Personal View site logo
50 mm in academy ratio - Hitchcock / Ozu with a GH2
  • 27 Replies sorted by
  • Mmmh...now I've found this on reduser: In FF35 photography, that has traditionally been a 50mm lens. In 35mm cine, it would be a 35mm lens though in the past, most Hollywood directors thought that it was still the 50mm lens (Hitchcock insisted that most of "Vertigo" and "Psycho" be shot on a 50mm lens, but only "Vertigo" was shot in FF35, i.e. VistaVision, where the 50mm would be "normal" in perspective.) To some extent, part of the problem was also that most directors started out in the silent era back then where the 4-perf 35mm Full Aperture was 1.33 and had a longer diagonal than later when cropping to 1.85 became common and the focal length had to shorten a bit to compensate if you wanted the same diagonal view.

    So Psycho seems to be shooted with 35mm lens!

    Other note:

    As for why old-time Hollywood cinematographers called a 50mm lens "normal" for both FF35 and 35mm cine photography, I think that was just a bit of mental laziness on their part, just applying ideas from still photography directly into movie photography. It's also probably because the 50mm lens was the most commonly built & available lens for early cinematography, maybe because it was made by the same companies making still lenses. Though keep in mind that old movies were 4x3 until the mid 1950's so the diagonal was a bit longer than later when movies were cropped to 1.85, so a 50mm lens in the old Academy days felt slightly wider-angle than it did in the later masked widescreen period.

  • You can never go wrong with a 50mm ;D