When a group of rental house owners and cinematographers got together with some ARRI folks at the NAB in 2003 for a user's group meeting, none could have guessed that this meeting would lead directly to a new product. Born from this meeting and a desire to expand the range of the Ultra Prime lenses, a new wide angle lens was developed by ARRI and Zeiss, the Ultra Prime 8R.

In April of 2005, Bill Bennett, ASC was handed the first prototype of the Ultra Prime 8R lens for tests. This was a fitting honor, as Bill has been instrumental in the conception and specification of this unique lens. Since images speak louder than any specifications we could list here, and since we have all the specifications on the Ultra Prime 8R web page anyway, here a short video clip and some screenshots from this shoot.

Ultra Prime 8R sample footage video clip.

Below some comments and making-of stills by Bennett regarding the motorcycle shoot:

"These Motocross scenes are the best example of how the Ultra Prime 8R can put the viewer right in the middle of the action and of the extreme dynamic look it will give you. Knowing that in previous tests I had already done the “sedate” and safe shooting with the lens of the buildings in downtown LA from the top of the car, the freeway interchange from the front of the car and the hand held material in the train station and the beach, I decided to go all-out and create some very dynamic footage.

We mounted the camera and lens on the back of Alan Padelford’s “Maverick” miniature camera car, built around a Yamaha V-Max motorcycle power plant. The water cooled V-twin engine has a 1,200cc displacement, putting out 120 horsepower. It utilizes a Porsche transaxle and custom off-road rally-car suspension, with Michelin rally tires. The chrome-moly steel tube frame chassis was totally custom built by Alan to join the Yamaha bike frame to the rest of the components. Alan is one of the best camera vehicle drivers in the world. He had driven high speed camera cars for many big racing movies like "Days of Thunder."

Lets just say this… with camera mounted and two people on board… it is very fast! When we were chasing the motocross drivers on the mountain dirt roads, Alan had the machine in a constant 4-wheel drift, steering and pointing the camera using the throttle. That was fantastic, as you can see from the footage. I was riding along, looking at a small LCD video tap monitor. What I was seeing on the monitor was amazing, but when I looked up at the “real world” and saw just how fast we were going, inches from these speeding motocross bikes, drifting right on the edge of a bottomless cliff, it scared the hell out of me! My solution was to look back at the monitor, and just ignore the outside world!

To get the dynamic images you see here, we had to place the lens extremely close to the speeding motorcycles. We had the camera mounted on the end of 6 foot (2 meter)  pipes, attached to the chassis with Speed rail fittings. Placing the camera out away from the camera car chassis allowed Alan to stick the camera up next to and between the riders, just inches from them, to get these extremely aggressive shots.

We shot the lens at T11, with the focus set at 2 meters, (6’ 6”) using a Schneider ND9 filter, with a clear filter in front to protect the ND filter and the lens from rocks. We rolled the ARRIFLEX 435 ES camera at 20 fps, for an intended projection or transfer rate of 24 fps. For some of the shots, we did a speed ramp, while the camera was rolling, from 20 fps to 96 fps. When we were doing the speed ramping, we changed the ND filter to an ND.3 and set the aperture to T5.2. When the camera initially rolled  at 20fps, the internal computer set the shutter angle to 37.5 degrees to compensate for the extra light, giving the “skinny shutter” look to the low frame rate portions of those shots. When I ramped towards 96 fps, the shutter angle automatically compensated until it was 180 degrees at 96 fps. The film stock used was Eastman 5246-250D."

More information on the Ultra Prime 8R can be found at these locations:

• Ultra Prime 8R Web Page
  
• Sample images of the Ultra Prime 8R and an 8 mm fisheye lens
  
• An article that explains the differences between the rectilinear Ultra Prime 8R and a fisheye lens