Cinema Anamorphic lenses on Letus Ultimate

Austin Berry

Austin Berry

Active member
Trying something crazy here: shooting a short film this fall and I'd love to shoot it in true 2.35:1 anamorphic/cinemascope.
Here's the plan:
Panasonic HDX-900
Letus Ultimate (PL mount) via Compact B4 mount relay
Powerscope MKII anamorphic primes (35mm, 50mm, 75mm, 100mm)

As I understand it, this should work in theory. The Letus should convert the image pickup to an Academy aspect ratio which most PL mount lenses project, including the Powerscope anamorphics.

Thoughts?
 
You'll have to unsqueeze the image in post, but it will work.

You'll probably see a lot of barrel distortion, more so than you would expect, until you're further stopped down.
 
That combination won't give you 2.35, it'll give you 3.56:1.

Cinema anamorphic lenses have a 2:1 squeeze, and are designed to be used on the 4:3 film frame (which, when you matte off the soundtrack area off one side, results in a total frame of about 1.2:1). Squeeze that 1.2:1 and you get an optical frame of 2.4:1.

But the HDX-900 doesn't have a 1.2:1 chip, it has a 1.78:1 chip. So if you put 2:1-squeeze anamorphics on there, you'll get a 3.56:1 frame, way wider than you're expecting. You can of course crop off the sides in post and blow up the image, but I don't think that's what you're really aiming for.

If you wanted a native 2.35:1 image, you'd need to find some 1.33:1 squeeze lenses. 1.78 x 1.33 = 2.37:1.
 
So what you're saying is that I could stick (for example) one of the new Zeiss compact prime PL mounts on the Letus and desqueeze to approximately 2.35:1 in post? Or any spherical cinema lens? They all seem to project 1.33:1.
 
Spherical lenses don't project any aspect ratio. They are just glass. Whatever the shape your chip is (or film is), is what aspect ratio the footage will be.

"anamorphic" lenses squeeze the image to a certain degree. There are 1.33x anamorphics, 1.5x, even some 1.75x, but those are all mostly special-purpose or projector lenses. Cinema anamorphics are a 2.0x squeeze.

So the aspect ratio you get out of an anamorphic lens, is directly dependent on two factors: the shape of the chip or film that you're recording on, and the squeeze factor of the lens.

If you want to use cinema anamorphics, those are pretty much entirely, exclusively, 2.0x. So if you put a cinema anamorphic on a 4:3 chip with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, you'd end up with recorded footage that would need to be desqueezed to 2.66:1 to look right. And if you used that cinema anamorphic on a 16:9 chip with its 1.78:1 aspect ratio, you'll need to unsqueeze it to 3.56:1 before it looks right.

When shooting 35mm film for anamorphic, you use the whole 4:3 frame, minus a little bit of width for the soundtrack, so the actual recorded aspect ratio is 1.2:1. Then it gets projected through a 2:1 unsqueezing anamorphic projector lens, to display the original aspect ratio properly.

So - if you want to get 2.39:1 out of a cinema anamorphic on a 16:9 HD camera, you're going to be recording at 3.56:1, then you're going to have to unsqueeze in editing to 3.56:1, and then chop off the sides of the image to get it down to 2.39:1. And I'll bet that after you get through with all that squeezing, unsqueezing, chopping and blowing up, your resultant image won't really look any better than if you'd just shot 16:9 and matted it down to 2.39 in the first place.

I think the only reason to use cinema anamorphics on an HD camera is because you like the texture of the stretch; it's not because you're going to record higher quality footage by using more of the chip, because I think a pretty good argument could be made that the resulting footage is going to look technically worse than a straight spherical shoot and matte (which is basically how Super35 film works; they shoot with spherical lenses and then matte off the top and bottom).
 
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