Cine Gear: Images & Items of Interest by Adam Wilt

Assorted curiosities and amusing objects

June 7, 2019

Another year, another Cine Gear. Is there any other show that brings together so many unusual film and video toys?

Camera on a crane — Cinematographers have the best selfie sticks

Dado Vlentic in the ACES Academy tent — Dado Valentic, grading for an audience

The ACES Central grading theater was held in an open, light-blasted tent in B-tank. It may not have been an ideal grading environment given the poor black level control — but what would I know?

Lamborghini camera car — Cinematographers have the best dashcams, like this GSS C516

Gray camera cars — Is there a rule that all camera cars **must** be wrapped in matte gray?

Cine Gear: Images & Items of Interest 1 — The Enola Gay Grenade Co.? Why, colored smoke canisters, of course!

A cable-cam traversing the New York Street Set

Angénieux Optimo 40mm T1.8 prime. Brian Hallett has the story

Shiny Sigma cine prime — Shiny 14mm Sigma cine prime, one of a set of polished-barrel display lenses

Shape lens shades — Shape brings new meaning to “lens shades”

The view through an SLR Magic Hyperprime 35mm T0.95

SLR Magic Micro Primes. Now that Veydra Mini Primes are gone, these are the only dedicated MFT spherical cine-style primes.

SLR Magic 8mm f/4 — SLR Magic’s tiny MFT-mount 8mm f/4 prime (designed for drone work)

The view through the SLR magic 8mm f/4 drone prime, using a GH5

Also in MFT lens news, Chinese company Vazen is launching three MFT-mount 1.8x anamorphics. I didn’t see them, but Matt Allard at NewsShooter did.

Infinity Photo Optical's Michael Bosold shows off a MikroMak "Nelsonian Optics" lens — Infinity Photo Optical‘s Michael Bosold shows off a MikroMak “Nelsonian Optics” lens

MikoMak lens — It’s essentially a deep-focus microscope lens that focuses to infinity

3D printed mockup of Gravity Laboratories‘s Moxie lens motor

Cine Gear: Images & Items of Interest 2 — Moxie app mockup: up to 3 axes of control, via smartphone or handheld unit. $500 / axis. Coming soon on Kickstarter

CUBIX banner — Buried deep inside a building on South Chicago street, CUBIX showed off their workstations

CUBIX workstation — Liquid cooling is the thing: here, one circuit handles CPU and GPU

Dual cooling system — This beefier beast has two separate cooling systems. They share radiator space under the vented top panel

separate GPU and CPU cooling and power — It’s really two systems in one box: a CPU/storage system with its own PSU and cooling, and a GPU expansion chassis with a separate PSU and cooling.

CPU and memory cooling — CPU and memory have their own cooling system

four-GPU cooling system — A different loop cools all four GPUs

Sadly, most CUBIX systems aren’t quite as colorful; transparent piping encourages the growth of bacterial nasties after a while. Production workstations use opaque, un-illuminated cooling systems — but they stay just as cool, even at full throttle.

CMotion's wooden camera — CMotion builds elegant FIZ systems. They’ve been using this wooden camera since before Wooden Camera was a thing

The CineMoves Matrix 4-axis gimbal claims to eliminate gimbal lock. It looked pretty flexible panning and tilting from aimed straight up through straight down, and its control system dynamically assigns the “pan”, “tilt” and “roll” controls to different axis motors depending on orientation, so the controls always feel “upright” and correct. I never saw it lock or tumble, but some of the axes slewed pretty quickly to avoid singularities, and I **might** have seen a slight wobble at one point

Hive Lighting demoed the new Super Hornet 575-C full-color LED

Hive Plasma 1000 — Hive got their start with plasma lights, and plasmas still comprise 20% of sales. Here’s the Plasma 1000 lamphead

Canon's Sumire demo setup — Canon demoed Sumire primes the right way, with pinpoint background lights for pleasing bokeh

Atla Lens Co booth — Atlas Lens Co., makers of Orion anamorphic primes, also had the right idea

Lower East Side street with banner — Coverage isn’t complete without the canonical Lower East Side Street banner shot

Size Matters! — Size **does** matter, according to The Rag Place

cineRT and RatWorksEngineering banners — One sees a variety of graphic styles cheek-by-jowl: here, FOCUSBUG and Ratworks

Lens tattoos — Some people **really** like their lenses!

Disclosure: I visited Cine Gear Expo on my own dime, and none of the vendors portrayed offered me any payments, bribes, free food, or other considerations in return for coverage. Darn it.