anyone taken grain out of their letus adaptor?

[bradywurtz]

so i was thinking, i really only wanted a letus to create the DOF that lenses will give me. i really don't care about the grain that it adds to my video.

has anyone ever tried to open up their letus adaptor and remove the grain on the glass so that the image is just project on the glass without adding grain to it?

would this be possible? would this not cause as much light loss through the adaptor? would it be reversible if you wanted to put the grain back on? or would this ruin the adaptor?

 

[Huy Vu]

If you're using the adapter properly you should see no grain. It's not just a matter of opening the adapter and polishing the grain off, as that would probably seriously damage the adapter in the process.

 

[Postmaster]

Are we talking about the "grain" that shows up if you stop down beyond f4 or the schlieren that show up even on on wide open?

Frank

 

[bradywurtz]

Are we talking about the "grain" that shows up if you stop down beyond f4 or the schlieren that show up even on on wide open?

Frank

sorry, it's about the grain.

cause from what i see, the advantage of using the letus is two parts. one is you can attach prime lenses to get a better DOF and more control over your shots. the second is the ground glass that has whatever kind of material that letus or other 35mm's put in it, and then either rotate or vibrate it to get that grainy film look.

now is it necessary to have the grainy film look if all you really want is to shoot video with a prime?

i mean i know this is just a 35mm adaptor thing. no other professional cameras actually have a plate of grain on them, so why do you have to have it on there with the 35mm adaptors?

 

[Huy Vu]

i mean i know this is just a 35mm adaptor thing. no other professional cameras actually have a plate of grain on them, so why do you have to have it on there with the 35mm adaptors?

Because all ground glass materials have grain in them. It's extremely time consuming and expensive to develop a material that has zero grain that will also give a sharp image and bokeh that are not diffused. The reason the G35 was so delayed is that they spent years trying to develop a GG with a fine enough grain structure so that you don't have to spin or vibrate it, and they basically missed out on the adapter market because of that. Letus and Shoot35 have all developed their equivalent GG so that there is no grain when stopped down, but those still needs to be spin.

I still don't know what you meant with regard to grain. I repeat: if you're using the adapter properly at the correct F-stop and shutterspeed, there is no grain. If there is, none of the adapter people would be in business as non-moving specks across the image is pretty much considered a no-no.

 

[Admir]

Because all ground glass materials have grain in them. It's extremely time consuming and expensive to develop a material that has zero grain that will also give a sharp image and bokeh that are not diffused. The reason the G35 was so delayed is that they spent years trying to develop a GG with a fine enough grain structure so that you don't have to spin or vibrate it, and they basically missed out on the adapter market because of that. Letus and Shoot35 have all developed their equivalent GG so that there is no grain when stopped down, but those still needs to be spin.

I still don't know what you meant with regard to grain. I repeat: if you're using the adapter properly at the correct F-stop and shutterspeed, there is no grain. If there is, none of the adapter people would be in business as non-moving specks across the image is pretty much considered a no-no.

When saying that the shoot35 adapter dosen't have any grainpattering, do you mean with the rotorazor 1?

 

[Huy Vu]

When saying that the shoot35 adapter dosen't have any grainpattering, do you mean with the rotorazor 1?

Yes, rotorazor 1. It's not that it doesn't have grain, but it's so fine that you can stop the lens down and not see it. Same with the Letus Ultimate.

But the discussion of "grain" is really irrelevant because as long as you stay within the limit of the adapter, there is no grain.

 

[Admir]

That's another thing that I find strange, whenever I try to stop down my 50mm 1.8 nikon prime below 5.6, I start go get heavy vignetting. My Sgblade is on the way, with a RR2. My thaught is that there is no reasong to go with the RR1 since anything below 5.6 probably will start go vignette.

Or maybe this was only a M2 issue, I'm not shure!

And yes, the grainpattering is irrelevant, grain can also be in camera settings with detaillevel and the master ped.

 

[Postmaster]

and then either rotate or vibrate it to get that grainy film look.

You misunderstood that. They spin or vibrate it to get RID of the grain.
Stop your spinning/vibrating GG and see what I mean.

A grainy look was never a feature of adapters, but an PITA that came with the GG.
Adapter builders went trough a lot of trial and error to get rid of it as good as possible.

On a vibrating adapter like the LEX , the trouble starts beyond stop 4 or 5.
On the spinning adapters you can stop down much more without grain.

Frank

 

[Dino]

I think the OP might not be clear about the reason for having ground glass, which inherently has grain vs. clear glass. It's the same as projecting an image on a rear screen material vs. a window. The former projects an image due to the granular nature of the material, the latter will show a translucent, low contrast image.

While I don't think grain is visible with a proper setup, there's no question that the GG imparts a certain amount of softening and organic look to the image. This is why the SG Blade offers GG options.

I was shooting for a few days recently with an HPX3700 with Letus Ultimate, B4 Pro relay and Zeiss Compact Primes. Even with the sharpness of the Zeiss and 3700, the image still had a more filmic look than a DSLR or RED One, both of which make me want to immediately put a Diffusion FX or Soft FX or Pro-Mist filter on them so they don't look so video/clinical looking. This is part of the magic of DOF adapters in my opinion.