I have a low-middle range 3 ccd camera that happens to have a 43mm lens thread. My question is: Does it make sense to use a anamophic lens if I have to use a step-up ring? I.E. Will it do anything or just shoot in a funky place between 4:3 and 16:9? And if it does shoot somewhere inbetween would it still be worth it to shoot it like that and then crop the image down to 16:9 in post production?
Thank you for reading this,
Allen
All an anamorphic lens does is compress the image. It's gonna give you twice as much picture (assuming it's a 2x anamorph) as you would usually get, but in the same horizontal space. Everything will look thinner. The only way to use the image, unless you're doing something "arty", is to spread it 2x when it's viewed. I'm a film guy, so I don't know anything about that process, but if you can't respread the image, then there's no point in using the lens.
Remember also that if the anamorph moves even a little bit out of square with your lens that all vertical lines will start to tilt.
Your aspect ratio will be whatever your normal ratio will be, but the horizontal line will be multiplied by two. If your camera usually shoots in 16x9, then anamorph will make it 32 x 9. Usually 4x3, then it'll be 8x3. That's wider than widescreen anamorphic format... but formats are meant to be broken.
"On a good gate, that's a wrap."
"On a good gate, that's a wrap."
I haven't tried it, but it should work with the step-up ring: the lens just squashes the incoming image by 25%, so no matter what size the final lens on the camera may be it should still be squashed by the appropriate amount. All you need to do then is turn on the 16:9 flag in your edit, and you can output an anamorphic 16:9 DV master.
