truly amatuer use and know too little to tell the difference.
An example of a quality product made by people who know what it means to rely on something is anything made by Zacuto. They’ve taken things made by people who spend too much time at the drawing board and given them the improvements that professional users need. It’s no accident they’re cameramen. Even high budgeted products get it wrong (ie. The HVX’s ass backward menu, DVX had it right. Or any high end cameras menu. If they got it right, we wouldn’t rent “paint boxes”).
My biggest issue with some adaptor makers is customer service: everything from confirmation, turn around time, inventory confirmation, documentation, manuals (or lack of them), returning emails or phone calls, is nothing short of abysmal. Compounding it is the amount of slack posters give them. There are numerous Mom and Pop shops that have excellent customer service (usually better than large corporations). Peter Lisand, who designs and machines great parts (best lcd monitor stand adaptor out there) calls you personally. Zacuto will talk to you. The Filter Gallery in NYC is a one man operation that makes the best filters, and sells a helluva lot more than all the adaptors combined has an address and will take orders personally. Even the manufacturs of cheap Indian knock off Matte Boxes get back to you within 24 hours. When I read about or have experienced negligent customer service from adaptor makers (or anyone else for that matter) I want to send my fist through the mail. Any posters who defend this as "poor little one man band" are just facilitators. If a shop is so busy that they can't get back to you, then they can afford to hire someone who can. It's the cost of doing business - and it pays for itself in future orders.
My qualifications are that I shoot for a living, so the gear I use must withstand extensive amount of use. I can’t afford for gear to go down. So my trial run with an older model SG Pro passed with flying colors. I wait with baited breath for the latest model. If it passes muster, I’ll tell you all about it. If not – go to the marketplace and it’ll be for sale.
The last thing, I wanted to mention. If you must flip the image, render it, in order to judge sharpness. My FCP will play flip in real time but will look soft until it’s rendered. What I do is drop everyting on a timeline, flip it, render it and then export as a FCP Self Contained file, re-import that file and use that to edit with. Full sharpness and no render wait.
I hope that answers some of your questions.
Tim Naylor DP
www.timnaylor.com
1) Build Quality - must be rugged and precisely built for optical tolerances and the day to day use of a 12 hour day, six day week.
2) Optical Quality - sharpness and minimal to no grain are paramount as well as alignment for minimal to no edge to edge sharpness issues.
3) Vignetting - The only acceptable vignetting is no vignetting
4) Set up: No tools is ideal. Fast and simple.
5) Lens Mount: Sturdy enough to eliminate focus pull jiggle
6) Adjustability on x,y, and z axis so your camera can find the true center of the ground glass. Zooming in more than you have to in order to make up for uncentered imagers, causes edge to edge uneven focus, especially with wider lenses.
7) Light loss: More than a stop, I'm looking elsewhere. Somewhere the perfect
compromise lies between light loss and bokeh. My guess it's beween 1/2 and 1 Stop.
8) Sealed GG. Bad sealing is a real problem especially with oscillating GG's. More on that later.
8) Customer Service: A response time of more than 24 hours is unacceptable. I don't care if you're Gepetto toiling away in a little shop in fairy land, if anyone pays more than a grand for anything, prompt customer service as well as a maiing address and phone line should be par for the course. Work it into your price/budget unless you make a failsafe product. When the competition heats up, bad customer service will bite you in the ass, deservedly so. Slow or inattentative customer service for film gear deserves nothing short of a firing squad.
9) Price: Meet the above requirements and price fairly. Charge 300-400 bucks and something will slip, be it build quality or customer service. Charge 10 grand, well it better be perfect and I'll be renting not owning it. Between 1-2 grand, if you can nail 1-8, than your my personal savior.
So which are my faves:
PS Technik and SG Pro. The build on the PS is the kind of precision and duarability you want when money's being spent. If you've got a paying client you'll be in a world of hell if you're adaptor fails (and some will). Because of price, I use the PS with the Zeiss / Varicam combo for client or indie feature work. Here’s my favorite sample shot by Sam Chase for a something I co-directed: http://www.timnaylor.com/musicvid_richiespicevideo.html
Many folks think it’s 35mm film.
The build on the PS is unparalleled and completely reliable. But with the HVX, the light loss is a bit heavy due to the image flip. I wish they had one without the flip. That and price are my only beef. With a Varicam because it doesn’t have to go through another lens, light loss isn’t an issue. At about 3 g a week with lenses and camera it’s not a bad deal for indies. The price of extra lighting and labor with cheaper adaptor on an HVX may make up the price of the Vcam, PS combo. HVX is a light sponge.
So my advice on your feature, if you got the cash go for Varicam/PS/Zeiss package.
If you don’t and are considering a low cost adaptor, so far SG Pro gets my vote.
Build is excellent. Almost on par with the PS at almost 1/10th the price. Sharpness and Bokeh are truly cinematic. In fact, I dare say it surpasses the PS on image quality. And I’ve only used it with still lenses (albeit Canon primes). No vignetting! Nuff said. Light loss isn’t the best or the worst, I’d say about 2/3 to a stop. That’s the trade off for great Bokeh. Lens mount is solid – no jiggles. Ground glass is wonderfully sealed and it spins. Despite the debate of oscillating verse spinning, after dissassembling and rebuilding a less then good quality built adaptor twice on a job due to an errant and visible piece of dust lodged on the GG, well sealed and spinning GG is what I look for in low cost adaptors. The time lost in the rebuild cost production more than the price of the adaptor. PS is now oscillating but their sealing could withstand a dust storm.
I used the SG for the first time on a job this week for paying client. It was a five minute set up, built like a tank and has the most beautiful bokeh and best sharpness of all the low costs and high cost adaptors. No vignetting is a big deal for me. You just can’t write vignetting off as being a cool aesthetic and acceptable. It should be a choice – in post.. I’ll post images as soon as the job’s edited. The batteries are double AA’s and last about 24 hours. This is the first low cost adaptor that I’d say is ready for feature / pro use.
The only downside is the wait to get one. I ordered mine and must wait until mid July. The upside is the inventor Wayne Kinney gets back to you promptly and gives you an honest answer about turnaround so you can make plans. The one I tested was an older model (Rev 2) courtesy of Timur Civan. If the new Rev 3 I’m waiting on improves upon this – all I have to say is I’ll be ecstatic.
I don’t shill for SG Pro. I’m a DP who’s been workiing professionally for over ten years. I’m truly excited about the new wave of low cost cameras and adaptors and have made the investment. However, the 1/3 chip is still a drag.
You will not get minimal DOF remotely close to a 35mm imager on a clean HVX with a similar field of view. Optically impossible. The HVX’s 4.5 is about the same field of view as 25mm on an adaptor. A DOF chart will tell you the rest – or your eyes. Great films can be shot with a 1/3 imager but you have to adapt your aesthetic for deep focus (ie. Barry Sonnenfield, Orsen Welles, John Ford). Composition must be more meticulous unless lampposts sticking out of heads are your thing.
It’s common sense that any adaptor on a camera will technically make the image softer than without. But that’s not the case always with audience’s perception. With greater contrast between soft and sharp, our attention goes to the sharp portion of the image. With the right adaptor, audiences often perceive this to be a sharper image compared to the image without an adaptor and more DOF. It’s like white against dark as opposed to white against light tones. The former will be perceived to be brighter than the latter. In otherwords, contrast, be it light or dark, soft vs sharp plays a huge roll in our perceptions. However, some adaptors are just too soft and full of artifcacts to pull this sort of slight of hand. The two I mentioned are more than capable in doing it.
Concerning your feature, advice from hobbyist and amatuers who’ve yet to experience the demands features have on gear should be viewed with some discrimination. Many of the adaptor makers haven’t given their products the rigorous Beta testing to make improvements for truly professional / feature use. Minimal Beta testing to create a truly professional product should involve no less than 500-1000 hours (length of a feature shoot) of on set use. Otherwise, your product will be far from fail safe and you better budget for the onslaught on your customer service. Many adaptor makers are not cameramen or have spent time on a real set, so feedback is vital to them. But feedback from the weekend warrior or the once in a lifetime indy maker may not be as much value as someone who will try to make a living off the product. And unfortunately, I find the quality so poor on some adaptors that I feel they’re making them for truly amatuer use and know too little to tell the difference.
An example of a quality product made by people who know what it means to rely on something is anything made by Zacuto. They’ve taken things made by people who spend too much time at the drawing board and given them the improvements that professional users need. It’s no accident they’re cameramen. Even high budgeted products get it wrong (ie. The HVX’s ass backward menu, DVX had it right. Or any high end cameras menu. If they got it right, we wouldn’t rent “paint boxes”).
My biggest issue with some adaptor makers is customer service: everything from confirmation, turn around time, inventory confirmation, documentation, manuals (or lack of them), returning emails or phone calls, is nothing short of abysmal. Compounding it is the amount of slack posters give them. There are numerous Mom and Pop shops that have excellent customer service (usually better than large corporations). Peter Lisand, who designs and machines great parts (best lcd monitor stand adaptor out there) calls you personally. Zacuto will talk to you. The Filter Gallery in NYC is a one man operation that makes the best filters, and sells a helluva lot more than all the adaptors combined has an address and will take orders personally. Even the manufacturs of cheap Indian knock off Matte Boxes get back to you within 24 hours. When I read about or have experienced negligent customer service from adaptor makers (or anyone else for that matter) I want to send my fist through the mail. Any posters who defend this as "poor little one man band" are just facilitators. If a shop is so busy that they can't get back to you, then they can afford to hire someone who can. It's the cost of doing business - and it pays for itself in future orders.
My qualifications are that I shoot for a living, so the gear I use must withstand extensive amount of use. I can’t afford for gear to go down. So my trial run with an older model SG Pro passed with flying colors. I wait with baited breath for the latest model. If it passes muster, I’ll tell you all about it. If not – go to the marketplace and it’ll be for sale.
The last thing, I wanted to mention. If you must flip the image, render it, in order to judge sharpness. My FCP will play flip in real time but will look soft until it’s rendered. What I do is drop everyting on a timeline, flip it, render it and then export as a FCP Self Contained file, re-import that file and use that to edit with. Full sharpness and no render wait.
I hope that answers some of your questions.
Tim Naylor DP
www.timnaylor.com
