Some Canon XL2 + Letus Extreme footage to look at.
 

Hi guys

I think you might be interested in some XL2 footage with Letus Extreme adapter. I wasn't sure whether I should post this in Show Your Work or here, on the XL2 board. Finally, I decided that I was going to post it here since it was shot on the XL2 and some of you might just want to take a look at the footage coming out of our beloved cam.

Of course the footage was color corrected and the vimeo version is softer and has lower dynamic range than the original file. Unfortunately, after uploading, the vimeo transcoding made the file a lot brighter so having been unable to find solution I just prepared a special version with lowered brightness. After transcoding in came out more or less as bright as the original but some dynamic range was lost. As for the sharpness (in the original file) I must say that I used to shoot sharper images with Letus and XL2. Both lens were open, XL2 stock lens perhaps a little bit less. Moreover, I overexposed the footage because I was afraid that I would loose a lot of details after color correction. I am pretty sure I was focused on the ground glass properly so at least this wasn't an issue. In the end, the footage came out somewhat milky but the day before I shot a test and the picture was almost as sharp as a naked XL2.

All in all, XL2 was accompanied by Letus Extreme and placed on the Manfrotto tripod (525mvb legs and 503 HD video head). I used very old Pentacon f1.8 prime lens with m42 mount. My Letus has got Nikon mount therefore if I wanted to use this lens I had to buy a cheap m42 converter ring for nikon mount. The ring has glass that theoretically should enable the m42 lens to be able to focus on infinity but I still can't do it. Maybe the backfoucs in my adapter is off and needs adjusting. That said, all the shakiness of the cam was not a result of manfrotto tripod but a loose and wobly lens as the converter ring isn't machined properly. I tried native nikon lens with my letus and it sat rock solidly.

To conclude, I really like the look of the XL2 with letus and the softer image actually much helped and there were less compression artifacts and we all know what happens to the picture when qwe try to shoot DV in the woods.


Hope you like the footage,



Piotr