First Letus35A shoot

Not to hi-jack your thread, scharky, but I don't want to start another thread just for Letus footage.

But, here's some raw stuff I just shot this afteroon with my kids at the park near our house. I had a MONSTER lens I wanted to test, and I still have the Letus35 Flip that we tested for the article (should post any day now). I'm uploading the footage now ... 3 MBPS to keep the quality high, and a few PNG images.

park framegrab
park clip

woman framegrab
cowboy clip

chains framegrab
chains clip


NICE clip, BTW. Funny, your wife didn't look too pleased to be out there at about 00:40 - 00:43. What a sport, though.

One thing I've noticed about the Letus (both on my original, and the Flip we've tested), is a residue or "something" on the glass. I've brought this to Quyen's attention, and he's already ordered some new cleaners/product to make sure this isn't on future units. To me, it looks like SMALL waterspots, or something that wasn't buffed out all the way ... either way, you may see some of it on the above clips.

I too, am impressed with the Letus though.

Oops, just realized that the 2nd & 3rd clip were shot 24PA, but in a 29.97 timeline, and rendered out 23.976 (IVTC) ... so, think they're progressive, or should I reimport & render from a 24P timeline? Oh well, for this it may not matter.
 
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Thanks for the frame grabs guys!

Looks a bit grainy for my tastes.

Envision, is your stated 4 stop light loss due to not having fast lenses? If I got a adapter would hunt down some f1.4s.
 
The Letus35 Flip Advanced is reported to now lose only 1.5 stops of light. The unit we tested we estimated was approx 3+ stops, however, it was defective with the screen off center ... so we had to zoom in even more with the DVX, which lost about another stop. So, the light loss without the lens was already about 4 stops.

I've got two Canon FD 1.4 50mm S.S.C. lenses ... I just wanted to play with that monster 5.6 100-300mm zoom lens I had around ... and since there was still plenty of light (5pm), it didn't appear to be a problem. I still had to stop down the camera from blowing out too much.
 
Scharky, that looks really good. I burned it to DVD and watched it on a 50" plasma and it looks very sharp. Grain doesn't bother me at all.

What procedure did you use to uprez? Did you do any sharpening from the original footage. I was under the impression that these adapters are soft but yours is pretty sharp.

Nice job...post more :)
 
Wow, this thread has really taken off.

Let me go back and answer a few questions.

I shoot everything to be color corrected. Why you may ask? That's just what I do. Therefore I usually shoot things very flat and soft and then make them look how I want them to in post.
There wasn't alot of correction, I brought the blacks to black, and matched the colors more to how they looked when i was shooting, but I did cheat a tad on the warm side.
Yes, I did sharpen. I experimented with several different sharpening techniques. First I was trying to avoid bringing out grain, but after several tests I found that just a applying a "sharpen" filter in vegas and adjusting that really looked good, especially when projected on a larger screen. Now the grain really does not show up when looking at it in standard def, it does show up when looking at it on an HD screen, but so does 16mm. On standard def monitors 16mm has virtually no grain, well, depending on the shot and speed of the film. But on an HD screen, there will be very noticeable grain.
I for one like grain, I enjoy seeing it. maybe I'm old fashioned, but there is something about grain that is very pleasing to me.
Now it is easy to overdue it in the grain factor, but I think just standard sharpening brought out the right amount of grain, which really isn't noticeable whith a moving image, and I think this is one of the more pleasing shots that I have got out of my DVX100.

The Andromeda is the next step for me, when my wife finally gives me the ok :). As for right now, the DVX continues to impress me with its results. It's a camera that seems to get better with age, like a nice fine chardonnet :).

And with people like Quyen around making wonderfull products for such an affordable amount of money, hopefully some of these larger companies will start to feel the power of the independent pioneers making these things possible.

And no I don't work for Quyen :)
 
Now with that said, there are some downsides to the adapter that I have noticed, however theses seem to apply to most of the adapters I have seen.

1. Edge to edge sharpness. Still not there. I measured in the center of the frame to resolve about 530 lines shooting 4:3 on a 4:3 chart. THat to me is amazing, however there is noticeable resolution drop off at the corners, as well as a little vignetting. However, if you are shooting 16:9 or 2.35:1 these issues are lessened greatly, but still slightly apprarrent at the very edges of the screen. This I have seen in all 35mm adapter footage, just to be fair.

2.Chromatic abberation apperears around the edges as well. This isn't a huge issue to me, as it can be toned down, to a point, and watching exposure will help with this. The Chromatic abberation can be pretty pronounced if you don't watch for it and compensate, so this is more of a warning.

That's pretty much it. The build quality is great, although I wish that it was a little tighter on the part that threads the DVX lens with the diopter and the actual Letus body itself. It is very easy to accidently spin the adapter off axis allowing the sides of the frame to diagnolly cut into the image. I reccomend putting a white dot on the top of the letus, close to the DVX to tell you where the square center is of the adapter. Also, like I said before, you really need rods for this. This to me is not a bad thing, I have the cavision rods, with a cavision lens support rod that works great with stabalizing the adapter.
 
So I've got alot of emails from people wanting to know more, and more. Well, I'll have some more footage to show you uploaded in a little bit. But let me just say that I have learned two big things since my first post. First, camera settings, letus footage looks really good if you have your detail settings set really high, ie +5-+7 and the detail coring also set to +7. Normally, I would scoff at these settings, but this really gives you nice looking footage.
Now the other thing I learned is about a little vegas plugin called "Dynamic noise reduction". This is an amazing plugin, at least when dealing with footage with shallow depth of field. I have tried it before with regular DV footage, and was not really impressed with the results, but on this footage, some amazing things happen. I don't use it to completly get rid of the noise, then it just looks fake, but to heavily reduce it. It looks pretty amazing. I'll post some new footage with this noise reduction applied. the footage originally was really grainy becasue I was trying out some new settings in camera (this is before I had realized the key settings for the letus) and I also bumped the focus ring 1pt out of focus, so the footage was softer than normal, and I didn't realize nearly until the end. Therefore, more sharpening was applied, therefore making the footage much more grainy. The noise reduction software really saved this footage, and I am now doing tests to see what it looks like used under ideal conditions. I will post my findings soon.
 
Sorry Vampiresoup, I'm not familiar enough with FCP to give you a definitive answer, but in AE, depending on your version, I believe noise reduction is listed under the effects menu.

Aram, yes, this has been uprezed in Vegas.

So here are the results of my tests.

http://www.stefweb.net/SettingsTest.wmv

Just to let you know, this test was only for image sharpness and noise. My personal best choise settings are Detail +6, V Detial +7 and Coring +7. Now this really goes against everything I have always done with the DVX, but surpisingly it gives really nice results.
I compared this footage to straight DVX footage with a similar field of view. The focus is on the Red bowl and the candle for both shots, although the DVX footage has the entire image in focus.

So there you go, I hope this helps some of you with the settings questions. These work for me, as I am looking for a very specific style. You will most likely need to pause and play several times during this test, in order to see what's going on. I needed to keep the file size as small as possible, while still keeping the WMV constantly creating frames. With too much compressing, wmv starts to get rid of noise on its own, and that kind of defeats the purpose.
 
scharky, why Detail +6 vs. +7? Can you really even tell a difference, and if so, what are you running your tests against to see the difference between say +3 or +7, etc.

Jack Danial Stanely's posted over in his ODD SQUAD thread some similar settings, but then further cranks WAY down the Master Pedestal, and some other interesting adjustments. What else have you tweaked & why?
 
I'm glad you asked that. Actually, it was more of a mental thing than anything. I just cringe at the thought of cranking it all the way to 7, but I'm sure there is really no visible difference :).

I have been keeping my Master P around 5 or 6. I have found that slower lenses do produce more grain, even when properly exposed, therefore, a F2.0 lens properly exposed will be visibly less grainy than a F3.5lens with proper exposure. Why this is, I'm not sure, but I personally would not use a lens slower than 3.5. at that aperature and beyond, things tend to get very grainy.

Here is actually the shoot that I was talking about before, again with my wife. This time a had a 80-200 3.5 and a 45-85 3.5, however both of them had focus problems with the DVX lens, much more noticeable with the 80-200 shots. It kind of sucked, because the ferrets were cold, and we had to go back, just when i was figuring out that my focus was off on the DVX. Learned my lesson that time :)

Here is the footage. It looks ok, not as sharp as the other, and a bit noisier, but I have been experimenting with noise reduction, and it actually did a really nice job.

http://www.stefweb.net/LTSteph2.wmv

I'm still uploading it, give it 5 minutes or so.
 
scharky, gaffer tape that baby. Once I've got that perfect focus & zoom on the GG, I take gaffer tape & lock everything down & disconnect the servo, even throwing a spot of tape over that switch. I want to ensure that once I'm focused on the GG, nothing's going to change it.

I've even taped over my iris dial before, if someone else was using the camera for a bit, as I didn't want the camera accidentally stopped down.

So I didn't quite follow you from you talking about the Master Pedestal at 5-6 to the speed of lenses ... does one have to do with the other? Jack throws his Master Pedestal clear down to -12, and I've asked why, since I thought that would massively crush your blacks, which I'd imagine would create even more noise possibly.
 
I'm sorry, i actually meant -5 or -6. I have worked with it lower, but find it more pleasing crushing it in post. -6 I have found to be the first setting for a true black. Sorry for the confusion.

Gaffers tape is definitly a great idea, don't know why I didn't try it yet. Thanks for the tip.
 
Well, it turns out my previous thoughts were wrong, as far as slower lenses. Witht the detail levels up, and the detail coring all the way up, higher Fstops are completely acceptable, as shown as well by Envisions footage.
I feel much better after doing these tests, even though I now see that they were already done for me :) but I'm more and more impressed by the footage that I can get with this adapter.
 
I'm sorry scharky if you may have already answered this, but what lense have you been using for your testing? I like your colors in the first wmv files, great job!
 
No problem. on the first one I used to F2.0 nikkor lenses, 28mm and an 85mm. Hope this helps.

Coffee, really FCP doesn't have any kind of sharpening filter? That seems rather odd to me.
 
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