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There are a few different types available, but with all the options available, from the cheapest to the fully-fledged studio mattebox, how do you know which is the best value matte box for you? First of all it’s important to understand why you want to use a mattebox in the first place. The ability to use multiple filters and rotate them is incredibly useful. The rectangular filters used introduce you to the realm of professional cinematography filtration. From color correction to soft FX, there are endless options available. A commonly used filter in filming is the 85. This corrects the color temperature when using tungsten balanced film in daylight. Although film is rarely used these days, some people choose to use a color correction filter when using tungsten light with digital cameras. Many digital sensors are balanced towards daylight and perform better when tungsten light is filtered towards 5600K. The negative side of this is a loss of light. Polarizers are also very useful. As well as making the sky look nicer, they can control reflections in glass, such as a car window. Sometimes you want to see a person’s face, and sometimes you would like to have a reflection of trees or buildings the vehicle is passing. Neutral density filters are a great way to reduce light without changing the quality of the light. They are very useful when you are trying to achieve a shallow depth of field. By reducing the amount of light hitting the lens, you can choose a wider aperture with changing ISO or shutter time. Graduated neutral density filters are also available. These are very useful when you only want to affect a certain part of the image. With a high quality Studio Matte Box you can rotate and adjust the position of the filer to where you want it. Though you can buy cheap matteboxes, a good quality one with many features may prove to be the best value mattebox in the long term. Good quality matte boxes will last for years (or even decades). Cheaper ones are made from plastic and rubber. The high end ones are made materials such as carbon fiber and aluminum. The better ones come with flags, and sometimes mattes. Both flags and mattes do the basic thing, which is preventing flare in the lens. Flags can be adjusted, and mattes come in various sizes to match a range of lenses. Often there are mounting points for French Flags. French Flags are useful for blocking light that a matte or flag isn’t covering. Another issue to factor in when choosing a matte box is lens coverage. Wider lenses require a wider matte box to prevent vignettes. A vignette is when the lens’s field of view is wider than something that connects to the lens. It is usually seen as darkened corners in the image. The better the mattebox, the wider the lens it can cover with causing a vignette. Larger sensors require a wider field of view for a given focal length. So a full frame camera will need a wider matte box than an APS sized sensor. Whatever type of matte box you decide to purchase, it’s important to think about where you are, and where you are going to be. Are you working on small projects and planning to keep doing that? Maybe you are working on bigger and bigger jobs. If so, a high quality product might be a better investment, as it will save you replacing a low end product with a high end product at a later date.
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