What is the lens mounted on that camera?

Steve,

It's a Zeiss Superspeed, Distagon 50mm T1.3. They're pretty old (made in West Germany) and have been replaced by the Master Primes.

you might also be interested in this thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=20798

It has quite a few pictures of XL1/s setups.

May sound like a dumb question but..

What exactly is the purpose of having a Matte box and rails mounted on the camera? I'm new to the technological side of things..

Lon

For shooting cinematic peices, you can add warming or cooling filters, star filrters (make specular high lights turn into corsses or 5 pointed stars, liek in a car comercial), you can add diffusion filters, half neutral density filters (so the sky is darker but the ground isn't.

Also, can mount a follow focus, sunshade (French flag) keep lens flares out of your footage, and it also looks REALLY COOL!

Matt

The matte box is a large lens hood, with movable leaves, that can also hold filters and usually a rotating stage, or two, or more. A rotating stage is good for polarizers and grads, etc. The rods allow for different length lenses to be used with the matte box. Different sized rods accommodate the lengths of various sized lenses and they can usually be lengthened, or shortened by adding or removing sections of rod. Arriflex and Chrosziel are two of the larger matte box manufacturers.

A follow focus unit is mounted on the rods. The follow focus allows the camera assistant to accurately pull focus to follow an actor or whatever action needs to be in focus during a take. Cinetech and the afore mentioned mfr's and others make ff units.

Focus, zoom and iris motors can be mounted on the rods as well. These controls are adjusted remotely via a wireless control unit or a wired controller, like a Microforce, for the zoom. If you look at a motion picture camera in full studio mode, you'll see all of the afore mentioned tools mounted. The motors and controllers have gears that mesh with the gears on the lenses. In the case of the wired controllers, they plug into the remote jack of the lens or controller. BarTech, Chrosziel, MagFox, Fox, Seitz, Genio, Hedén, Benz, Jurgens, Varizoom, Zoe and Microforce make motors, remotes and wired controllers for zoom, focus and iris.

All helpful tools. Sometimes ya need 'em, sometimes ya don't.

Thanks Mark.

Here are some pictures of my XL2 setup. Pretty simple. XL2 body, 20x lens, EQ-XL1 windscreen, bogen manfrotto 3051 tripod with 501 head.

http://www.sweepinghalo.com/pics/canonxl2_01.jpg
http://www.sweepinghalo.com/pics/canonxl2_02.jpg
http://www.sweepinghalo.com/pics/canonxl2_03.jpg

Here is a shot of mine.

http://www.geocities.com/downhillmania/Picture062.jpg
http://www.geocities.com/downhillmania/Picture063.jpg

Another Downhill Biker with an XL2?

What are the odds?

I ride a Balfa 2step

Nice Bike. I have to get up North there and ride one of these days. Maybe Ill catch you at MT Snow?

Travis

Here is a rig I cooked-up. The focus of the Sony parabola and the power of the 20x lens makes incredible bird footage.

http://www.geocities.com/amjoyce2004/main.html

that is one NUTTY mic!

Andy,

Where did you get the mic? I'm also curious about the sound quality. I was going to build one to use with a good uni-directional for nat sounds. I know of one guy who built one from a metal snow disk. This one looks light weight and might fill the bill. It also looks like you can replace the mic. Can you?

Dan

The Sony PBR is discontinued since not enough people bought them. I bought mine about 10 years ago from Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, and it's very cool. The parabola accepts any "tube style" mic (dynamic or condenser) and is a pistol grip style or 5/8" thread-mountable.

Even a Tupperware container will work in a pinch, but the quality of the material affects the sound a lot. The polycarbonate design of the PBR is superior to any homemade material, but you can try anything.

The sound quality is dictated by the mic element, but there is also an inherent loss of bass by using a smaller sized parabola. I've used 3ft. diameter dishes before to get more frequency response, but they are very impractical. Since I mainly use it to record birds and insects, the loss in bass response is irrelevant.

Good luck...