SLR Magic’s affordable anamorphic lenses – first footage

This video makes me feel hesitant about shooting on a Panasonic GH2, but the lens looks exciting.
SLR magic is a lens manufactured based in Hong Kong and their affordable Noktor primes that all have an aperture of F/0.95 are very successful among HDSLR shooters.

As announced in September the company decided to start designing anamorphic lenses which can improve the image quality on widescreen formats. The anamorphic prototype as presented in the video above will squeeze a cinemscope image with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 into your HD camera’s 16:9 image. Apparently the lens will have an MFT mount and go well with a Blackmagic Cinema Camera MFT.

About pricing Andrew says:
Pricing of this lens will be accessible as are SLR Magic’s other high end lenses. Pricing hasn’t ema5d.com/news/?p=12879″ target=”_blank”>announced in September been set yet so I cannot specifics on that other than to say “don’t worry”. The best anamorphic offerings on eBay like the Iscorama 36 and LOMO round-fronts are fetching between $3000 and $7000 now and this lens is not at all close to that price range thankfully.

They ask for feedback as they are still in the design stage and would like to know what you want to see implemented in the lens.

NOKTOR website: LINK

via EOSHD

NAB 2011 – Phantom has an indie product in the cooker

By: Sebastian Wöber

We’ve seen companies Megaspeed and Fastec target the indipendent filmmakers market with their new and rental-affordable highspeed cameras. But I got some very interesting hints on future products from renown highspeed camera company Vision Research (Phantom) today.

Vision Research (Phantom) really sets the standards in professional highspeed filmmaking. If you shoot highspeed for a tv commercial or movie you wanna make sure you get a Phantom. They’re very expensive cameras and you can usually only rent a package with a technician (but that depends on your rental house). One of the big advantages of the Megaspeed and Fastec portable highspeed cameras over a phantom is that you don’t necessarily need a technician but can simply take these cameras out on your own.

I met Phiroze Dalal at the Phantom booth today. We talked about highspeed cameras for indie filmmakers (=affordable, non technician) and I kept asking about Phantoms future and the indie market. Phiroze said that they wouldn’t announce their products prior to release. He then checked with another important Vision Research rep and came back to tell me that: “This will be a very exciting year for you, (…) we have something in the cooker”. He didn’t want to say that on camera nor did he give me a timeframe for the “egg”. I said I’d be back at IBC in September, which is another large tradeshow like NAB, and asked if we could expect to see something at this time. They really didn’t want to go into that stuff. He said the next months would be cruical and that he can’t say any more than that, but added that when they see a market (and obviously in hdslr there IS a market now) they wanna be part of it.

Very promising hints, I think we’ll see the highspeed battles evolve in the coming months. If you’re interested in that topic as much as I am you’ll get any new info I have right here at cinema5D. Cheers.

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NAB 2011 -Yet another affordable highspeed camera we can’t afford

By: Sebastian Wöber

I reported about the Megaspeed (wow I love that name) camera yesterday. But look: here’s another portable highspeed camera. The TS3Cine costs twice as much as the Megaspeed, that’s $30k. That’s not really my priceclass, but it still might be a bargain in rental since you don’t need a technician to operate it unlike it’s aunt the phantom.
If you’re into good design and marketing I’m sure this camera seems more appealing to you than the Megaspeed, but we’ll really have to wait and see what both of them have under the hood and whether this one is worth the additional 14k.

I found this very nice demo they put together and I noticed they also had some people that waved hdslrs around. I think I’m their target audience, drool…

I must say, if I had the funds I’d probably be sold just for the editing and choice of music they did on this one. Great job to whoever did that. If you care about the music, that was: The XX

Some of the specs on the cam itself:
- 1280 x 1024 pixel maximum
- 500 fps at 1280 x 1024, 720 fps at 720p resolution
- optional frame rates up to 20,000 at reduced resolutions
- BMP, TIFF, Cinema DNG (RAW), JPG, AVI
- C-Mount or F-Mount (Nikon), optional PL mount

I think I overheard him saying it’s a 1 inch sensor, but I’m not sure. Comes out late summer.

http://ts3cine.com/

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