Re: Will the Lens adapter degrade the Film Out?

I'm not saying focus will be off, because what u see on your monitor is what you ARE seeing on a hd camera, (or dv for that matter)


What I'm saying is that if you have a lens, say a panavision (love their glass btw, if you want some fun go shoot some stills with their prime's it's amazingly crisp) that is supposed to be putting an image the size of a piece of 35mm film on an exact plane, and you are instead putting it onto a ground glass, and then translating that onto the film, you will then have image distortion. A good way to see this is grab the demo of Monet from Imagineersystems.com, it has a lens aberration calculation in it, that allows you to map out straight lines in a shot and see the distortion, makes for great compositing, and also shows you whats going on in your lens. Often times you end up with an odd bit of abberation on the edges and in the center of your image causing a slight warp. Now with the high end adapters, it's not there pretty much at all, but the lower end stuff you get this effect a lot more.

It's not really noticeable to the naked eye, and for the most part it's out of tv safe, and no one will ever see it, but I've seen it enough using good glass on say red rocks, and lower end 35 adapters, to know it's there.