So I have had the GoPro Hero 9 Black, 10 Black and now 11 Black, and I have had the Skyreat 1.33X Anamorphic Lens Mod the whole time and I want to just make a little blurb here. It is 1.2121x in reality, but it still does the trick.
Simple to install
Just like all the other lens mods, it is a simple twist, but you cannot stack other filters so be ready to do some hacks for filters I mention below. It can sometimes rub the Media Mod, but it does not block you, just an annoyance if you are like me and don’t like that friction.
NO: Hypersmooth!; YES: Gimbal!
Hypersmooth will cause warpage and jelly effects like a funhouse mirror, nuke it. Get the Inkee Falcon Plus (only one that allows Media Mod) new for under $100 on eBay and have even more flexibility to do tricks like follow/tracking a subject and smooth pans. It makes the paralax effect look nicer. That’s when you are keeping a distant point in the center and move so things pass in front of the camera or like walking around a subject facing a sunset or walking alongside the subject as they walk.
ND filters are not available
You will realize you really need to fake an ND filter holder to deal with how nuts things will be if you attempt 24fps “cinematic” footage on a sunny day. The ISO doesn’t go low enough to handle this and the Protune flat profile is ungradable trash for this unless you really want to get in on your color grading skills and then see the camera can’t handle that much overexposure.
You can probably get the vinyl peel and stick ones but they risk casting a tint you may be able to fix later. https://www.getfpv.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=stick-on%20filter or try home window film https://gilafilms.com/for-home/gila-heat-control-titanium-static-cling-window-film#product-bottom-tabs
It gets old fast
It is pretty neat to try it at first and for some limited use, you can get cool footage, but it just looks soft focus after a while and black bars remind those of us of a certain age, the era of TV black bars when films were not cropped to fit our lame 4:3 TVs. I didn’t really like it then, but now we have insane monitors that to show the flaws at scale in 4k.
Lens flares are alright
The blue streaks that are the main party trick for anamorphic lenses is here, and it is not bad, but inside you’ll see streaks by windows that look like a smear, not a lens flare.
My settings:
I started with “cinematic” mode and did the following things:
Linear field of view, NO hypersmooth, 30fps with 60fps shutter (helped too many highlights getting blown out), ISO set to auto (usually 100), 4k De-squeezed in Premiere at 1:1.21~ but to get the black bars you remove the clip from timeline, then de-squeeze and re-add it to the timeline. If you don’t do the remove/re-add dance you will chop off the left and right to fill the YouTube canvas.
Ok, to de-squeeze you go to the Adobe Premiere media browser window, click on the video file and select Modify>Interpret Footage>Pixel Aspect Ratio>D1/DV NTSC Widescreen 16:9 (1.2121).
I’ll probably come back to this with more footage when my gimbal arrives this week, but for now I hope this helps someone.
