World's First True HD Anamorphic Feature

Canon HD “Cinemascope” for new Spanish production

On July 11th Spanish producers Mediapro started shooting a feature film called “Salvador”, directed by Manuel Huerga and produced by Jaume Roures. This is the story of Salvador Puig Antic, who was the last person to be killed under Franco’s regime using the “garrote vil”. *

This feature is being shot entirely on HD, using mainly Sony’s HDW-F900 camcorders  - and Panasonic’s Varicams in some over/undercranked takes. As it is to be shown in 2.35 panoramic mode, it was decided to use Canon’s ACV-235 anamorphic converters on each camera.

Pol Turrents (ACTV) DIT and 2nd unit DOP of Salvador, writes:

“When I was involved in the project, my first thought was to use the Canon anamorphic adaptor, which was then a very recent tool available in the market. Together with David Omedes (AEC), the director of photography of the movie, we decided to test different options: first, to use the adaptor with prime lenses, in order to get the most quality in the final image in 2.35:1;then, to use regular prime lenses, cropping the image, as other movies did; or thirdly, to use an adaptor for film lenses, and regular spherical film lenses.

The tests were done with an F900 and a Varicam, post produced, and then transferred to 35mm with Arrilaser. We noticed that the quality of the image was much improved with the adaptor, especially when we did severe colour corrections; and noticeably on the footage of the Varicam. The Panasonic camera, having less native resolution, achieves a higher resolution with the adaptor, which is very important in order to make the transfer to big screen.”

Canon anamorphic tests best for quality

Both technical and artistic crew agreed that, on all the tests, the converter showed the best results and only introduced a slight light loss of 1/3” stop. There was excellent performance, with no resolution loss or shading in the image, even when the lenses were opened wide. No correction was needed on the cameras –except for the inversion and squeezing of the image. (The Canon anamorphic inverts and squeezes the image: so that it is not immediately easy to operate the camera nor to watch the results on the monitors.)

Results easily made instantly viewable

For that reason, rental company Ovide (Spain) which was providing all the equipment for the shooting, modified all the viewfinders and HD monitors so that they unsqueezed and flipped the image vertically, and therefore the image was correct everywhere. For the SD images, the monitors were not modified as Ovide also tuned the downconverted signals so that they were inverted and unsqueezed.

No size and weight problems

“Once we decided to go with the adaptor, our main concern was the size of the camera.” adds Pol Turrens. “You can imagine that adding the converter makes the camera bigger and heavier, which is not always easy to handle; but soon the camera crew got used to the size of the equipment, and didn’t have any kind of problem. It wasn’t even a problem using the cameras on a Steadicam rig. Ramon Sanchez, the Steadi operator was able to use it with no problem of overweighting or oversizing. In fact, the adaptor with a prime lens is not much larger than some of the HD zoom lenses available in the market.”

Canon are obviously pleased and proud to be part of this breakthrough in HD feature production.