Jdanstans Letus 35 footage / review

Jack Daniel Stanley

Jack Daniel Stanley

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Staff member
:smiley_do
Ok here's the clips 1st incase you don't want to read the review :)
Lens used was Nikon F1.4 50mm

I welcome your comments, but know that I was just seeing what my lens could do, not trying to make the best films ever.

:smiley_do :smiley_do :smiley_do :smiley_do:smiley_do :smiley_do :smiley_do :smiley_do :smiley_do :smiley_do :smiley_do
right click to download each please

NIGHT TEST - 2:54
I took it out at night using just street lanps in the French Quarter. Any perceivable noise is from when I shot in just no light at all I think and that's from the DVX. So judge the noise by the better lit places which is still pretty low light.
http://frenchquarterfeatures.com/letus35test/Letus35NightTest.mov
There's what I call a kareoke video beauty shot of a firehydrant that makes me laugh in this one.
The music is the Tiger Lilies:
http://www.tigerlillies.com/2003/index.php

DAY TEST - 1:48
This was the third test and my camera settings had evolved to shooting with the Detail and V Detail levels at full and detail coring way up and Normal Gamma Matrix.
Detail level high to maximize sharpness with all that glass infront of the lense, coring high to reduce any noise and Normal to reduce noise as well.
http://frenchquarterfeatures.com/letus35test/letus35Day.mov
The music is Mr. Bungle (Faith No More's art band)
http://www.bunglefever.com/

INSIDE LOW LIGHT - 00:41
The crappiest footage. My apartmet is sooooo dark and you know why that can be a prob with these. There's some wierd noise in the blacks due to compression.
http://frenchquarterfeatures.com/letus35test/letus35LowLightInterior.mov
music is Starlight Mints
http://starlightmints.com/


:smiley_do
REVIEW
-----------------
Seems pretty low noise to me.

I Love the look.


MY ADAPTOR: You can get the basic for like $300 and you can accessorize it/upgrade up to $550 I think -- I got the tricked out which gave me black anodized finish (add $100) I think, metal mounts for dust proofing, and a better achromat -- the only diff in the image between mine and the basic would be the acromat which adds something like $25 or $50 to the price.

QUALITY: Ok this thing is built like a brick poo poohouse. It's pretty solid. But in order to get this thing out at this price point NOW when other 35mm adaptors only tease us, have month lead in times and cost much more, there are of course trade offs:
  1. It aint pretty.
  2. the battery casing is flimsy and on the outside of the unit held on with velcro. No big deal, but I am concerned about the wires shorting out from bending or dangling. I put another peice of velcro on my Nikon 50mm lens cap so I can attach the battery there so I can better grasp the barrel of the adaptor while screwing it on.
  3. Parts may not all be standardized. So while I get the impression that they will always be snug and work from talking to a few other owners, your adptors metal mount ends may be in so firmly that they cannot be removed by hand (in order to align the enternal rectangular element with your lens) and your buddies metal mounts may be very snug while he's able to pull them out with just a little effort by attaching the camera to the DVX and pulling the barrel of the Letus off the mount.
  4. No caps for either end of the adaptor or case - no biggy these things are cheap

But again the image seems great to me for the price -- you guys can see for yourself though. You just have to think of it as a sturdy (ugly) piece of plumbing that will get a quality shallow depth of field image to your camera. It's all function.

I don't know a lot about achromats or what makes one of these things great. I'm not dissing the other adaptors out there. I would just rather have something less slick that, for me at least, gets the job done NOW. At this price point I couldn't be happier.

CUSTOMER SERVICE: is maybe the best part of the adaptor. Quyen gives a prompt email response and this compensates for any irregularities that may arrize due to his low overhead. Specifically, when I got my adaptor and screwed it on, the rectangular element inside that you are supposed to zoom through to avoid vignetting was out of alignment. In otherwords it's orientation was more of a lopsided diamond that rectangle. Now the expensive ones may have an easy fix for this but the method to re-align with the letus is to screw the letus onto the camera, pull the housing off of the camera end mount, align, push the housing back on and you are good to go. You can do the same thing on the front end so that the focus tick marks of your lens wind of being on top when you screw it on. This adjustment is necessary because you are putting a rectangle on a screw mount and the rectangle has to go one way. While my adaptor was tested on 3 DVXes before leaving the shop there is no way to gaurantee that the threads will line up right on your DVX. The only problem was that I could not get the metal mounts out. The particular mounts were just too tight on the particular body I had. But Queyen and I had a chat session wherein he guided me through trying several means to remove the housing with what I had at hand. In the end I wound up hitting the end of a screw driver to dislodge it (after unscrewing it from my DVX). If it was as pretty as the G35 I would have been concerned , but its not so I hammered away. So there was a small snag with mine but Quyen was very resourceful and attentive in resolving it. I think this kind of glitch might be likely at this price point, but the dude that makes these things will make it right for you. This may be the trade off for getting it in a couple of days vs. 4 months, but again to me, for the price and Quyen's customer service it is worth it and I am very happy:laugh:
 
Good write up Jack!
I did my tests finally today and it looked pretty good as well, I'll post a link in a minute after I upload it.

Quyen is really good at his services.
 
Jack, i thought i saw a tad of vignetting....Did you notice any? Otherwise I'm pretty much frickin sold on this thing.

EDIT: During the Day clips I saw the vignetting alot more.
 
there shouldn't be any if you have it properly aligned and are zoomed in correctly which I don't think I was on the daylight test, so you could see a corner of the element inside but I don't think any should be visible as I cropped it .... I'll take a quick look at the uncompressed footage again just to make sure though.
 
I think that's just the compression dealing with dark out of focus corners look when there is something bright in the corner and ther seems to be nothing there.

Also when you blow up the vid to full screen the vignetting jumps around like compression.
 
It look very good! I agree there are some kind of vignetting in the corners but I like the footage. It doesn't look videoish to me.
 
Jack:

1. How much did you pay exactly?
2. Did it come w/ the Nikon lense, or did you get it yourself? If so, where did you get it?
3. How long did it take to arrive?
4. Do you like cottage cheese and eggs?

EDIT: Here are a few more:

5. How much light do you lose?
6. Would you need rails if you were going to use a mattebox (like maybe the formatt 500)
7. How did you remedy the upside down image problem? Did you use the magnet on the side of the lcd trick?
8. How hard is it to get used to focusing this thing.
 
ronik
I have a ton of crap to do tonight but I will try to post some full rez stiills tomorrow so we can identify that vignetting as compression or not -- oh hell I will probably do it tonight as a form of procrastination from what I should really be working on.

Slimo
1) I got every feature offered and two day shipping for $550. You can get one that would be optically identical to mine for #350 I think. But it will look like you have torn the label off a can of peas and stuck the tin can on your camera, lol. Which is kind of cool and funny at the same time. Cool cuz you are getting your film made withing your budget and funny because it looks like you have a can on your camera.
2) Nikon lens purchased seperatley. Used f1.4 reguularly 240ish, I got mine used for 160 ish. You can get an f1.8 brand new for $100ish, every stop counts because the adaptor causes your to loose a stop and then whatever lens you use causes you to loose whatever its lowest stop is, once you go to f 1.2 they start at $400. So the extra stop for the used nikon was worth the extra $70 bucks over the new 1.8 to me.
3). I ordered late night monday and i had it thursday
4) can't stand cottage cheeze -- blech -- like eggs especially with hot sauce -- if you are asking about cottage cheese and eggs mixed together then double blech.
 
Jack, I'm jealous that you've been testing yours out so much. I'm ESPECIALLY jealous because you had the foresight to CRANK your detailing up, something I'm wondering if we SHOULD have done. Oh well, too late now as we've already shot 85% of our Sci-Fi short film over the weekend.

For anyone who's still interested in the Letus35, when Ryan was over at Quyen's last week (getting a lens cleaned on the Letus35 - there was a slight smudge on the inside of the glass), Quyen's working on a SLIGHTLY longer version, which will completely cure any barrel distortion, as well as a more expensive version (at least $150 more, reportedly) that will also be larger as it will house four tiny mirrors that will bounce & flip the image right side up. How it'll look, I don't know, but I'm darn curious to see the result.

For our short, I bought a toy magnet set from Walmart for $4.88, and ripped out four magnets for our LCD's (1 magnet per LCD with a back up magnet incase we lost one). It worked well, and anytime we needed to see some camera info, we just slipped the magnet out for a moment.

I'll be uploading the footage tonight of what we've shot ... saw a few clips over at Ryan's as we were uploading there (he's on Mac, I'm on Vegas, so we'll each do our own seperate rough cut & compare to see which direction/platform we'll go with), and was really happy with what I saw.

Again, though, I think Jack's onto something with cranking up the detail like that. Smart move.
 
Envision said:
Jack, I'm jealous that you've been testing yours out so much. I'm ESPECIALLY jealous because you had the foresight to CRANK your detailing up, something I'm wondering if we SHOULD have done. Oh well, too late now as we've already shot 85% of our Sci-Fi short film over the weekend.

For anyone who's still interested in the Letus35, when Ryan was over at Quyen's last week (getting a lens cleaned on the Letus35 - there was a slight smudge on the inside of the glass), Quyen's working on a SLIGHTLY longer version, which will completely cure any barrel distortion, as well as a more expensive version (at least $150 more, reportedly) that will also be larger as it will house four tiny mirrors that will bounce & flip the image right side up. How it'll look, I don't know, but I'm darn curious to see the result.

For our short, I bought a toy magnet set from Walmart for $4.88, and ripped out four magnets for our LCD's (1 magnet per LCD with a back up magnet incase we lost one). It worked well, and anytime we needed to see some camera info, we just slipped the magnet out for a moment.

I'll be uploading the footage tonight of what we've shot ... saw a few clips over at Ryan's as we were uploading there (he's on Mac, I'm on Vegas, so we'll each do our own seperate rough cut & compare to see which direction/platform we'll go with), and was really happy with what I saw.

Again, though, I think Jack's onto something with cranking up the detail like that. Smart move.
Click to expand...

Awesome I can't wait to see the footage.
 
hey guys trying to download, JACK,TIM,I'm meeting CURTIS HARRINGTON tomorrow morning (director for a short film next week)
 
Thanks for the in-depth sharing, Jack! Solid stuff there both image and word...

I am left wondering if your woman is an active participant or you torture her?

Mr Bungle is good stuff!
 
Ok here's some sleuthing into vignetting. THese are crap grabs as nothing is in focus but you can see the edges --

first off the problem -- I just didn't have the adaptor on right and it was adjusted wrong -- you can actually see it here -- when I adjusted the rectangular element inside it was slightly angled when the body was fully tightened, so I just rolled the body back a hair - so obviously I want to calibrate it so that its perfectly aligned when fully tightened.
letus35Day.jpg


Here you can see its just right -- see the left upper corner of blown out sky is all clear. The black line at the top is from inaccurately cropping letterbox off for the web and the balck line on the right is part of the gate.
letus35Day2.jpg



So vignetting shouldn't be a problem when properly aligned, and proper alignment shouldn't be a problem if you take the time to set it right the first time - so its not like the anamorephic where once you have it on you have to keep readjusting.

EDIT: I think maybe I wasn't zoomed in properly on #1 also because that's way into the fram since I letterboxed.
 
the-lyons-den.com said:
Thanks for the in-depth sharing, Jack! Solid stuff there both image and word...

I am left wondering if your woman is an active participant or you torture her?

Mr Bungle is good stuff!
Click to expand...
lol, Megan doesn't mind being filmed as long as she doesn't have to act, she will help with scheduling as a last resort, but she would rather eat anthrax dipped razor blades than help or spend anytime on set because it's "soooooooooo booooorrrrinng!"

It's all good though cuz she is going to let me buy an HVX even though I have no job and no prospects post Katrina. She also helps organize the gear and brings me food and generally takes care of the rest of my life when editing or filming.

Oh and each of these were filmed during the course of a normal dog walk so no skin off her back.
 
jdanstan said:
Ok here's some sleuthing into vignetting. THese are crap grabs as nothing is in focus but you can see the edges --

first off the problem -- I just didn't have the adaptor on right and it was adjusted wrong -- you can actually see it here -- when I adjusted the rectangular element inside it was slightly angled when the body was fully tightened, so I just rolled the body back a hair - so obviously I want to calibrate it so that its perfectly aligned when fully tightened.
letus35Day.tif


Here you can see its just right -- see the left upper corner of blown out sky is all clear. The black line at the top is from inaccurately cropping letterbox off for the web and the balck line on the right is part of the gate.
letus35Day2.tif



So vignetting shouldn't be a problem when properly aligned, and proper alignment shouldn't be a problem if you take the time to set it right the first time - so its not like the anamorephic where once you have it on you have to keep readjusting.

EDIT: I think maybe I wasn't zoomed in properly on #1 also because that's way into the fram since I letterboxed.
Click to expand...


I'm not seeing any pics Jack. Are these suppose to be referring to some pics?
 
ok Tim look now

now they are jpegs

before they were tiffs which can encode their byte order for Mac or IBM compatibility so that can cause probs sometimes, but you should be able to see them in the original post now --- lemme no
 
yeah, good stuff. I like it alot. yeah usually if you zoom inenough, you will not get hardly any vignetting , and especially if you crop in post. For me though vignetting and a little grain never bothered me at all....

Function over form :)
 
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