How do I make video footage clearer?

What type of camera adaptor would you use to make video footage look like film?

• In this "making of" interview with Monsters director Gareth Edwards, he describes (starting at around 10:55) how they stuck an adaptor on the front of their video camera to make the footage look like it was shot on 35mm. http://www.makingof.com/posts/watch/2488/gareth-edwards-discusses-monsters What kind of an adaptor is he referring to exactly?

• Answer:

  The impressive Mr. Edwards used the Panasonic HVX200 camcorder. This is a good camera,with 3xCCD sensors.  The camera is capable of capturing high (enough) resolution images to make a movie. But the camera uses tiny sensors.  A small sensor means that the camera has a very large depth of field. Everything is in focus. This is great for news-gathering, but not good for story telling. We are used to seeing shallow depth of field in narrative cinema. So the adaptor is a device fitted in front of the camera which attaches to a standard movie or SLR lens, focussing the image onto a ground glass screen.  The screen acts as a proxy for the large film negative. The camera then captures the image from the back-side of the ground glass screen. The resulting image has a shallow depth of field, which is one element of the movie look. I think the movie used the Letus Ultimate. The complete rig would look something like this. The Panasonic camcorder is on the right. The big block in the middle is the Letus adaptor. Adaptors often have motors to vibrate the screen (so any grain in the ground glass screen is not visible.  In front is the 35MM stills lens. The big circular thing is to manually change the lens focus. The camera is focussed on the adaptor.  If you go down this route, you lose autofocus. Another downside is the image is inverted. :-). The raw image from adaptors can be a bit "milky" which needs to be made more contrasty in post. Nowadays lots of people are shooting on DSLRs, which gets rid of the need for an adaptor.  DSLRs have different problems.