MINI-MORPHIC

Behind the scenes with the Silicon Imaging camera on Celestial Avenue

Shooting Anamorphic with the SI-2K

HOMEMADE ANAMORPHIC...
Anamorphic lenses have been around for a while but its not always possible to use 35mm format anamorphic lenses.
Celestial Avenue is a short lm and was always going to be signicant as one of the last short lms to be funded by Screen Australia, who have decided to no longer fund short lms. Cath is looking for love. Shes even prepared to try online dating and is on her rst date with Joel. Always the culinary adventurer, shes chosen an authentic chinese restaurant but all Joels interested in, is the spingies and some chicken with sweetcorn with special fried rice. Its not really going well for Cath when she hears a siren song and is drawn to a beautiful singing voice in the rear lane. Here she meets Ah Gong, who doesnt speak english and is busy washing cabbages for Chef Wong. Caths in love. She returns the next day and sets about wooing the shy Ah Gong, eventually learning how to speak cantonese and working in the restaurant. Joel is still keen on Cath and returns for a last attempt to impress Cath with his knowledge of the orient. Written and directed by brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, we had 5 days to shoot 18 pages. The boys were also interested in shooting anamorphic; not so much for the wider aspect ratio, but more for the anamorphic look. Anamorphic lenses do have their very own personality thats really hard to replicate. I think of them as being awed but in a kind of beautiful way. Anamorphic lenses usually work by applying a 2x horizontal squeeze to optically compress more information onto the lm or sensor. When the project was initially submitted to Screen Australia, a RED camera kit had been penciled into the line under camera hire. However, once the boys started talking about their love of anamorphic, I had to start thinking of other ways to achieve this. Although from Version 18, RED has software support for anamorphic lenses, the cameras sensor is still not full height so a signicant cutout is required, cropping a great deal of

The Anamorphic Adaptor Orginally designed to fit on the Panasonic DVX 100.

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FRAMEGRAB CHEF WONG ( JIN YI )

Im really interested in exploring alternatives to the usual ways of creating images.

the anamorphic image is traditional 35mm Anamorphic lenses are used. Firstly I started thinking that 35mm anamorphic would be the simplest. At rst I even fantasised about a traditional anamorphic non DI nish. Apparently this isnt possible any more. Cinevex (now Deluxe) have mothballed their lm grading equipment. So now its DI or bust. Shooting 35mm Anamorphic with a 2K DI was going to end up costing an additional 7K including post (on top of the original 150K total budget). Not too big a premium I felt. However, the budget had been under pressure from other areas and there wasnt anyway to nd that additional cash. Instead I began to look for other digital cameras. Of course there ARE full height sensor cameras. The Sony F35 and the Arri D21 were considered and rejected, mainly because of cost. Amazingly, they were actually going to cost MORE than shooting 35mm lm shooting 15:1 ! Im really interested in exploring alternatives to the usual ways of creating images. Too often with digitally originated images, I nd they have a sameness about them. Different lm stocks have personalities and you can ash or fog them, push them, pull them, cross process them, or even leave them in the sun. All these techniques may not be the most correct thing to do from a technical and engineering point of view but it does give DOP another way of manipulating the image. Hard drives and video tape cant be manipulated in this way. Its either there or it isnt. If you mess around with the bytes, it just means youll have no image ! So when shooting Digital, Im always looking to nd ways to push things outside of normal in the same way. Sometimes of course straight or normal is what you want, but innovation comes from trying things out and its remarkably hard to get away from the base look with a lot of digital cameras. One camera I hadnt considered though was the SI2K. The Silicon Imaging camera has a 2/3 sensor so it wouldnt work with the 35mm format anamorphic lenses. Then I remembered that there WAS a 1.3x anamorphic adaptor that was made by Panasonic for the old DVX100 MiniDV cameras from a few years ago. It was originally introduced as a stop gap to create 16x9 Images from the 4x3 DVX100 sensor before they would later release true 16x9 CCDs for their Mini DV cameras. If I used 16mm format lenses with this adaptor shooting 2K it should work. I call it MiniMorphic !

DOP John Brawley with focus puller Josh Flavel

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TEST IMAGES

The SIs 2048x1080 DCI image would virtually become 2662x1080 with the 1.3x anamorphic adaptor. This turns out to be 2.46:1, not far at all from 35mm anamorphic ratio of 2.39:1. So now I could shoot using 16mm format Superspeeds and get a 2.46:1 optically anamorphic image from a 2048K RAW camera system. A pretty good compromise I felt. That was the theory but I needed to shoot some tests to nd out if it would work. Yes I could have probably done the same thing with a RED shooting 2K, but Ive always found the REDs 2k image to be vastly inferior than what it should be at 2K. I must admit I never got around to doing a 2K shootout with the RED and the SI2K. I could have also used a regular HD camera, but Id be back to a tape based and/or a NON-RAW workow and would lose off speed camera frame rates. P2 is still a little too compressed for my liking. There were a few problems though. The Panasonic anamorphic adaptor was only ever designed to screw into the lter thread of a DVX100 and is actually quite small. This meant it had to somehow be mechanically tted to the lenses I planned to use. The guys at Lemac, who currently are one of the few companies that actually carry the SI-2K camera, set about building me my anamorphic adaptor. I went for Superspeeds. I even considered for a while MK1 superspeeds, because of their small size and shot my rst tests with them. (see photos - left)

I ended up deciding to use MK3 Superspeeds because the size was still useable with the adaptor and had the added advantage that they had proper focus gears ! In a very short amount of time Lemac came up with a simple mechanical holder that allowed the adaptor to be mounted to a set of lightweight or production rails and centered on the lens. This way I could simply slide it up against the front of the primes. I set about testing the adaptor with a set of superspeeds. I found the 9.5, 12, 16 and the 25mm all worked ne as long as I shot a deeper stop than T2.8. anything wider open that and the picture just appeared to get soft and softer. The 50mm really struggled to hit innity. As the subject got closer it would start to come good. We found though that by taking the new homemade adaptor FURTHER away from the front lens we could get to Innity, I gather because the tighter angle of view meant less of the adaptor was being used. The 50mm would require a shroud to cover the gap between the front of the 50mm lens and the adaptor, which Lemac also promptly built for us ! Just as an extra layer of difculty, the minimum focus also seemed to change, unfortunately for the worse. Some shots required diopters to allow closer focusing. Talk about really stacking on the glass !!

early tests
Top: The first test footage, shot with a MK1 Zeiss. Middle Frame: MK3 Zeiss test frame just before shooting. Bottom: Louis Pulis in the midst of a steadicam shot

FRAMEGRAB KATH ( CATHERINE MOORE )

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FRAMEGRAB FALSE COLOUR MODE AND MENUS

In testing we also found that the minimum focus distances for each lens wasnt really holding focus to marked distance on the barrel. Not only that but the actual marked distances were out by an inconsistent amount. All of this mean that my very patient focus puller Josh Flavel would be having to pull focus from eye sharps done during the nal rehearsals. A big risk considering the monitoring was proving to be problematic. (He eventually worked out a formula that enables him ti use the barrel markings) It was getting close to shooting by this point. I still had a RED reserved as a backup, just in case and at some points it was tempting to just give up and fall back to what was safe and known. I wanted to persist though because the initial test images looked so promising and it seemed to be worth trying to make it work. The cameras monitoring options are both its strong and weakest points. Now used to such good monitoring with the RED, it was a bit hard to have to take a step backwards with the SI-2K. The SI-2K is essentially a windows computer that runs inside a camera body built by P+S. As such, it supported two monitors, one through the HDMI output and the other through VGA. There are limitations however. The VGA feed also displays all the camera status and functions as you navigate its very well thought-out and useful menus. Its resolution though tops out at 800x600. You can however do enlargements and crops within the frame to check focus. The HDMI monitor is only 720P. We did try converting it with a HDMI-->SDI adaptor but it didnt really look any better than the 800x600 VGA display AND you also then lost the onscreen menu status. Plus wed then end up with TWO on board monitors hanging off the camera. eeww Ick.

So we decided to stick with the single VGA based output and then got a VGA to composite converter to allow us to monitor using a video based monitor. There dont seem to be any readily available portable VGA or HDMI monitors designed for on board work. A bit of a shortcoming really when your camera is a computer and you want to use video monitors ! This is apparently changing with some monitors about to be released that support HDMI. Josh did a great job though. We ended up blocking and rehearsing. Once the actors were locked in he would take a few moments to check the marks using the enlarge function and eyeball the sharps off the monitor and mark up the disc. It worked OK in the end if a little slowly. We often would try to check the shots back after download just to really make sure they were sharp. There were very few surprises so we seemed to get through them all ok. The workow is similar in a way to RED and perhaps even a little easier. The camera records in its own version of RAW, which is actually in an AVI wrapped le. This means it opens in Windows Player and in Quicktime. Various LOOKs (LUTs) can be stored with the le but these are only metadata. Each look can be programmed in via the camera but I didn't really get much a chance to explore this. There is a free download that allows the AVIs to be played back within quicktime on even the lessor equipped macs with slower USB drives, albeit with a slight stutter. You can also do the same within Final Cut as well, making it very simple to ingest and start editing. There is another free little application that allows you to change the metadata basics like white point and matrix etc, assuming you plan to online and nish within FCP. Otherwise you can use IRIDAS speedgrade to do your nal colour grade natively (much like scratch for RED)

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The camera records direct to a hard drive and they use a customised caddy that slots into the back of the camera. We had two 60GB solid state drives and a 120Gb mechanical drive. They all performed without fail. In fact the camera didnt crash once in testing or through the weeks shoot. A pleasant surprise to me. A single 60Gb drive holds about 50 mins in CineForm RAW (compressed mode). With similar data rates to the RED, the camera records a compressed signal or just recently, it can even record 12 bit uncompressed straight to disk, providing you have a fast enough disk ! I would suggest anyone wanting to use the camera should insist on getting HD rushes processed from their data wrangler. It goes for any digital cameras like RED really, but given the relatively poor monitoring solutions that are currently available for this camera, its well worth looking at your pictures at full resolution. I didnt really have time for a direct comparison to RED, but the camera seemed very comparable in terms of dynamic range. It was perhaps a little noisier in the blacks. It does also operate a little bit differently in some regards. For example, it has a gain function in 3dB (1/2 stop) steps up to 12dB. You cant change the ASA, its locked into roughly 250 Tungsten or 320 Daylight. There are several great exposure tools built into the camera that make it easy to check exposure though. The histogram

shows you broadly where the bulk of your visual information is lying in terms of exposure. In the manual, they discuss the idea of exposing to the right a lot, meaning you open up to put the *meat* of your visual information as far over to the right of the histogram without clipping. Theres a lot of merit in this theory. By doing so you also reduce apparent noise later on in the grade. They also have a great false colour system thats similar to RED with one important advantage. The scale is right there on the right of the screen as well ! Areas of clipping turn red, near clipping yellow through to orange, green for middle tones and greys to blues for underexposure. Psychedelic baby ! Its a really quick way to see whats going on and I used it a lot. The Directors ended up calling it the Kenny Everett check. Ambitiously, the boys wanted a single shot that followed a plate with the unusual house meal, startled pigeon as it went from Chef Wong in the kitchen to the table that ordered it. The actual startled pigeon was a built prop and looked like it had come straight from a cronenberg lm. This shot required building a custom rig that would attach to steadicam operator Louis Pulis sled. It held the plate complete with startled pigeon so that has he moved the camera from the kitchen tot he table on its journey, it would stay in place relative to the frame. (see photos)

BEHIND THE SCENES

Above: Focus Puller Josh Flavel lines up on Ah Gong (Angus Samson). Below: Louis Pulis getting hungry between takes, Note the rig to hold the startled pigeon prop.

FRAMEGRAB JOEL ( JASON GANN )

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FRAMEGRAB MADAME WONG ( GABRIELLE CHAN )

The pictures were remarkably good and had a kind of softness that was very attering and very un-digital like.
One remarkable feature of the camera, is the ability to take the actual sensor block out of the camera body. All of a sudden the lens is bigger than the camera ! The head can record back into the camera via an ethernet cable or even straight into a conventional laptop. There are huge advantages to this. The camera all of a sudden becomes very compact. I initially wasnt planning to use this feature, but Ah Gongs room was very tiny and using this striped down and simplied version of the camera proved very handy shooting in the cramped space. You do of course lose all the camera functions which are now driven remotely. But it will certainly enable some interesting shots. It was a lot of pain to go through to get the camera to actually shoot anamorphic. Its was perhaps a bit of a risk. A camera that I hadnt used and was pretty much unused in the country. A cheapo plastic anamorphic adaptor built 5 years ago for a mini DV camera that would throw out all the focus marks on the lenses making it even harder to keep sharp ! I had to have a very understanding Producer and scott alexander was very supportive. Every time thought I started to doubt, i just had to look at the desqueezed graded footage and feel good again. The pictures were remarkably good, and had a kind of softness that was very attering and very un-digital like. It made dealing with all the logistical challenges more than worthwhile. -Celestial Avenue is currently being edited and Johns looking forward to grading his MiniMorphic pictures !

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