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Filed under: Cameras •Post Production •Web Video •

Shooting Indy Cars with the GT35pro

What can you do about this noticeable texture of the ground glass when using a zoom lens? Well the first thing you can do is don’t forget to turn on the motor for the vibration of the glass like I did several times! That’s part of the whole point of having a spinning or vibration type adapter. The movement on the ground glass helps to hide the texture as well as any dirt particles that may have collected on it. Newer versions of the GT35pro have a tally light that shows if the unit is on or off. A huge plus. Another things is to add noise reduction.

While noise reduction can often be a God-send in certain situations it does reduce the overall sharpness of an image. In the case of my little Indy car shoot it was acceptable to me and helped reduce the texture left behind when working at the long end of the zoom lens. I used a pretty aggressive setting in the Noise Reduction plug-in of Magic Bullet Steady. I didn’t do a lot of experimenting with the different setting nor did I try any other noise reduction plug-ins. It’ll be interesting to see how much sharper I can make the image while still reducing the texture with more tweaking.

Still frame with NO noise reduction applied

Same frame with a high setting to reduce the ground glass texture

And speaking of sharpness ... the most difficult thing of all when shooting with the 20GT rig is keeping focus. In fact that’s probably the most difficult thing when shooting with 35mm lens adapters in general. I did a shoot recently with a Letus Extreme mounted on a Panasonic HPX170 and it has an amazingly handy focus assist feature with a little histogram-type display and a focusing bar that both work when using an adapter. They make it much easier to nail good focus in HD. With the HV20 there is only a focus assist function that magnifies the center of the image and while that helps it is still hard to get it just right, especially when using a long zoom lens. To make matters worse I was shooting out in bright, direct sunlight. Thank goodness for the Hoodman!

It was great fun hanging out at Barber Motorsports Park and shooting the Indy car practice. Let’s hope next year I can go back for the actual race that they might have on the 2010 schedule. In the meantime tune in to the Indy 500 this Sunday!

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amanda, not sure if it would work or not but you can check here: http://gt35pro.blogspot.com/

Posted by Scott Simmons  on  08/18  at  07:23 PM

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