Depth of Field Adapter on Steroids

Tons o Glass 0 Class wrote:

Matt over at DIY Perks on YouTube has made a "next-level" camera rig. It's awesome and is very much in the spirit of this forum. Someone posted about it here yesterday but perhaps because the video contained sponsored content the post/link was removed; so instead of linking directly I'll have to let you search for yourself (but maybe DPR will feature it on their own soon given how rad it is)!

He took a giant barrel lens from an old episcope (a Ross 17" / 432mm f/5 - I bet Bosun Higgs has one of these somewhere), and fabricated a housing with focusing capabilities and a focusing screen coupled with Fresnel lenses that you then record / image with a normal camera/lens. The resulting image in terms of depth of field and field of view is like shooting with a 37.4mm f/0.43 lens on full frame, which is of course unheard of. His sample videos and images are stunning! They're not pixel-perfect, but they're certainly very cinematic and more than good enough for pleasing-looking 4K captures.

I've experimented with this kind of thing before , although on a smaller scale with nowhere near as much elegance/completeness and with results that pale in comparison. There are also a couple of niche products that have since been discontinued that work in the same way (one such product is Redrock Micro's M2 Depth of Field Adapter Kit).

I feel like the Fresnel lenses and diffusion material involved will limit resolution, so the bigger the imaging area is, the better it may perform. But as the rig gets hilariously large, it would start to get unwieldy pretty quickly hehe. Maybe Matt has already found the sweet spot.

I'm inspired to build a rig like his, but the exact lens he used doesn't look easy to find. Whether I'm scaling the rig up or down, what other lenses would be good candidates for this kind of rig that are cheap and/or readily available?

Quick question to thread follows, can a bellows like this be a starting point for trying out the kind of thing in this thread?

https://www.ebay.com/sch/625/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=%28double%2C+dual%29+bellows&LH_TitleDesc=0

Of course, this is terribly expensive, but I am thinking more generically, starting with something that already has movement of rear, mid and front, and think a monorail setup could be good. I am thinking 4s5 would be best for experimenting as well.