Best way to use Mylar?
 

Hey everybody, I'm kinda a newbie at this, even though I've done tons of research and played with grinding my own ground glass, I know only a fraction of what you all know. So, pardon me if this has been answered already.

I have some samples of Mylar coming from Dupont in a few days, 3 different thicknesses of both translucent and opaque white, in 8.5x11" sheets. What do you all think is the best way to put this together? I'd prefer to not have to use a spinning GG, I'm alright with a little grain. Also, my camera focuses easily at 1cm from the lens, even with zooming (a wide angle lens helps immensely here), so I doubt I'll need to use a macro lens. How would you suggest making the focusing screen? Mylar on Plexi? How should I attach the Mylar to the Plexi?

Some help would be greatly appreciated here. Thanks in advance.

A guy I talked to before just attached mylar to a uv filter. He got amazing results but his was a moving setup. Im not sure how well mylar is going to work unless its moving.

Okay, Maybe I'll just buy one of those $9.99 CD players at Target, rip it open, remove all electronics, cut a hole straight through the bottom of the player, battery power the motor, cut off the top, put a nice tube on it, transferring light from the lenses to the CD Blank inside the CD player, and see how it works. Sound alright?

Well, things may have to go on hold for a little bit. My Steadicam just had some parts fail, so I'm going to have to spend what little cash I have laying around to pay for a machinist to redo them, only stronger this time. This is one of those things I may get to eventually, but for now I have more urgent things.

My experience is that mylar is definately very good, but pretty much terrible when not moving. I used a mylar contact paper on glass, and it has a very large grain. Not that there is alot of grain, but the grain itself is very large. However, on a CD player style adaptor it should work great, and its definately pretty easy stuff to work with.

I used Mylar for about 2 months, great image, but major light loss . I would use it only for experimenting, but beyond that, better to go with wax.

Yeah, I finally got my Steadicam fixed, so I came back to this. I got the mylar (about 30 sheets) via Fedex this morning, and cooked up a decent static adaptor. It's got big grain, but very little light loss, and it's sturdy as heck, and weighs a few ounces. (I litterally just took a Radioshack project box, put the mylar inside of a window I cut on the back, cut a hole in the front, and epoxied the cut out lens cap to it). It's incredibly simple, but it produces great quality pictures with my F1.7 lens. I'm going to be using this for outdoor, daylight shooting only, and it's a quite gritty, scary film, so I think the grain should do just fine.

Oh, and I used Mellinex 377 500 gauge Haze (or possibly TLT). It's quite thick (about a milimeter) and has a quite aggressive haze to it. It doesn't lost much light though, so I'm quite happy.

Tom,

Try it at night and then try wax paper instead and see the difference. The mylar I got was great for the image , nice and big, but the light loss was too much for anything more than daylight shoots.

I tried the wax paper, and I was suddenly glad the DuPont guy gave me tons of sheets. I just installed some medium thickness (too much of a hotspot on the lowest one) Mellinex. It's so much better in terms of light loss, and the hotspot is still not very noticable. I am quite amazed by the wax paper though. I think I might make another one of these Mellinex adaptors, so I can have one with medium thickness for day, and one with low thickness (90 gauge) for night/indoor shooting, though medium thickness works well for indoor too.

Tom,

I am using Press-Seal right now and it is the best that I can come up with. The most important part of my DOF machine is the condenser that evens out the light.

Yeah, it definetly needs a condenser. I took it out and shot about 10 minutes of decent footage, but nothing worth sharing. It really needs a condenser. The hotspot is pretty big, even when I switched back to the nice and thick 500 gauge.

I really wish I didn't have so many projects going on at once. I have my first big feature film coming up, my Steadicam just got finished, my crane needs some upgrades, and now this thing. I think I might have to take another break before upgrading, for a month or two, while I begin shooting this film. The few DOF shots I need can be accomplished with this in the middle of the day, so there should be no problems there.

Okay, do you think a sandwich of 2 80mm PCX condensers around my GG would help it work better? I could probably make that happen easily, as Surplus Shed has some in stock, and they're close to me, and cheap as anything. Also, how would I go about mounting these things? Maybe I should look at moving from a project box to a Thorlabs tube.

Condenser will definitely help, but the fact of the matter, unless it is micro wax like Oscar has perfected (that's right Oscar, I said perfected, you genius!), you are still going to lose light through the thick mylar. It will brighten up the image and get rid of the hotspots. As far as the Thorlabs goes, that has been used in a static adapter before with success and I think there is a thread on it somewhere.

I'm really not concerned about light loss. I'm just glad I can do 35mm at all. Maybe I should look into picking up a Nikon D screen from B&H when I head up there this weekend, as it'll save me the trouble of trying to attach condensers.

It is an interesting journey Tom. Once you start down the road, the first thing you think is - I'll be glad to just get it done! Then, you are perfecting it, tweaking it. There are so many on this board that have been doing this for years and years. I am on my 9 month, and each tweak brings you closer.
Good luck with your adapter.