The way the M2 adapter gets around this is by actually opening up a 35mm lens on a piece of spinning glass which is attached to your video camera. Because the spinning glass is exactly as far away from the lens as a piece of 35mm film would be in an actual film camera, the video camera records that image at the actual size that the lens is suppose to expose a frame of 35mm film at. This allows you to record the softness and depth of field of film with the M2 adapter and your SD, HD, or HDV camera.
When the glass circle is not spinning, you will you will notice that the glass has a certain texture to it and that it is not quite transparent. That comes from a special type of texture treatment that is done to the glass to allow you to see the image through it. On clear glass, the light from the lens would just pass through and you would not be able to see the picture coming from the lens. The spinning was added because if you were to use just the texturized glass without it spinning, you would have grain issues that you can’t get rid of. The circular glass spins fast enough for the individual grains in the glass to no longer be visible, so that the camera captures exactly what the lens on the front sees. (For the more technical, it’s sort of like having a telecine mounted to the front of your camera.)
While the technology is comparatively simple, the tough part was making the adapter precise enough to get a quality result every time, considering all the specs on all the available lenses and the wide variety of cameras that are available to filmmakers today.
Ease of Use
When you put the M2 adapter on your camera you suddenly are not using a video camera any more. You are now shooting with a film camera that just happens to be capturing to videotape (or P2 card, depending on your camera). DV cameras have been designed to help you shoot anything quickly and easily. The M2 adapter brings back the art of thinking through how you want to use the camera to tell a story. Do you want to use a wide-angle lens and shoot close with less depth of field or do you want to use a long lens and shoot from farther away? How much can I use the aperture to affect the depth of field? For dramatic feature production stopping to think about these things is very important. If you are shooting documentary or reality based production where the action happens fast then using the M2 might not be the right tool for the job.
Setting up the M2 is not the easiest thing to do. You will need to take some time to go over the manual and make sure you get all the adjustments just right. The adapter is mounted on the camera through a rod system similar to the ones used on film cameras. The rods allow you to add the adapter to the front of your lens and then adjust it to make sure the image is centered and focused to work properly on the camera that you will be using. The first time I did this I was a little intimidated by the process. I wanted to be able to just lock and load the adapter on and start shooting. After having the adapter on and off my camera for a week it really wasn’t that big a deal. The settings are the same every time and I just had to go through the steps of adjusting the zoom and focus and rod placements. Honestly, after a couple of days with it, I was pretty sure my initial reaction was just my withdrawal from having been doing so much point and shoot reality/documentary stuff over the last few years.
