Fake Anamorphic Lenses from Iron Glass Adaptors
By Kevin Waczek
An “anamorphake” lens says it all in the name. It is a fake anamorphic lens. But how close do these fake lenses come to replicating real anamorphic lenses? Today I will use the Iron Glass Adaptors fake anamorphic lenses to help answer this question.
HOW ANAMORPHIC BEGAN
In 1927 the first television set was invented. Soon after its arrival in the consumer market, technology allowed for bigger screens and color televisions, which competed with radio and movie theatres. When films were screened in the movie theatres, they were shot and projected in a 4:3 aspect ratio. An aspect ratio is the ratio of the width and height of the image. During this time, there was less of a thrill when going to the movies because there was free programing all day on the living room TV. Feeling threatened, the movie industry tried many things to get people back to the theatres, and widescreen movies was one of them. Theaters now had a selling point over TV’s: A larger widescreen aspect ratio of 2.39:1 that you can't get anywhere else. This aspect ratio is known as CinemaScope. How were they able to achieve the widescreen look?
Anamorphic lenses were designed to have a wider field of view than a regular spherical lens. A wider view enabled a wider picture. But it’s not that simple. With a lens now grasping a wider image doesn't that mean the size of the film needs to be wider? Does the camera need to be bigger? While those questions are reasonable, filmmakers continued to film with the same style cameras and on the same standardized size of film. The way they were able to pull off a widescreen image is through compression.
The anamorphic lens takes in a wider image, and through its unique design the lens is able to squeeze and compress this image onto the standardized size of film stock. At this point in the process, there is a widescreen image at a 2.39:1 aspect ratio squeezed into a piece of film that is at a 4:3 aspect ratio. If you looked at the individual frames they would look horrible, as if you put a squeeze effect filter on your footage. After the footage is shot, the film goes through a developing process where the film is then stretched and compressed to make the stunning widescreen image. Although I have been talking in terms of film and not digital sensors, the process is the same. The wide image taken in by the anamorphic lenses are compressed on a small digital sensor and then decompressed in post production. Real anamorphic lenses are expensive. They are among the hundreds of cinema lenses that would take many of us years to afford. But is there a cheaper alternative?
HOW FAKE ANAMORPHIC BEGAN
Fake anamorphic lenses began as a cheap substitute that can create a comprable look to real anamorphic lenses. There are also adaptors you can put on the front of regular lenses to achieve an anamorphic look.
While researching anamorphic lenses, I saw an anamorphic hack on Youtube claiming to turn any lens you owned into an anamorphic lens. He started with cardboard and a short strip of fishing line. He then cut the cardboard in a circle, which is the exact circumference of the back on your spherical lens. From that circle, in the middle he cut out an oval shape. Then he attached the fishing line across the cardboard over the oval shape. He then put this rig on the back of his lens and was able to get some basic characteristics of an anamorphic lens. But why does this work? Because it is able to mimic two unique features of anamorphic lenses: Oval bokeh and horizontal lens flares.
Bokeh
Bokeh is a Japanese term referring to lights that are out of focus. When these lights are out of focus, they form balls of light and make for a very appealing image. With a spherical lens, these lights arrange themselves in circles. With an anamorphic lens, the bokeh won’t be spherical but instead have a slight oval shape. This is a stylistic choice but it does give the image its own unique quality. The DIY rig was able to replicate this by crating a oval shaped cardboard insert and placing it on the back of the lens. The oval shape bokeh derive from the decompression process of stretching the footage.
Lens flares
Lens flares are a beautiful side effect of lens distortion. Spherical lenses flare just like anamorphic lenses except that their flares are spherical and an anamorphic lens has a unique horizontal lens flare. Anamorphic lenses also flare more in general because they have more elements in the lens. The more elements, the more flares. The horizontal lens flares derive from the decompression process of stretching the footage.
Iron Glass Adaptors Fake Anamorphic Lenses
These lenses are a cheaper alternative to real anamorphic lenses, and they use a similar system to our DIY rig to achieve the anamorphic look. Instead of using cardboard and fishing line, they use an oval element and a strip of reflective metal that is housed inside the lens during manufacturing. These lenses are amazing to play with. The oval element really worked, and all of my bokeh looked as if it was actually being filmed with an anamorphic lens. The metal element down the center of the lens amplified lens flares and guided the light across the image to achieve the iconic horizontal lens flare. For the $600 to $1600 for a full set of these lenses, it is not a bad purchase, especially if you really wanted this look and have a very tight budget. However, with cheap alternative there are some downsides.
THREE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT FAKE LENSES
No gain in resolution
The big selling point to having anamorphic lenses is the fact that the compression and decompression process actually allows the filmmakers to retain all of the resolution information in the image. Since this is a fake anamorphic lens, there is no compression system, and therefore in order to export at a widescreen aspect ratio of 2.39:1 you will need to crop the image. That’s a bummer, but honestly this is not that big of a deal. Most likely you have already been cropping your image in order to have the widescreen effect. This doesn’t mean your image quality is worse, but in order to achieve the widescreen look you need to delete some pixels at the top and bottom of every frame.
2. Blue Haze
For some reason, and I have a theory, with these lenses whenever I open my aperture wide open (the lowest f/stop) a blue haze floods my image. This blue tint immediately goes away once I close my aperture slightly, but if I want to be truly wide open when filming I will have a blue tint over my image. I think this is caused by the reflective metal strip in the lens. I believe this strip is coated in a blue color to help lights appear bluish when they flare across the lens. When I go wide open with the lens, this effect goes overboard, causing some pollution in my image. It wouldn’t be a big deal if I was shooting a futuristic film where that bluish tint were acceptable, but even if I was I’d want full control over the color on my image.
3. Bokeh Lines
When I was testing the oval shape bokeh, I noticed something strange with my image. When I took a closer look, I realized that in the center of my bokeh was a straight line breaking the oval in two pieces. I soon realized that the line projected in my image was from the reflective metal strip in the lens. This was an odd occurrence that only happened once during my testing. Once I noticed this, I went to a new location with new background lights and it didn't happen again.
All in all, these fake anamorphic lenses from Iron Glass Adaptors were fun and worth it if you are someone who loves horizontal lens flares and wants a cheap alternative to the anamorphic look. These lenses get close to recreating the anamorphic look, but nothing will be quite like the real deal. Before purchasing, I would also look into anamorphic lens adaptors, as those are also well priced and get the job done.
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