By Max Duncan and technical editor Matt Allard:
With anamorphic shooting becoming very fashionable many users have been looking for ways to shoot the format easily. At BIRTV in Beijing, Mitch Gross from Convergent Design ran through the latest features for anamorphic shooting available on the Odyssey 7/7Q and 7Q+ external 4K recorders. These have advanced options for viewing and recording an anamorphic image when hooked up to the modern 4K cameras like the Sony a7S and Panasonic GH4.
The latest options include additional anamorphic de-squeeze settings and a centre extraction mode. The centre extraction mode de-squeezes and magnifies the centre portion of image, transforming wider letterbox footage into the more common anamorphic formats for viewing – this replaces having to tape off parts of your screen to adjust for the aspect ratio. The adjusted image is sent to video outputs but the recording itself remains unaffected.
Mitch also shows how the anamorphic functions can be used with the Hyper Zoom mode, peaking, false colour,waveform and vectorscope functions. These features make the 7Q+ well suited to Anamorphic shooting.
Center Extraction modes:
1.33x (1.78:1) Stretches center 4:3 image to cover 16:9 frame
2.0x (2.39:1) 2.0x stretch with image zoom & crop to 2.39:1
2.0x (2.67:1) 2.0x stretch with image zoom to 2.67:1
For more information go to the Convergent Design website.
