Homemade 35mm Adapter

[Paul Bettner]

Daniel,

I think that one of the fundamental points of the Agus35 design is that Agus came up with parts and plans using household equipment, such that we could all take a shot at building one of our own.

Your design may work great, and a fixed GG is an exciting development, but until you can help me to copy your design (by posting parts and plans that I can utilize), it holds less interest (for me anyway) than the existing design which I can build right now with $20 in parts and tools.

Any research you can do to find out how I (or anyone else here) can find the pieces you used will go a long way towards validating your results (along with some plans/detailed photos of the device.) Until then, don't get upset if people "ignore your adapter" - first help us to build one of our own, and then excitement will follow! :-)

paulb

[Taylor Moore]

Here are Fillip's pictures of the foil material
Looks good

www.moorefilms.com/filip.htm

"just sent my pictures to TAYLOR (thanks), and when he uploads it on his site - you can compare it. i can bet thay you cannot see the difference. it is frosted in the similar way as MAXELL, same opacity, same look. i also took a picture for comparition with MAXELL CD and FOIL frosted CD side by side.
hope this can help someone. when you find proper gradient of this foil it tooks 2 minutes to prepare your own evenly frosted fake CD.
i tested it with my agus35 and for me it looks absolutelly ok"

[Daniel Moloko]

my adaptor was all homemade, and has a good advice for everyone in here:

try to find a GG from old photo cams. i think every big city in this planet has a place with used photo cams. i live in brazil, and a find one of these stores here.

ciao

[Bob Hart]

An idea for moving a smaller groundglass in an orbital motion without cranks and links. Try fixing a groundglass, CD spindle motor onto a common plate. Suspend the plate with several small tension springs on the focal plane. Make a guide track for the plate to stop it drifting off the focal plane. Fit an offcentre weight on the CD motor spindle. Make sure this weight is mounted central to the centre of the plate's thickness. The plate itself might be the mount for the motor and carry holes for the springs if it is a piece of frosted CD cut down. There may have to be experimentation to just where the weight should be to balance the opposing mass of the motor across the centre. Put the power to it and there hopefully should be a random orbit with no stationary centre, little vibration conducted to the frame and no wearing parts except for the motor itself and the guideframe faces.. Just a thought.

I've sent some construction pics to Chris of the PVC plumbing parts version of the Agus 35-- > I had promised not to burden him with more .jpg files but I think I might have lied.

Parts list for the hardware bits in Australia follows :-

End caps 165mm OD "Iplex Pipeline D105150 (9311381153157)".

Inner alignment sleeve for removable cover. Any PVC pipe which fits the caps or a piece of thin plastic trimmer bent to fit and glued in place. The sleeve must but against the motor mount retainer ring to hold it place unless this is itself glued in place.

Mount plate retainer (ring only used from an assembled part) "Iplex UVPC 100mm DO99100A DWV
Registered Design No. 110042 127.100A - Casting number on the ring itself is DO99100C".

Lens tube. Any manufacturer ID 63mm approx. OD 68mm approx.

Spindle motor mount plate. "Decor Australia Pot plant saucer Registered Design No. 78935 *610".

(The motor mount method I have used does not allow for backfocus adjustment by moving the groundglass. I may change from a compliant mount to a simple firm perspex plate, long screws with compression springs and washers so that the plate can be moved for back focus, or make provision for this on the final front lens mount which might be simpler. )

[Filip Kovcin]

i wish to send to someone's server (talyor? louis feng?) my tests with GG and no GG.

i shooted one night WITH GG on agus35, and the next WITHOUT. the pictures ARE different of course, and my deepest appologies to all of you who are talking about that there are different. and there is no use to shoot WITHOUT GG. (i was sceptical, but at least i tested it).

no GG solution is subjectivelly better than normal "old" video shooting, probably because of zooming into 35mm lens, but it gives video impression all the time. my first tests are kind of extreme colse ups, so i thought that there is no difference between agus and NO GG solution. in wider shots, difference is obvious. AGUS 35 RULES!!!!

please send me your thoughts which compression is the best (the file is 2:30 minutes long) to send to server and to acheive the smallest size with proper quality. i tryed vith virtual dub, but anyhow file is so huge that is useless to send it.
i have access to avid dv, premiere and virtual dub.

any thougts?
(if anyone is interested of course)
filip

[Bob Hart]

Some folk here may recall me carrying on about an adaptor which uses a lens set out of a telescope eyepiece. It does not make the image upright but it does allow a closer coupling of a 35mm motion film format widescreen size image into a PD150.

Two .pdf files which Chris will be kind enough to post can be found sometime soon at --- www.dvinfo.net/media/hart/ ---- for those who might have a curiosity and interest.

I am not an engineer, so the drawing should be regarded with some cautious contempt. The adaptor however did work in its intended application without any problems.

When installing into the 58mm filter thread on the PD150, extreme care has to be taken to avoid crossthreading as the PD150 housing is plastic and can be very quickly ruined by careless handling.

Additional bracing off the camcorder tripod mount is highly recommended as the PD150 lens enclosure to maincase fixing is simply not robust enough for additional load-bearing on the filter mount.

[Chris Hurd]

Bob's latest PDF's now online at www.dvinfo.net/media/hart/ -- cheers,

[Taylor Moore]

Devin Doyle
Please email me.Thanx

taylor@moorefilms.com

[Ignas Gramba]

To Daniel Moloko:
I also thinking about system maded from some old broken SLR photo camera. But when I saw your shots... Of course there are no grain, because there are no detail at all, they are very blurry, and very dim. It looks like an old rewritten VHS record. I hope it is possible to film SLR ground glass in better way because when I'm looking through my SLR camera viewfinder i see crystal clear and sharp image. If I'll fail I'll try to put spinning CD instead of ground glass. Hard to believe, but maybe home maded spinning ground glass from CD really is better solution than hi-quality ground glass from camera.


BTW, some info about fibre solutions:

http://www.us.schott.com/fiberoptics/english/products/healthcare/imagingfiberoptics/fusedcomponents/faceplates.html

[Mike Perkin]

First of all for anyone interested I just picked up the Maxell 50 pack that contains the frosted cd at me local Circuit City store. I also saw the same pack at Staples and Office Depot. Its the one with the aqua blue label. Cant wait to try it.

I have a couple of questions regarding the Fresnel lens issue.

1. Is it always neccessary to use the fresnel in the design of the adapter?

2.From the description given by Devin and Spencer regarding their design, am I to understand that the fresnel lens is the same lens used by a typical pocket magnifier. Wouldnt that be the same lens as a magnifying glass?

Thanks for your help
Mike Perkin

[Bob Hart]

Here is a draft of an enquiry I thought I would send to the Schott company referred to above :-

Given that there are a large number of participants in the Agus 35, I thought it might be more appropriate for folks here to have some sort of editorial rights and to correct the intended email where it needs same.

"""
Dear Sir.

I participate in a group at www.dvinfo.net which is workshopping a low-budget 35mm motion picture format adaptor for video camcorders. We currently use transparent CD disks hand finished on one face as a groundglass opaque plane for an image projected from an objective lens. To improve apparent resolution, the disk is spun so that the surface texture moves through the frame faster than the videocamera can resolve it but the projected image remains. There are some resolution and light transmission issues remaining and plastic CD disk surfaces are easily injured.

Could you advise :-

- if you make 120mm outer diameter clear glass disks with 15mm center holes and 1mm to 2mm thicknesses which would spin true which we could hand lap with fine grits to make groundglasses? (There is a Japanese company OHARA which makes such a product, "GD-FHT" for testing computer hard drive read heads but efforts to contact this company have been unsuccessful so far. Their product might be over-engineered for our purposes and out of our affordable price range. An alternative might be computer hard drive glass substrates.)

- if your fibre-optic image display panels function as a groundglass screen to fine groundglass standards?

(The CP16R motion picture camera used a small fibre-optic panel as a viewfinder groundglass screen in the early to mid seventies)?

- if your image display panels can be made to 120mm outer diameters?

- if they can be made with a 15mm diameter centre spindle hole?

- if they are capable of being rotated at speeds up to 3200 RPM without flying to pieces.

(There would be conflict with centrifugal forces on the disk by minor periodic lateral forces introduced by the centre hub across the disk from motor vibrations and greater intermittant lateral forces introduced by operator movements?)

What sort of costs would we be looking at if disks could be made?


It is believed coherent bundles for 180 degree image twisting are not made for diameters of 30mm and that costs would be more than conventional lens paths. Can you advise on this.

Any information you can offer would be greatly appreciated. As a marketplace, this might be a limited one. However if you have a fibre-optic product which exceeds the effectiveness of groundglass as a projection screen, P + S Tecknik in Germany might be a potential market for you if they haven't already evolved something better. They make the professional level MINI35 and PRO35 products comparable to our own more basic projects.

Regards from WA

Bob Hart.

""""

[Bob Hart]

Adding to my earlier post, Chris has posted for me at www.dvinfo.net/media/hart/ some .jpg images of comparative tests of the telescope eyepiece
lenses versus the stack of 1x + 2x + 3x 58mm close-up lenses some folk have been using on the PD150. Lighting conditions were bottom end to get closest to real-world conditions.

The eyepiece tests were improvised by fastening a paper template of a 35mm widescreen gate on a fixed groundglass (microscope slide dressed with 600 grade aluminium oxide) and the objective lens crudely set up on an open jig. Ambient light was falling on the groundglass so there is reduced contrast.

[Daniel Moloko]

how can u say its looks like VHS?

are u crazy?

what video did you watch?

man, i got it projected to an audience, they went crazy. theres no grain, the definition is the highest for a minidv system. just what i was expecting

have u ever seen the footage from agus 35 with children playing in a park?

that excatly what i got with mine zenit GG. the only diference is that i dont have a spin cd.

by the way, i work in movies, im very used to look at TELECINE 35MM. to me, my footage looks like a Telecine.
besides some of the night shots that dont gave me enough lite to do a good shot.

ciao

[Filip Kovcin]

daniel,

is it possible for you to send somewhere full resolution still frames, with no or at least low compression on it?
i think we all wish to see that in as good as possible resolution.

thanks.

filip

[Louis Feng]

One of Daniel's image (first one) is posted here:

http://f2.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/lou...o+Still+Images