Smallest moving GG solution yet???

Dennis Wood

Dennis Wood

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Well, as promised, here's a sneak peak at the Guskers35 "2nd gen". I finally got some composite material I was waiting for and was able to get a prototype running nicely. It's obviously not a spinner, but an oscillator. As far as the movement, all I will say is that it doesn't use hypo needles, rubber bushings...or a mechanical movement. Other than the motor, there are no wear parts. There is no macro or condenser element required. The diffuser is engineered...not mechanically ground.

Light loss is from 0 to 1 f/stop. This puts it on par with MPIC.

That's a 50mm lens beside it as a size reference. Size is 3.75 inches long, 2.75 inches long. Weight is .... really light. I haven't finished internalizing the electronics, but NiMh batteries are being used, with a 30 hour run time. The final version will be a bit thicker as it will use carbon fibre tubing. It will also have adjustable back and front focus distance. All popular manual lens types will be supported. The flange is modular, meaning it can be unscrewed, and different mount affixed, and flange-GG distance adjusted.

The flip module will be available seperately. Right now, it's looking like $400 for the adapter, likely $250 for the flip module. The flip module will be usable with any other adapter too. Price may come down if there's enough interest as I'll be able to volume order some of the components. CNC machine costs for some of the parts may come down too.
 
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Looks nice -- my hat's off to you!

I'm interested in learning more about the flip module...
 
It looks awesome.

Popular = Nikon, Canon, and Minolta? And will the adapter ship with the mounts for these, or will it ship with one and then we have to buy the mount and swap it out?

How will the flip module affect light loss?
 
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Virium, et al. The flip module will theoretically soak up about .1 of an F/stop. The CNC work is taking some time to coordinate...but so far so good. The Nikon, Canon, Minolta etc. mounts will be spec'd on ordering. Less poplular ones will just add about 10 days on to the order time, as I won't stock these. You could also purchase addition mounts after the fact too. They just screw on.
 
Initial tests on the prototype show no grain at 1/60s until the 50mm F1.4 reached F8! Normally you wouldn't be doing this if you have an adapter affixed for shallow DOF, but it's nice to have that flexibility.

For outside work I kind of liked the -2 f/stops of my spinner. This adapter will definitely require an ND filter or two on the prime.
 
Bena, bravo for asking...sometimes I wonder if aesthetics are more important than footage...ha. I'll be posting some clips shortly. I've done many hours of tweaking to the design after some high shutter (1/2000s)/prime at F8 testing to evaluate GG movement. I'm happy with it now, so we'll see how it does with my shooting "torture" test. Some of the testing was to see if I could shrink the length a bit, but 3.75" is the practical limit.
 
Sorry for the dum question. It says GS400 on your website. I've seen the footage of the that man smoking. It has a weird glow...
 
All of footage will be GS400, 16:9 in pro-cinema mode...basically 30F. The wierd glow footage was taken on the "1st Gen" which was a spinner. That particular clip was taken with a low diffusion (ie. lots of aerial pass thru) disc which had only 1/fstop of light loss ... but inadequate diffusion. You haven't seen footage from this adapter yet as nothing has been posted. I did about an hour of test shooting under different conditions last night, so I'm very confident this one's a keeper.

Interestingly, the cam recorded near 0 adapter noise, a surpise to me. In the outside footage, birds are chirping, branches rustling, and there's very little to indicate the adapter is even there..other than the footage.
 
Guskers, I'd be interested in seeing a very large sample of your adapter footage, just compressed with the DV codec. I could provide you with FTP address over PM for you to upload it to my server; I'd also make it here for a while for people to look at it.
 
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