Kays Alatrakchi wrote:Anamorphic lenses came about as a solution to a problem inherent with physical film and cameras at the time, it was an ingenious solution at that.
Actually, anamorphic and other wide screen technologies were mostly desperate attempts to save the Hollywood industry of the late 1960s in the wake of TV. Studio executives who can't think well in purely artistic ways can only come up with more technical solutions... But what ultimately got the masses back to the big screen was good stories, when a new generation of creative filmakers like Scorcese, Coppola or Spielberg emerged. Most of their movies were shot in 1:1.85 with spherical lenses.
Still, widescreen movie can offer a quite immersive experience when well exploited. But, like Australian Image implied, this is only relevant when viewed on an actual wide screen ! There's absolutely no point of using it if the end diffusion is on small 16/9 screens, or even most TV screens, you'll only end up with a cropped image and awkward framings for most shots.
Like I said, we already can make very powerful and emotional movies with spherical lenses. So unless our video will have stunning visuals that will be viewed on a theatre's big screen, I advise to save our money and shoot spherical. And if our video
does have stunning visuals to be shown on big screen, then it should deserve a proper production with a sufficient budget to rent what's needed.
Even if you absolutely want to use the p4k with anamorphic lenses, there's still a way around by using the 4:3 frame guides and crop in post, sure you won't get full 4K image but you will still have a very good over 3K image, isn't it already quite cool ? I agree it would be better to have crop mode to record less useless pixels, and the squeezed image while framing might be annoying, but hey, it's only 1300$...