PDW-700 Lens & Filter tests

I thought you might find this interesting. We had a DOP in this week for a client who wants to shoot on the PDW-700 for a Drama in Bangladesh.

The reason for the test was to see how different the images would look using different combinations of broadcast lenses, Digi-primes, filters and film primes.

Originally the production team who mostly come from a film background were very keen to use a Depth of field adaptor and PL mounted 35mm cine primes simply because of experience using 35mm PL mounted cine lenses on film. However the this was going to have a large impact on the budget with around £60,000 worth of investment required to buy the cinema lenses and a Pro-35 adaptor.

We also tested Zeiss digiprimes and while they looked incredible, they were very very sharp. I’ll let you decide when you watch the film. I just thought that they looked too sharp especially on HD.

The key objective was trying to emulate the look of film. The tests were preformed using HG3 in the PDW-700 hyper gammas as this gives a large dynamic range with subtle tones.

These were the combinations:

Canon HJ22 clean
Canon HJ21 clean
Canon HJ 22 With Lee soft FX filters
Canon HJ 22 With Black Frost
Canon HJ 22 With nets
Zeiss DigiPrimes 7mm & 40mm
Canon HJ 21 with Lee Soft 1 detail off
Canon HJ 21 with Lee Soft 1 detail - 20 (watch how the charts change in the background)
Canon HJ 21 clean detail -20
P&S Pro35 & 16mm Ultra Prime
P&S Pro 35 & 85mm Ultra Prime

Testing different lens/filter/DOF adaptor combinations on Sony PDW-700 XDCAM HD Camcorder from Den Lennie on Vimeo.