I want to shoot at 24 fps. The Freewell has an ND anamorphic lens with a choice of built in ND filter.
I can't afford a variety of them at $40 each.
I would think either a 16 or 32 would be best for sunny days in Arizona.
Basically, I'm wondering if it's better to use less ND or more, if not sure.
There’s two ways to look at this.
Full sun is 10 hours out of the day right now so that’s most of the daylight hours.
ND 64 would be what would get you down to 1/50 shutter in full sun in the desert. However, anything less than full sun it will be too much so you will need to bump up the ISO to compensate. However, during golden hour it will likely be way too much and you’ll need to take it off.
ND 32 won’t be enough in full sun but it would get you reasonably close and you’d have to use a little faster shutter which probably won’t make much of a noticeable difference. It will still be perfectly usable in overcast or less than full sun conditions and mid morning/late afternoon. It will fine until you get to sunset conditions at which time it will be too much.
ND 16 will be best during golden hour and sunset but this is a very small percentage of the day.
ND 8 being the lowest version they make is for everything else.
The issue you have is that in twilight conditions you still want the anamorphic but not the ND part. It’s not like a regular ND filter you can just take off when the sun gets low and as far as I can tell they don’t have a just anamorphic version. At the very least you’ll want a lowlight filter and a high light filter.
Preferably I would want a ND 8 and ND 32 personally. In Utah which isn’t that different from Arizona ND 32 is what I use 90% of the time, though I don’t have a ND64.
If you can only do one then maybe you can look at ND 16 as the compromise filter but it will only be the “right” filter for a very short time of the day.