DARK NIGHT RISES: SHOT ON STILL LENSES

[KETCH ROSSi]

I agree that Master Primes (or the new Leica's) are clearly the "best" way togo, but I love Richard's point about the uniqueness of alt glass.

The 20th century is littered with strange and unusual optics. I've already seen sets of lenses that can bend light and render reality in ways a conventional and "perfect" lens would never dream of doing. Clearly, such lenses are "speciality". What but what they can do...is still very "special" indeed.

The LensBaby Diving Bell reference is just one great example.

Exactly, I have come to love the master primes since they first came out, and it was not easy to Sale them, but the New Leica glass is superior and so I did the switch, however there are some particularities about Still glass, and of course in particular Medium Format Still Glass, for this I can't wait for a Epic Mount for the S series of the Leica MF glass, Assy had great glass, not so much any more since they dropped the contract with Zeiss, but there is literally a Tone of great old Medium format glass, and great not so old also, in the choices I have been trying to make for some particular scenes I have been testing all kind of glass which I can currently adapt to the Epic, so this was a good move i=on their part to not be so tied up to only use Cinema Glass.

[Vadim Bobkovsky]

Come on bud, hyperbole. It was middling, but satisfying, cap to the trilogy. We're just lucky they didn't drop a Godfather III turd.

It was a great article though and just shows why Pfister and Nolan's stalwart dedication to film is a little nuts, and an emotional decision. Did you read the part about single snowflakes interrupting the thread on any of the cameras during the Wall St. scenes? They spent more time repairing the 3 cameras than they did focusing on making a better film, shooting some coverage instead of perpetuating those flat, tracking shot fight scenes that felt void of any scope or gravity.

When RED resolves to around 8K there's no excuse to still be shooting these clunky, distracting IMAX cameras.

Wasn't 70mm IMAX film something around ~16K?

[Nick Morrison]

Wasn't 70mm IMAX film something around ~16K?

I'm not sure what the max resolution IMAX is capable of...but on The Dark Knight Rises they scanned all the IMAX negatives at 8K.

[Richard Goodwin]

I'm not sure what the max resolution IMAX is capable of...but on The Dark Knight Rises they scanned all the IMAX negatives at 8K.

I think IMAX is approx 10 times the resolution (but that is memory and I could be off). So 8K scan would be 4 times the data of 35mm/2K scan. Also, I think IMAX is a VistaVision style format (with film running horizontally through the equipment - hence the very massive resolution). I don't know how they decided on 8K scans. It may be the best combination of meaningful image data that is still realistic to process through an complex CGI pipeline. I'd be interested to know the deeper details of the reasoning.

[Nick Morrison]

I think IMAX is approx 10 times the resolution (but that is memory and I could be off). So 8K scan would be 4 times the data of 35mm/2K scan. Also, I think IMAX is a VistaVision style format (with film running horizontally through the equipment - hence the very massive resolution). I don't know how they decided on 8K scans. It may be the best combination of meaningful image data that is still realistic to process through an complex CGI pipeline. I'd be interested to know the deeper details of the reasoning.

Yeah, I mean even on Prometheus they found 5k too render intensive for all the CG work, so I think they worked at a much smaller resolution (2.5k maybe?). I can't imagine how challenging 8k must be. Even if IMAX can render out a larger file size, I get the sense it would be total overkill.

[Chuck Z]

I'm not sure what the max resolution IMAX is capable of...but on The Dark Knight Rises they scanned all the IMAX negatives at 8K.

I think they scan them on the specialized Imagica scanner at 11K but downsample to 8K for output.

[Mark Tierney]

Just wanted to add - those lenses are several grades above what you would see out of a Canon or Nikon still lens. I'm not shocked at all.

[Dan Kanes]

This film was rad, but generally quite soft.

I couldn't figure out why one whole 10 second cut at the mansion during the fundraiser scene was completely out of focus.

[Satsuki Murashige]

I've been reading the latest issue of American Cinematographer, and I was struck by this:

Turns out, a majority of the Imax shots in The Dark Night Rises were shot with highly cinevised medium format still lenses, mostly Hasselblads and Mamiyas:

Of course, this particular scenario speaks as much to the paucity of Imax lenses that exist, but they used still lenses nonetheless.

Not surprising, there's not much else out there glass wise that can cover such a large negative. I wonder how much work the Panavision techs did to make the lenses workable. I suspect they may have changed the iris assembly, didn't catch any pentagonal bokeh this time around. I'm surprised they didn't rework the focus helicoids, my Hassy Zeiss lenses are extremely stiff and not really usable for cinema use as is. Optically they are fantastic though especially the 40mm FLE f/4, reminds me of the Master Prime look. Would love to see a version with T*XP coating, cam focusing, and T2!

[AndrewThomas]

If Panavision "cinevized" the lenses...can you really call them still lenses at that point?