The quest of the microfilmmaker is to make a movie that looks as good as the best films put out by big studios or the independent producers with deep pockets. Over the last 15 years video technology has narrowed the gap of the kind of quality picture you can capture on a low budget. In the last two years HDV has entered the market making it reasonable for low budget productions tell their story in the HDTV format. Still, most of the cameras that use fixed lenses or lenses that provided a good video picture don’t provide that “film” look that you are looking for. There have been many post-production plug-ins which have helped bridge the gap in many areas. Still, for things like depth-of-field, the only way to get the real deal is to capture the look in production.
Having the right lenses to tell your story is a must if you want the film look. Until Red Rock Micro introduced the M2 Cinema Lens Adapter the only way to use the same lenses used in feature film production was really the P+S Technik Mini35, which cost $10,000 before even putting on a lens. My first look at the M2 was at NAB 2006. I was impressed that an adapter so small and priced to buy would allow me to get the depth of field and the look that has always been a problem to get on DV and HDV cameras. The idea of being able to change lenses to get the look I wanted is a dream come true.
Red Rock Micro realized that there was a growing need for tools to help filmmakers with talent and no money make their films better. The concept for the M2 adapter is really simple: take the picture from a 35mm lens and allow your camera to record that image as it was intended to come out of the lens. However, you can’t just create a fitting that adapts a 35mm lens to a DV or HDV camera, as that doesn’t give you a film-like depth of field…it just magnifies the 35mm lens about 4x and turns your camera rig into an unwieldy blunderbuss.
To understand why this is so, let’s take a moment and examine one of the two most important things about film: organic softness and depth of field. Organic softness is the way film allows the edges of objects and people to be visible, without being harsh and crystal-clear. (I often refer to harshly clear edges as looking like ‘news footage’.) Depth-of-field refers to the characteristic of film to only allow a small portion of a shot to be in focus. Depending on the type of film lenses used and the aperture setting chosen, this area of focus can range from a few inches to a few dozen feet (to infinity if you’re Alfred Hitchcock, but he would’ve been the first one to go to a standalone HDV camera if they had been available, because he hated the look of film while using film!) To give you an idea of how different the depth of field on a 35mm camera is in comparison to a DV or HDV camera, I’ll give you an example. If you were to put the same lens on a 35mm camera and on the Canon H1, and lit everything the same way, you would see that a patch 12 inches in depth that’s in focus on the 35mm camera is a patch 12 feet in depth on the Canon H1!
To understand why this is, let’s look at what helps determine depth of field. Depth of field is determined by the overall surface area that is recording an image. The bigger the recording area, the shallower the depth of field you are capable of (and the more organically soft your image is). The smaller the recording area, the deeper the depth of the field is (and the more harshly edged your image is). The 1/3” chipset on all the micro-budget HDV and HD cameras is about 1/5th to 1/6th area recorded on a frame of 35mm film. While the ½”, 2/3”, and 1” CCDs on the cameras ranging from $20 K to $120K have more detail and control over the image as well as greater depth of field, because they are larger, they still look a lot more like video than film because of how much smaller even their chipset is than a frame of 35mm film.
