Mini 35 Digital image converter
 

What is a Mini 35 Digital image converter Cause I have heard about it but have never seen it. How Much money is it

www.mini35.com

very expensive. Unlike the XL1 version, the DVX100 goes in front of the on the existing lens.

It probably costs you several stops of exposure and possible other issues. I have seen no test footage from the adaptor. It's more a rental item unless you have $5000 for the lens and nice collection of 35mm film lenses at your disposal.

The Mini35 is an $8,000 lens attachment that you fit to your camcorder. It then allows you to use PL-mount lenses (which typically cost anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 each).

The goal is to give your video camera the same field of view and depth of field as film cameras.

You can achieve some of the same effect for 1/30th the price by checking out my SoftScreen product at www.softscreen.us.

Can't you Use a filter to get the depth of field. Like Neutral Density filter. That is supposed to control lighting and deoth of field.

Depth of field is governed by aperture, by distance to subject, and apparent depth of field is also governed by focal length. So, once you zoom in as far as you can, and get as close as you can to your subject, and open up the iris as much as you can (by using Neutral Density filters), well, that's as shallow as it's going to get.

The problem comes in that these consumer/prosumer video cameras have such extremely wide angle lenses (the DVX100's is 4.5-45mm, the XL1 is 6-88mm) that even under the best of circumstances it's extremely difficult to get the shallow depth of field look. While you can sometimes get a decent shallow look outdoors (with the background far away from your subject) it is usually impossible to get a shallow background look on an interior interview shot.

The Mini35 is one way to overcome that. By using film lenses (which are much longer focal length, a typical 10x zoom in 35mm might be 25-250mm) you can get the long focal lengths necessary for shallow depth of field. But, at a cost of $8,000 for the adapter, plus then you have to get PL-mount lenses to use with it.

Using ND filters will allow you to shoot with the iris wide open which does reduce the depth of field but due to the small size of the XL1's CCDs (1/3") there is a lot of depth within the image natively. The small size of the chip also means there is a 7.2x magnification factor that turns a 50mm standard 35mm lens into a 360mm telephoto. What the Mini35 does is through the use of various lenses and a spinning glass plane the magnification factor and depth of field are reduced to that of 35mm. The adapter also allows the use of motion picture lenses from makers like Arri and Zeiss, as well as 35mm still photography lenses from Canon and Nikon.

ND filters will somewhat reduce depth of field, but won't provide nearly the amount of very finite control (that is, extremely shallow focal planes) that 35mm motion picture lenses will, with the Mini35 adapter.