35mm adaptors look fake
 

Hi,

I don't mean to talk bad about these apators as I own a M2, but something about the way it blurrs the image just looks fake to me. It's kind of hard for me to describe but it almost looks like the fake type of blurr you would get using photoshop or something to blurr the background more in a photo. It just doesn't look the same as a 35mm DOF.

I know this is not really a big deal, because most people wouldn't notice it, but I know a few networks that really don't like to use them for this same reason.

I'm just wondering why it does this, I mean isn't just taking the image from the 35mm lens and projecting it onto the glass and back into the camera? so why would that make it look fake?

Any comments?

Hi,
I am really glad you brought this up. I've had the same observation from all the adapters even the SGpro and I used the same analogy (photoshop gaussian blur), until the we got the newest Rev2 GG, which seems to be much different. This is something I talked to Phil Bloom about when we did the shootout.

The blur effect or 'bokeh' render with the new GG seems to match film very well. The blurring of the fence here is a nice example:

http://www.rimeligok.no/pentax-fru.jpg

http://www.rimeligok.no/pentax-fru2.jpg

The guys that make the SGpro's GG are an external optics company specialised in optical filters, they know their stuff and this was part of their design. I actually dont know to much technical on it, but they tell me its down to the diffussion properties.

This is because the GG we use for 35mm adapter purposes doesn't diffuse completely; it can't of course, because the image has to pass through to the other side for the camera to pick up. This incomplete diffusion is what makes the bokeh look odd. 35mm film, of course, diffuses completely. Like Wayne has shown, however, there are ways to make the optics of the GG operate in such a way so as to more closely emulate 35mm film diffusion.

Wayne, those grabs look really impressive. I've always been blown away by the SGpro's images, but the box format has always thrown me off. I may end up selling my current adapter to switch to your side :)

Great, I wasn't sure if anyone would agree with this because I have never seemed to hear about it on this site before, or any for that matter. I've just heard the comments from people who shoot 35mm that they wouldnt use it cause it looks bad.

So it has something to do with the GG?

Maybe I'll have to post some side by side pics to better exlpain the problem

Yep, its to do with the way the GG diffuses the light.

I guess that explains a bit more. What exactly would the differences in the GG have to be to better the diffusion properties?

I have to agree on this one, I also thought I was the only one to notice the 'gaussian blur'-effect, which has always kept me away from those adapters. But I am interested to see if the sgpro r2 has this 'fixed'. Are there already examples from the sgpro r2 and the canon a1, wayne?

Cheers!

James - what f-stop do you typically use when shooting as "open" or near open should really be avoided. Not the best image quality through the lens but more so I just find it's TOO MUCH depth of field, and that in itself just looks wrong!

Just curious about your settings, maybe that's contributing to your speculation?

Dennis has made a good point here, shooting wide open will also give a mushy bokeh.

Steven, no footage from the A1 as yet.

I've tried my lenses anywhere from T1.3-T16 and its not the too much depth of field that bothers me it's the way it blurrs the image.

Normally when you shoot film and lets say there are a couple bright lights in the background out of focus the small lights would turn into a larger glow and may even overlap eachother if they're close enough. With the 35mm adaptors it's more of a fake gaussian blur type thing and they lights out of focus in the background may diffuse a bit and expand, but not in the same way if you know what I mean.

This was shot with the SGpro Rev2 and HVX200:

http://www.sgpro.co.uk/lights.mov

It shows xmas tree lights out of focus, you can clearly see the clean sharp aperture blades, the disks overlap as you said above giving true bokeh like it would with real film.

I think this demo's what you are refering to.

If it is not film, it is not film, never wll be.

Properly managed, with all the other production value which goes with film imaging, like good lighting for starters, groundglass based relay imaging to video can get reasonably close, but it is and always will be, an emulation.

My personal spin is that it is an image aesthetic in its own right, another option in the toolset.

I have seen some film imaging in a multiplex cimema projection which looked just as fake by the time poor lighting, careless focus and digital intermediate had their way with it.

Wayne:
Your ground glass looks great, it seems it's your 35mm lens is producing what may be considered "poor bokeh", dark in the middle and bright hard edges. It may be because you shot the Christmas lights out of focus in the foregroun; out of focus but in the background may look better. Read about it here...

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/bokeh.htm

See "Fig. 1, Fig. 2, and Fig. 3" halfway down the page

It's always been my understanding that the wording "poor bokeh" is just a labeling term and not actually a catigorization of the quality. I, for instance, find that particular bokeh very appealing. If I'm not mistaken, I've definately seen that type of bokeh before on the big screen in theaters. Although it's very common, one example I can remember of bokeh speculars on bigtime movies with hard, defined edges (which that site seems to regard as "poor bokeh") was the streetlights and light sources behind the closeups of Denzel Washington's head in "Inside Man" when he is in the SUV with Jodie Foster.

If the goal is what that website refers to as "good bokeh," then many of the people complaining of bokeh quality would be well satisfied with less diffusive focusing screens that many here have already discarded as poor diffusers with "bad bokeh." The Beattie screen, for instance, which has been downplayed on this thread (and for good reason) as a poor focusing screen for bokeh, actually renders the Fig. 3 bokeh as described on the webpage.

Yeah, I'm going to have to say that I like the look of figure one.

What we are trying to do is emulate the same look as what our own eyes would see, correct? Well, I can say for sure that mine see figure one when I intentionally make them go out of focus on a small light by making the light in the background. But when I do the same with that light and make it the forground it looks more like figure two. So I am going to have to disagree with that article.

What the 35mm adapters look like to me is more of what a 'good bokeh' is described in that article, which is not what the eye sees and that is why it looks strange to me.

majority of people who watch a film will not be too concern with how the bokeh looks on a movie. If everyone is saying bokeh like the movie shot by Wayne with the SGpro r2 and HVX200 is bad, on what basis is it bad? compared to a normal 35mm film? That comparison is really subjective. I like the way the light blurred and it wouldn't make me think any other way if it blurred exactly like a 35mm film. But then again I am only an observer. But aren't most people? Maybe we shouldn't be too bogged down with getting the bokeh right or exactly like film. As Bob said, the bokeh is unique to 35mm DOF adaptor as the other bokeh is unique to a 35mm film. Just my thought.

From content creator`s viewpoint:
 

Most of us are just used to see that physical (im)perfection caused by film or imaging sensors that we are calling prefect sharp-edged diffusion. It is a byproduct that couldn`t be avoided physically. Most photographers including me are just so used to it.
Sure it is desirable to use Bokeh for artistic impressions sometimes but that`s nothing that must be accomplished in the first hand.

When I started to lecture about depth of field and how it can be used in videography using DOF adaptor I found out that with the exeption of former photographers nobody didn`t care about bokeh quality because everybody were concerned about how to tell the story and how to realize all the benefits of this kind of new medium for video students for example.

As long as content, it`s creator and it`s so called consumer won`t benefit from exact replication of real film physical properties it is by all means not neccessary to worry about it.

There is one technical aspect of almost all difusors used in DOF adaptors with lens attached: It must equal light loss of circa f4 to form that diffusion what we`re used to. Some diffusors will lose that much light and will give that bokeh quality even when the lens attached is wide open and others that will give the quality bokeh when the lens are closed to f4. So the creator can choose which route he want`s to go.

I have a sneaking feeling that Wyne`s creation is a perfect balance between the rule described above and sure the content creator can benefit from almost perfect DOF adaptor such as SGpro.

Best regards,
T

Wayne, i really like your bokeh. Didnt you think about selling GG separately for people, who cant afford SGpro?

I've sold a few recently via requests, not sure if im going to make to available or not yet.

I've sent you mail on your info(at)sgpro.co.uk address:)

Ben:
I agree that "poor" "neutral" and "good" are not absolute terms. But according to this article, unevenly illuminated bokeh-discs like in fig. 1 (which is what I see in Wayne's christmas light demo) is an indication of spherical aberration caused by the 35mm lens, and "neutral" bokeh in Fig.2 is an indication of little to no spherical aberration. Also interesting to note that a given lens will produce differnt types of bokeh in the foreground than background.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/bokeh.htm

Wayne:
Were the Christmas lights shot out of focus in the foreground? I'm just curious if it's true what the article says about aberration?

Of course none of this matters, like Ben noted bokeh is subjective.

What that website explains is what a good bokeh "artistically" should look like. I believe that is wrong especially in the case of telling a story in a movie because we don't want that type of distraction. The 35mm adapters do take away from the feel, not only to me. I have heard comments about the way it looks and have asked people what it is that makes it feel different. Most don't really know and it might not be because of the way the 35mm adapters blur the image, but I have heard straight forward comments about the way the "blur" looks.

It's kind of annoying that a lot of people here act like they are the only ones able to see these differences just because they're the ones making it. That's ridiculous! People are very observant, some not as much, and they do notice if something looks strange to them. Even if they don't know what it is.

The look we've been trying to achieve since the beginning of filmmaking is the look our eye would see if we were to leave it in a stationary position and be able to capture images. I'm not trying to start another discussion, but that's the same reason 60p looks awful. Have you ever looked out the window when you are on the freeway and let, lets say trees, pass your eyes without letting them move back and forth? It has a nice blur to it, similar to the look of 24fps. With 60p it's an unnatural smoothness and not similar to your eyes. Why would it be different with bokeh? We want things to look and feel as our own eyes would and the engineers should keep that in mind when designing a product.

The 35mm adapters are a nice tool for learning how to use shallow DOF in a video, but the look is still very amateur, and a should not be the look in a feature.

Wayne's footage does look better than the others I've seen, but that only depends if those lights are in the foreground or background.

Something to add to the good bokeh, bad bokeh discussion. The article says you don't want bad bokeh, because the background image is not sufficiently blurred. Yet Wayne's posting of Theodoros' footage of the christmas lights renders very nice apperture discs as seen in Hollywood films such as American Pie.

Can we get a hybrid of both? Yes I think so. Look at this 150% crop of a picture I posted in another thread (SGPro R2 + FX1). The highlights show great little apperture discs (the bad type) yet the rest is nicely blurred.

Maybe this is only possible with a 35mm adapter (and we would finally have 1 advantage over real film apart from lower costs & reduced editing effort).

Call it fake, I love it :-)

(just humorous, no offence intended)

You guys all know that the average movie goer tends to relate the term "bokeh" to a bunch of flowers, right? In fact, if your movie is so damn bad that the viewers go "ugh, this bokeh looks like a bad 35mm adapter," then you should probably list your gear on Ebay and beg for a job shuffling fries at Burger King.

In the list of things that make video not look like film, the bokeh from a 35mm adapter is very very very near the bottom, especially with the alternative being NOT using and adapter and going back to the video DOF which kills your film look alltogether.

The point is to emulate film, because film is what people are used to. If you get anything else, just give up because all you'll be doing is distracting your audience.

Like I said before, it's just a tool and does have it's benifits. I will say it does look better than a infinite DOF, but it does look wrong and it is wrong because it's not what your own eye would see. I guess you could say that it has it's "artistic" purposes or whatever.

It's nice that we can play around with these toys for now and use them to show some depth in our work and I am happy that people like Wayne realize it is a problem. Given enough time we'll all have cameras with nice big censors that give us a shallow DOF, but for now a lot of people here are stuck with their HD cams with huge DOF and the only way to fix it is by these apapters. I'm just saying it sucks it has to look so fake.

Ben,

It's true people don't like change, but people also want things to look as real as possible. Having a fake looking blur does not look real. Film doesn't perfectly match the human eye and nothing will, but it is close and the bokeh you get with film and proper lenses does very closely match the eye.

We shouldn't settle and say 'it looks ok, nobody will notice' if we don't have to.

Talk with any large network or producer/director and they will tell you the same thing. Things have to look REAL

This doesn't really show the differences between 35mm adapters and film, just the differences you get with lenses alone. Not really the subject of disscusion, but it's cool.

http://www.rickdenney.com/bokeh_test.htm

It has nothing to do with looking real, the whole film effect is to create an alternate fantasy. Please, try to convince me our eyes see 24 fps, I dare you :)

My point is that film has been a standard for so long, people are just used to it's aesthetic. If we can make our footage look like it, there is less to draw the audience's attention away from the story because they just accept that level of grain, sharpness, depth of field etc as the medium of theatrical motion picture.

I agree with you. I never said our eyes see 24fps. Our eyes do not have a 'frame rate', but 24fps does have the closest effect to the human eye. Do your own tests. Take your camera and have someone drive a car. Hold the camera in a stationary position out of the window and film in 24fps with trees passing by. Now use your own eye and look in the same spot you were filming at and let the trees pass by your eye without letting your eye move. They look very similar. Try that with 60fps and its way to smooth, looks fake. Not real. This also leads back to my other thread '24p looks fake' which is not my point right now. I am sure this is why the 24fps was chosen for film because it looks the closest to our eyes.

This thread is about the blurred image of the 35mm adapters looking fake. All I am saying is that there is a reason people chose to have that look, maybe not the grain part so much, but the others yes. The look that the 35mm adapters give do not look very life like that's all. I just think that if these companies are able to make this GG better to look more real they should, but I guess these adapters are going to just be temporary solutions to those who cant afford the cost of film until we slowly start getting cheaper cameras with bigger censors.

Yes, people don't want to change what they are used to, but what they are used to is already pretty much what should be.

A little bit off-topic, the motion film image aesthetic we have become accustomed to is not so much related to the frame rate of 24FPS so much as the shutter speed which became associated with it, 1/50th sec or thereabouts.

This creates the motion blur which most nearly approximates the human persistence of vision.

24 frames per second can be counted by humans. It is easy. Any half good musician can do it. Some, probably many musicians can tell you when a piece of music has been played against a click track. A soldier can learn to count bullets fired out of an automatic weapon.

When I was a kid, we used to cheat the payphones by tapping out numbers on the buttons inside the hang-up hook. You learned to do it by counting groups. Threes are easy. Phone 0 = 3 x 3s + 1 etc.. ( _--,_--,_--,_ )

This is where my off-topic comes in. My own half-baked theory on why 24P or 25P has come to be preferred along with it having been there from way back is that the detectable frame rate establishes a timing or pace we can subconsciously relate to.

When there is a story jump or a flashback, we can acclimatise to the new environment because that 24P is chattering away at our subconciousness.

Back to bokeh. If there are no very overexposed pinpoint highlights in an out-of-focus background, there is less apparent difference between the film image and the groundglass relay to video image.

The selection of a lens to soften background is as much about the director or DP seeking to draw our concentration upon a person or object, to manipulate our perception, sometimes to hide apparence of something in the frame from our immediate view.

Sometimes it is to set off a threat/apprehension reflex by having something out of focus move subtly in the peripheral vision area even in otherwise good lighting.

That is where you have a problem with the depth of field of small format video.

Such a contrivance is not quite as easy to achieve but one way it can be done is by burying much of the scene in darkness, to cheat out the obvious perspective inconsistencies caused by sitting off your subject with a long lens.

Just a few red herrings from a non-expert into the mix to carry you away.

James,
I disagree with idea that we should be trying to emulate what our eyes see. If this were true, DP's would always use normal lenses and never switch to wide angle or telephoto, because our eyes dont "see" that way.

I read a book about James Wong Howe, and in it there is a section on Realism. It says that art of motion picture is to show an enhanced reality, because reality alone (or a perfect duplication of the real world) would not engage the audience. So if Realism, and not reality, is the goal of a photographer, it seems that to tell others on this forum to shoot so it looks real, like our eye's see, may be poor advise.

The bottom line for me is that 35mm adapters help small format video look more like 35mm film. This forum exists because the devices can improve visual storytelling, the footage looks more pleasing (to most I guess?)

I'm mainly just talking about about the feel of the motion and blur. Of course we like to see life in different perspectives, but we want it to look sureal not fake. As Bob said 1/50th sec shutter speeds are closest to the human eye, which is why we use it. I may be wrong, but isn't that why we shoot at 24fps or 25fps because if we shot at 50fps with 360 degree shutter it would look wrong. Ive always been taught to usaully shoot at about twice that of your your framerate in most situations.

Like I said before the adapters are nice and all, but they do look fake and are a bit of a distraction. It does look a hell of a lot better than having an infinite DOF, but I would say most can agree that in this case we are trying to emulate the human eye and the 35mm apatpers are way off.

I do not agree that the shutter speed is more of what creates the film look (or similarity to our vision, etc) than the frame rate. 24p toggled between a 1/50th shutter and a 360 degree shutter (i.e. none) looks only subtly different--there is certainly more blur as expected but it still retains a filmic look.

However the visual difference between 24 and 60 fps is extremely noticeable, even by a "civilian".

On most of the high end HD jobs I've done the shutter is occasionally switched off to gain the extra stop, with the reasoning that it is a worthwhile gain against the slight difference in look. However switching the frame rate is something that would jump right off the screen and cue the audience that something is up. It's typically used for the effect of cutting to a TV broadcast or view through a video camera--the difference in look is meant to be jarring.

I don't think 35mm film (or 24fps for that matter) approximates the way the human eye works. It certainly doesn't match the quality of my own visual perception. It makes little sense to argue for the superiority of the range of bokeh produced by 35mm film by virtue of its being anchored, as it were, in nature itself. This is an aesthetic judgement, not a question determinable by optics or the psychopsyiology of perception.

Doubtless there are some people who can't bring themselves to admire the look of the various 35mm adapters, & perhaps it is also true that more than a very small fraction of viewers will notice a difference between adapter & film bokeh in the context of a put-together cinematic work. But it is equally true that the adapter bokeh pleases a great many people in its own right, & then again, it is implausible to me that the majority of viewers are so discriminating in this respect as you suppose. The last said is, of course, an empirical question, not something that can be known by any quantity of hearsay & anecdote. For every person of your acquaintance who rejects adapter footage because of its bokeh, I or others could produce a counterpart who has no such qualms, often in the form of working professionals who use adapters on the job. Who buys & rents all those Mini35s?

The upshot is that your calling the look of these adapters 'amateur'--aside from being by definition nothing of the sort in light of their professional use--is a subjective, & rather dogmatic, aesthetic judgement on your part for which you give no real aesthetic arguments. I don't condemn your opinion, but I think you're coming at it rather confusedly & on shaky argumentative grounds. Returning, for instance, to your assertion that the whole endeavor of filmmaking has been concerned since its inception strictly with attempting to ape human perception. That is plainly insupportable. Avant garde cinema has never been so shackled, people who continue to shoot black & white aren't merely pandering to an audience of the colorblind: what were film noir or German Expressionism all about? Obeisance to the human eye, & a misconstrued model of the eye at that, shouldn't be the limit of cinematic possibility, any more than it ought to be for painting. Leaving to one side, of course, the dubious proposition that 24fps/35mm bokeh is the utmost in verisimilitude.

The 35mm DoF adapter is a tool I'd rather not discard owing to its aesthetic difference from the older technology. It does a lot more than throw a little blur about the screen of this or that nature. It handily solves, for one thing, the problems of composition thrown up by the endless depth of field of small-chip video.

R. Mutt

The human eye makes poor bokeh. Just stare at a streetlight at night... more of a pointy-edged blurry glob than a clean, graduated disc. Maybe I can upgrade my retinas to film.

This is all very naive.

24 fps as a standard is an accident of history, not the end product of a concerted effort to reproduce human visual perception to a nicety, if such a thing were even possible. It came about for the most part as a compromise between the competing interests of overcoming strobing (at which 24fps is only partially sucessful, as we know) & economizing on film stock.

But beyond this, & more fundamentally, you appear not to understand much about the human perceptual faculties upon which you are grounding your opinions. Perhaps it's down to the fact that film theorists amateur & professional tend to exist in their own realm removed from the wider field of scientific understanding. Ever since the seminal Gestalt experiments of the early part of the 20th century, it's been known that the human perception of continuous motion built up of a series of sensations of discontinuous images has nothing to do with the theory of persistance of vision. See, for instance, http://www.uca.edu/org/ccsmi/ccsmi/c...0Revisited.htm . Persistance of vision is a myth. Most film theoriests, however, are content to bandy about the terminology of outmoded 19th -century science.

In a nutshell, the eye is not a camera, & the camera cannot aspire to be an eye. Human perception has as much to do with what goes on behind the retina as in front of it, to paraphrase Max Wertheimer. Sensations received at the retina are filtered through a complex system of mental processes, influenced by beliefs, ideas, moods, & even more elusive subjective states, to issue in a perception. There is no monolithic human visual (or any other) perception, & unless you can build a camera that functions just as our visual perceptual apparatus does (not to exclude the brain), it's nonsense to talk of a direct correspondence between the optical characteristics of a camera device & what people see.

As for your belief that the current practices of film production ought to exist in the way they do because of some relationship to the nature of the world, any introductory philosophy course would serve to show you that you can't get an ought from an is.

If you don't like adapter bokeh & want to clothe your taste in persuasive argument, you would do better to look elsewhere than perceptual psychology for your premisses.

H.

I had always been under the impression that 24fps was a cost-cutting measure anyways. It was to extract the least amount of film for the buck and 24 was the most they could cut without the consumer noticing - at least that is what I had heard.

24 fps
 

True and true. Historical accident and cost-cutting measure. In early cinema approximately 50 fps was judged as generally acceptable for creating the illusion of persistence of vision, though in fact the human eye is cabable of percieving frames even faster than 1/250th of a second. But 50ish was judged "good enough."

50 or 48 fps is still not very economical, however. So, cost-cutting industrialists that early filmmakers were, they discovered that they could flash each frame twice on the screen, and viewers wouldn't really notice. So they could cut the exposed frames in half (and also double the exposure time--a key point). That's why to this day, in a professional projector, each frame is "flashed" twice, producing 48 frames per second. That's how you can shoot at 24 and still have motion seem more-or-less seamless.

As to why 24fps transferred (or interpolated) to 29.97 looks better than straight 29.97, that's a whole different question, related to a convention of rythmical cadence and motion blurring. But it has nothing to do with how the human eye "naturally" perceives the world. If that were the case, we'd always prefer images shot with a squishy lens whose very shallow focal point flits around the frame sporadically, even spasmically (in x, y,and z-planes to boot), to create a whole image: very "naturalistic" (that's how the human eye "really" sees), but IMO impossible, even painful to watch on a screen.

Henry, correct me where I'm wrong here.

Back on subject for a bit... I have been pretty unhappy with the low-end 35mm adapters for this reason. The LetusXL works pretty good as it attaches to the camera direct, not in front of a lens. It has a 2X crop factor though. I personally never liked the M2, too hard to set up and only looks good in optimal light conditions. Most of these adapters end up looking like bootlegs of 35mm shots. I recently tested out a Brevis on the HVX200 and it looks better than anything I have tried and is EASY to set up. The options for multiple diffusers really sells the deal, I just ordered a big kit from them.

On a slightly unrelated note but concerning bokeh, I have a Canon 20D and a CHEAP EOS to FD adapter so I can use old FD lenses. The cheap adapter creates some GREAT bokeh, great in that, it looks mesmerizingly fake in certain conditions. Really unique effect, I will try to post a pic.



ash =o)