Konvas Film Gate

We have a different interchangeable film gates for Konvas cameras. All of them are brand new, and can be used both with standard cameras and with modified (reg pin added) ones. To be honest, I don't have a Konvas with registration pin. So, position of pin hole was calculated on standard Konvas accordingly to film position.

You can change the gate without any tools. Just pull an original gate down and toward yourself. It will pop-up. Replace it with other gate, and that is all. One minute operation.

One word of caution about modification of cameras to the Super35 (or other silent) format: it is, strictly speaking, NOT ENOUGH to simply change out the aperture plate and ground glass. STRICTLY speaking, the lens mount should be modified so as to recenter the optical axis on the new, wider aperture. In practical terms, this means shifting the mount laterally by an amount equal to one-half the increase in aperture width. For a lot of purposes, you could sorta kinda get away without this bit of finesse.

Another warning. Take into account the "individuality" of the Konvas cameras. Mirror reflex shutter of certain Konvases can hit the back of a new gate (not native to the camera), unless some additional machining is done. I would recommend to look at the back of your original gate(s), and see if there has been any additional machining adjustments done. Do the same adjustments to your new gate, and then mount the gate, and carefully, by hand, turn the mechanism and shutter. If you hear or feel the shutter hitting or scraping against the gate, you have some more filing to do. If you just stick the new gate in and turn the motor on at 24 fps, you run the risk of cracking/smashing the mirror shutter. The second thing to take into account is that new gates may need to be adjusted heightwise (due to the same "individuality"). (Contributed by Anders Banke)

Though the note above was made in January 2002, and we sold dozens of the gates, we didn't have any complaints with our gates yet. But I still feel myself obliged to warn you about this.

We produce few different gates:

Wide-screen (anamorphic) gate

Window size: 18,7x22mm. Printed image aspect ratio will be1:2.35. Used to shoot wide screen movies using anamorphic lenses. Sound track remains unexposed.

Full aperture (Super-35) gate

Window size: 18,7x24.9mm. Aperture ratio is 1.33. Used to shoot silent movies with maximum exposure field. Current Super-35 gate ('S') is Full Aperture one in fact. So, we'll rename next bunch of them to "F". Super-35 gate will have normal height and full width.

Masked gate

Window size: 13,2x22mm. Aperture ratio is 1.66. Used to shoot wide-screen movies without anamorphic lenses.

2-Perf gate

We made it to be full-width (silent) and half-height. To use it, you need to modify your Konvas camera to pull 2 perf per frame instead of regular 4 perf. Some discussions took place earlier on matter of cost efficiency of this 2-perf approach (saving on film may result in loses at production later), so it is up to you to decide if you want to play with this gate.

We don't make these gates anymore. I decided to keep this page as history.