'Scope' by combining 16x9 and anamorphic adaptor
 

A camera that can do 16x9 natively (our PDX10) combined with an anamorphic widescreen adaptor should give us 21.28 x 9 which is 2.36:1 and that is very close to to Cinemascope. Has anyone here ever tried this?

Who is also interested in trying this?

Guustaaf

Well Century makes a 37mm adaptor that is relatively inexpensive (maybe $250). Only problem is, what will you do with the resulting footage? Would probably need to upconvert to HD, then letterbox in the 16:9 frame. With square pixels you'd have a 480x1128 image size which would fit inside a 720x1280 frame. Now it does seem that 1128 pixels of width is a bit of a stretch for a camera with a 530 line resolution though. Unfortunately it's probably a lot more practical to just letterbox your 2.35:1 image in a 16:9 DV frame, which you could easily do in post.

But this is an interesting prospect which has been discussed here before. Let us know if you give it a try!

I have a Century 16:9 adapter on my Hitachi Digital 8 and I can use the letterbox mode to crop the 16:9 image to look like scope.[Essentially what you want to do--but I'm doing it in camera and I don't have to render]

While it looks okay--you don't get all the authentic optical distortion effects as if you use a 2x squeeze anamorphic lense. [I only know this by looking at movies like Die Hard]

I also have a Bell and Howell/Kowa 2x lens(which I got off of eBay )that I fitted to my camcorder using a SERIES 7 to 46mm adapter ring.

The resulting image is fullscope 2.66:1 with all the dramatic distortions it gives you--for example when you film down a street when cars entering the frameand then disappearing into the horizon.

This gives you the real deal and it looks wonderful on a widescreen HDTV set.

You of course have to first letterbox the footage first.

It works...

Go here and read up some more:

http://members.macconnect.com/users/b/ben/widescreen/