Lens adapters from Redrock Micro and Letus put 35mm still lenses on HD and HDV cameras for shallow depth of field. How they compare and what to know.
As video cameras continue to offer clearer and richer pictures, more filmmakers, particularly student filmmakers, are choosing to shoot on video. But there are still areas where video lags, and there are far fewer options when it comes to choosing lenses for video cameras. This is why two companies, Redrock Micro and Letus, have developed adapters that enable filmmakers to attach 35 millimeter lenses from still cameras to their HD and HDV video cameras.
One of the main complaints of cinematographers is the depth of field or depth of focus for video is much wider. Nearly everything is in focus all the time. A film camera can offer a significantly shallower depth of field, which allows a cinematographer to focus on one object, character or area of the picture frame and leave the rest of the picture soft or blurry. A professional grade HD or HDV video camera can limit the depth of field, but only slightly. Consumer grade cameras have an even wider area of focus, so that it’s nearly impossible to direct the viewer to what should be noticed in a scene; a critical aspect of narrative storytelling. This shallow depth of field or focus directs the attention of the viewer and can reveal the interests or concerns of the characters on screen. When we complain that a film shot on video looks more like news style videography or even documentary shooting, it’s partly because the cinematographer has less latitude in controlling what we see. One way to take control of the depth of focus on video cameras is to find a way to use 35 millimeter lenses.
Owen Donovan used the M2 on his film Twilight. “These lenses combined with the adapter provide a more filmic image. It reduces your depth of field which allows the filmmaker and DP to put the viewer’s attention to what is in focus. Basically, it adds a lot of options in choosing your aesthetic.”
Both adapters, the Letus, designed and the M2, from Redrock Micro, the partnership of Brian Valente and James Hurd, work using a variation on the same technology. The battery-powered adapter employs a moving ground glass disk. The glass is ground to a matte finish which works almost like a miniature screen. The image captured by the 35 millimeter lens is projected onto the disk, like a rear screen projector, then it is recorded by the video camera. Consequently, filmmakers using the adapters with 35 millimeter lenses need to use significantly more light to get the same quality image. Donovan believes that this requirement is really a benefit. “It requires more light than shooting straight digital because the adapter eats about a stop and a half of light passing the image through rotating ground glass. The plus of this con, however, is that you are forced to light like you are shooting real film, speeding up a students learning curve so to speak. It adds an integrity to the image quality that would normally cost thousands of dollars more.”
By requiring filmmakers to learn the lighting techniques perfected by cinematographers over the last century of motion picture filmmaking, the adapters bring the potential for videography much closer to the art of cinematography. Film students using this system will need to use light meters and learn how to light for film style cinema. This makes good shooting more difficult, but it enhances the opportunity for really mastering cinema techniques.
Both the Letus and the M2 use a moving glass disk inside their adapters. The variation in the technology between the two is that the M2 disk rotates, and the Letus disk vibrates. In order for the glass disk to serve as a screen and capture the image, it needs to have some opacity, so the glass is ground to a matte finish.
If the glass was stationary, the specs on the glass would be visible, so the solution is to either rotate or vibrate the glass at such a high speed that it gets rid of those artifacts.
The adapters greatly increase the number of lenses that videographers can currently choose from. Filmmakers have also noticed other benefits from using the adapters. The video pixel is square and in low-light will degrade to a mosaic of colored cubes. With the adapter, the edges of the pixels soften, so that the shape of the pixels is more elliptical resembling the grain of sixteen millimeter film. “When I first showed dailies down in Brooklyn, even some of my professors were confused on how we achieved the look that we did. We used my Panasonic DVX100 with the M2 for the whole shoot,” says Shane Carlson, who just completed his senior film project, The Creswood Hotel, at Brooklyn College. “We showed our production professor, and he told us how for the first five minutes he thought we had shot on 16mm.”
There are still always going to be differences in film and video cinematography and in the benefits and drawbacks to choosing the right medium for a project. “Film has true blacks and a different kind of depth,” says filmmaker, Jordan Stone who is currently shooting with the Letus adapter. “Film has far less detail than video because the chemical reaction in the emulsion is caused by momentarily exposing each frame to different intensities of light. The darker an object is, the more light it absorbs and the less energy it transmits or reflects. That is why the blacks are so dark in film. Video amplifies available light. The light looks like a mall, or the 80’s, or porn.” It’s hard to imagine what a film like The Godfather, which has so much darkness on the screen, would look like if it was shot on HD. The closest approximation might be a film like Collateral, set at night in downtown LA, but the shadows are never truly dark, like the city itself there’s always diffuse, sparkly light.
The big video equipment manufacturers make most of their money selling ENG equipment to news and sports television. It’s not really in their interest to design lenses for digital filmmakers. Both Letus Direct and Redrock Micro are aware that their potential customers are indie filmmakers and film students, so they have priced their products accordingly. “The best thing I can say about the M2 is it’s price,” continued Carlson, “I just bought my own, but my first one, I split between myself, and two other students. With several used lenses and the M2, we each only spent a little over $450.”
A shallower depth of field enables a film camera to limit the focus of a shot. A character may be in the foreground, midground or background, but they will be the only object in focus leaving the rest of the field softer and clarifying precisely what the filmmaker wants the viewer to notice. Using these adapters, filmmakers can now experiment with using 35 millimeter lenses with HD and HDV cameras and gain much more control over the depth of focus. A picture is worth a thousand words, but it shouldn’t look like a thousand words. The art of cinematography is the subtle ability to reveal visual information, which can signal the viewer to what’s on a character’s mind or where a story is going.
Dana Dorrity is an assistant professor of Communications and Media Arts at Dutchess Community College. She has an MFA in screenwriting from the American Film Institute and teaches media writing, screenwriting and video production classes.
Related filmmaking guides
- Camera angles in film: a beginner’s guide
- Filmmaking resources
- 16 best filmmaking sites for indie filmmakers
Keep learning filmmaking
Want more lessons like this? Join StudentFilmmakers free for live webinars with working pros, and stream on-demand filmmaking classes in cinematography, directing, screenwriting, sound and post.
