At CineGear on Friday, June 1st, Sony will be presenting the feature film Annihilation at the Paramount Theater. Before that film Sony will be screening a handful of short films shot on the new VENICE camera, including a new version of the one by Sony Artisan Jeff Berlin (see this article for more about how the film was made). 
 
This film was initially shot to screen at the Sony booth at NAB in HDR on their large C-LED display. “When I was on set, shooting specifically for that C-LED screen, I was framing just for the dimensions of that screen, so the aspect ratio I was framing for was 1.90:1 or just a touch wider than a typical 16x9 display. Now that the same film will screen at CineGear in the theater, I wanted to deliver to Sony a new version of the film in the wider and more cinematic, 2.40:1 aspect ratio.”
 
Berlin shot the film, full frame on the VENICE with Servicevision Scorpio Full Frame anamorphic lenses, so he knew he had the material already in the can, the only question was framing. “Since I wasn’t really looking outside of my 1.90:1 markers on my director’s monitor, I wasn’t concerned with what was outside those lines, so I went back into the raw footage to see if a wider render was even possible, and luckily, it was.
 
Since Technicolor on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood had my files in their system, they were able to copy and paste the color grade settings from the previous version into the new wider version and send us a DPX in the new aspect ratio. “I know I was lucky this time,” says Berlin, ‘but it was also a good lesson to go into every shoot thinking about all the potential ways a project might be played, projected, screened. I was so focused on nailing an HDR version for the 16x9 C-LED that I wasn’t thinking about a potential CineGear projection in a wider format. Had I thought that far ahead, I probably would have shot for 2.40:1 keeping the whole frame safe and cropped in to 1.90:1 in post for the NAB screening. Lesson learned.”