Whats Red and Eats Rocks

[Richard Payne]

Have you guys seen this http://www.redrockmicro.com/ it appears to give Z1 owners the ability to use a variety of different lenses. What do you think?

[nash]

Richard,
It looks very interesting. Have you seen any results from it being used? At $850 US it seems reasonably priced considering the potential.

..................Neil

[Alan Roberts]

Z1? Surely that camera has a fixed lens unless Matteo's got at it. It loooks to me like this is a copy of the P&S adaptor for 2"/3 cameras, a good idea but not relevant unless you can take the lens off the camera.

[The-Video-Company.co.uk]

From the looks of it, this is a variant on the P&S adaptor. Who actually have a similar model available for purchase as well.

[Richard Payne]

Richard,
It looks very interesting. Have you seen any results from it being used? At $850 US it seems reasonably priced considering the potential.

..................Neil

There is a QT HDV file on the site which I downloaded. There are also high res stills.

http://www.redrockmicro.com/samples.html

I got the impression that you don't need to take a hack saw to the camera - but I might be wrong.

http://www.redrockmicro.com/micro35_hd.htm

Update: Infact the shots on the site do show it attached to the original camera lens. This would also be backed up by the image being upsidedown which is mentioned in a press release about a new version of CineForm (3.2) which gives the option to flip it back.

[Richard Payne]

Solving the Depth-of-Field Challenge with 35mm Lenses
What can be done to give the filmmaker the freedom of shooting their movie on their 1/3" CCD camera AND take advantage of the short Dept of Field they so desperately need? One of the most popular solutions is to use a lens made for a 35mm camera (motion picture or still) and project the image onto a ground glass. The image is then captured by the video camera's lens and recorded. This combination results in the selective focus usually only available on 35mm film and the cost effectiveness of shooting on video.

The new crop of relatively inexpensive HD and HDV cameras suffer from the same long DOF as their SD counterparts because of their relatively small CCDs. However, the "35mm image projected onto the ground glass" solution works for them as well.

An Unexpected Additional Benefit

The images created in this way are a bit softer than images captured directly the camera's lens. Many filmmakers find this to be beneficial because it saves them from having to add a pro mist or other diffusion filter to eliminate the "video edge" that is associated with many electronically captured images.

[Alan Roberts]

So that's an admission that some users are deliberately softening the picture, surely a strange thing to do after spending all that money to get sharp pictures. The P&S adaptor gives sharper pictures than any HD lens can on a 2"/3 camera simply because you're using 35mm movie lenses, like Zeiss Digiprimes with their disc-of-confusion of 4microns (2"/3 cameras have pixels at 5 micron spacing, so these lenses actually produce spatial aliasing, a thing that can't be got rid of in post).

[DV_Ed]

I have seen some pretty amazing footage captured on the XL1s with the P&S adapter (in my own eyes at least). Its a workaround at the end of the day, and in this world of what should and shouldnt be done, I think these are a pretty good idea.