Hey! Long time no see, been swamped in work - I thought I'd check in with some information that might be of interest as we shot a short last week on some wonderful new Cooke anamorphics. They took a huge chunk of the tech budget, however in the light of things I felt it was really worth it. Now, some purists say these and the Arri / Zeiss anamorphics are too clinical for their preference. In my opinion they are just right for keeping a safe production workflow when you can't always adapt the way you shoot to "the ideal" or when you have to adapt the way you shoot to what you shoot.

Let me recap. We shot the short on an fs700 coupled to an Odyssey 7q+. Wonderful, powerful couple, even if I'm not the biggest fan of Sony colors. I decided to stick between 2000 iso and 6400 iso for night shots, as we didn't have the budget for a lot of lighting equipment. 6400 iso noise is a bit bad, but workable. At most I could augment and mold natural light. We decided pretty early on that Anamorphic lenses would add a cinematic twist but also contribute to a sense of realism / immersion we were after in the production. Now, these new and very expensive anamorphics are sharp enough / corrected enough to be shot wide open and the mechanics are obviously top notch, making them as functional as any high quality spherical lens. Another things is; the short was shot almost entirely hand-held and when it comes to anamorphics, that can really skew things up badly if an adapter is only slightly off axis f.i.. I was a bit worried during the first day of shooting, as we didn't have a working live-grade setup for correcting the footage, however, I did not need to. These are perfectly corrected to not skew things up in a bad way, no matter how you shoot.

We ended up with the Cookes as the Arri/Zeiss ones had been booked by someone else, but they did not dissapoint one bit. After checking some tests online I chose the 40 and 75 as the former looked to have less CA / have better correction than the wider 32, while the 75 had some CA but allowed for different framing (The Arri Zeiss ones seem to be pretty identical, but the Cookes have some differences in-between them) and differences in distance emphasis, depending on location space. The lenses are massive, over 2 kg's, and I had to put together pieces from 2 different rigs to make it work, all in all we ended up with setup weighing in at around 10 kg's. After that, however, we hardly had to think any differently, though at the end of the shoot my eyes seemed to want to squeeze reality into 2x.

The bottom line, having lenses of this quality in the production allowed us to use anamorphics in the first place, to get a clear anamorphic look without the potential caveats of working with them, never taking time from the shoot. For a more extreme look, well, you may have that option with a bigger budget but then again, it's always possible to push things in the grade. (in doing both I retain control)

The lenses can be used at 2.3T (with sufficient sharpness), though I prefered to stay at 2.8 for most night exteriors. I'll add some sample frames here shortly, and update when I get into pregrade. If there are any surprises, I'll let you know.