Why It’s Better to Rent an Atlas Anamorphic Lens
Anamorphic lenses are essential assets in the film industry that have become a favorite for filmmakers and professional cinematographers. These lenses capture wide landscape shots without distorting faces, even with extreme close-ups. Their ultra-wide rectangular aspect ratios, oval bokeh, and long horizontal flares add drama to close-up shots, making them an ultimate go-to for professional filmmakers.
An Atlas Anamorphic Lens is one of the various types of anamorphic lenses filmmakers can rent or buy. For example, renting these lenses allows you to create high-quality footage from their features, like the oval bokeh. It also saves you money from insurance, maintenance and storage expenses that come with ownership. This article will cover the common uses of anamorphic lenses and why you should rent Atlas Anamorphic lenses.
Common Uses for Anamorphic Lenses
Cinematographers can use anamorphic lenses to capture more comprehensive images on film than traditional lenses. Since these lenses have a super wide aspect ratio of 2.39:1, professionals in the film industry can use them for feature films, commercials, and documentaries.
Feature Films
In the early 1950s, filmmakers attempted to make movies more interesting by creating the widescreen. Film companies believed that this new perspective would entice people to return to watching cinemas rather than staying at home to watch television.
Traditional widescreens covered the top and bottom of the 35 mm widescreens, and the cropped footage wasted a portion of each frame. The small frame appeared grainy and had poor resolution when projected on screens.
Anamorphic lenses use the entire 35 mm frame, and the horizontal axis is compressed by a factor of two (2x) so that the images can fill the full height of the frame. The edges of the frame looked dreamy, adding a cinematic feeling for the audience. The audience enjoyed the footage naturally without compression because of the careful processing.
Filmmakers now love producing feature films with anamorphic lenses because they can capture wide-angle images with a shallow depth of field. This creates the epic cinematic Hollywood feeling that people long for by making the images in the films exceptional and intriguing.
Commercials
Anamorphic lenses generate a horizontally stretched flare that creates an aesthetically pleasing visual. Lens flares occur when the sensors and the lens capture light that can make unique footage. Their oval bokeh also lets the lenses capture out-of-focus lights in the background footage.
Anamorphic lenses’ horizontal flares and oval bokeh features add appealing aesthetic and artistic footage that can be used in commercials. Horizontal flares and oval bokeh features in anamorphic lenses can be highly beneficial for shooting commercials requiring aesthetically pleasing footage to attract a large audience.
Documentaries
Anamorphic lenses’ aspect ratio compliments their 1.33x magnification, which doesn’t distort the footage but increases the depth of field. The magnification effect makes footage in the foreground appear as if it’s bursting off-screen and away from the background. This illusion allows filmmakers to create documentaries that seem to bring the film to life and enable viewers to enjoy real-life experiences and factual information about the documentaries.
Advantages of Renting an Atlas Anamorphic Lens
The benefits of renting an Atlas Anamorphic Lens include managing costs, the flexibility to test various lenses, and the quality.
Costs
Generally, anamorphic lenses are practically expensive due to their complex build, and this can limit your production project. Atlas Anamorphic lenses come with various technical specifications, and purchasing all these lenses can be uneconomical and expensive.
Renting an Atlas Anamorphic lens can help you save money and avoid other costs like maintenance and insurance for owning the lens. For instance, you only spend money on renting the lens if you get a high-paying project, which allows you to determine how much you spend according to the production budget.
When you complete your project, you return the lenses to the rental house and don’t have to worry about equipment insurance, storage, and maintenance issues costs that come with owning those lenses.
Quality of an Atlas Anamorphics Lens
Atlas Anamorphic lenses are convenient, flexible, and adaptable, with the best modern and vintage features. Renting these lenses allows you to test the qualities of different lenses to create high-resolution films and produce intriguing footage. For example, renting allows you to use the lenses’ contrasting horizontal lens flares for multiple projects.
The standard professional anamorphic lenses’ horizontal and bokeh features allow filmmakers to make unique and aesthetically appealing films. Renting Atlas Anamorphic lenses enables you to test the quality of the lenses for more light or dark footage, unlike owning one, where you try the qualities of one lens.
Variety
Renting anamorphic lenses gives you various options, such as using different lenses for specific film projects that ownership might not offer. For example, the new Atlas Anamorphic Mercury series has a 1.5x full-frame lens, while the Orion series has a 2x full-frame lens. Owning one of these lenses may limit your options for various projects requiring covering different fields of view.
Renting allows you to choose between the Orion series to capture wide-angle images with 2x the horizontal field of view, or the Mercury series with a 1.5x full-frame lens. Renting enables you to try out various anamorphic lenses and their different optical traits, which would be challenging if you bought one set of lenses without trying multiple options.
Conclusion
Renting an Atlas Anamorphics lens is cost-effective because you only have to spend money when you have a project and a production cost budget. This allows you not to worry about other expenses like insurance, maintenance, and storage. Plus, renting allows you to explore the lenses’ different qualities and varieties for fantastic footage.
Unlike owning an anamorphics lens, renting gives you options to gain experience working with various to know their strengths and weaknesses. At Cinevo, we’re a camera rental house offering production support, crew, and studio space to ensure you have a great shoot.
Our rental camera equipment is high quality, and we rent cameras, lenses, trucks, audio, and other equipment for your next film project. You can rent from our Los Angeles and Phoenix locations, but we also ship nationwide. Contact us today and find the best equipment for your next film production project.