Monthly Archives: June 2012

Converting a Bolex Yvar 36mm lens to Cmount

 

I know what you’re thinking.. why going through all this mess when this lens is not that fast. Thing is I own a 75mm Yvar AR and I love it to bits. It’s  sharp even wide open, contrasty and it’s got beautiful colors. And it’s a vintage 50 years old lens that can still produce stunning images on the cropped sensor DSLRs.

The Bolex camera was made in 8mm and 16mm versions. It’s a precision Swiss design and a variety of lenses were made in different formats from Kern Paillard themselves, along with Canon, Schneider, Cooke, C to name but a few . The Kern’s one are A grade stuff and perhaps they are so sharp because 16mm film has to resolve more details to look decent once projected.

How I did “COSA RESTA” pt 2

 

This pt2 will concentrate more on the post production side of things. As usual there was bucket loads of it and it took a very long time to get things done.

Rendering times were bloody huge. This is due to the output resolution I chose and the processing power of my computer, a quad core 3ghz. When you’re rendering stuff out, unless you’re into 3D, all it matters at the end of the day it’s the engine running under the bonnet. I wish I had a 8 or 16 core Xeon based system but that was no option for now so I had to stick to my limited system.

How I did “COSA RESTA” pt1

Hi all, it’s been a while since I last wrote something. Fact is I’ve been dead busy with lots of projects lately and I did not have a proper chance to sit down and write on this blog.

Well, here I am at last! This post would have been too long to make it into one so I rather have it split in 2 sections, in the first one I will explain how I shot it and in the second part I will explain post production into details.

First you might enjoy having a look at the final version of the video

 

 

You might as well wonder why this version bears the “Director’s cut” label. In fact there was a first version of the video I edited strictly edited following the client’s directions but in the end he liked my version better.

All right, now let’s talk technical here. I shot this music video using both an anamorphic adapter and spherical lenses. I would have gone all the way anamorphic but in some instances we were in a real rush and we were mostly shooting exteriors so spherical is a lot faster. It would have been perfectly doable if I had the chance to grab some Hawks or Primos but I guess this was way out of the budget.. so the sought after anamorphic look it had to be all on an adapter: KOWA 16D.