HD-DSLR: the Lens debate…

The HD-DSLR lens debate is ongoing, and ever changing at the moment. We have been watching as better solutions are announced, and then it all changes again.

When this all began early 2009, early adopters used what they had in their bag: Canon lenses, and they made excellent pieces, simply working around the prevalent issues. The first being that the Canon 5dMk2 firmware did not allow for manual exposure during motion recording. This immediately led to the trend of mounting non-Canon EF lenses onto the camera, such as Nikon AI, and Zeiss glass which all offered a physical aperture ring on the lens. This meant manual control, but it also created a myth that old or alternative glass was perhaps better than the Canon.

The new Zeiss 35mm primes that were released last year with Nikon mounts soon became default gear: great glass, manual aperture ring, and longer focus pull. This latter point refers to the short distance of focus ring travel between closest focus and infinity which most modern (Canon EF) lenses are designed to have: for stills shooters, this is ideal, but for motion, it is hard to wrangle, when you want small / or slow adjustments.

At the beginning of 2010, the Canon 7d with it’s movie-centric design was released, and it’s sensor being small enough to be fully covered by traditional motion picture lenses got some people thinking. First off was Hot Rod Cameras in LA, who disassembled the camera, removed the mirror, and installed a PL mount to take cine lenses. Of course this mean that the optical viewfinder was useless, but since all the cine work used live view, it wasn’t a problem.

Then came the realisation by Cine lens manufacturers that they could re-engineer existing designs, or develop new ones for a full frame 35mm stills format. A new market was born, and the first entrants are again Zeiss.

The Zeiss CP.2 lens range is an “economical” solution for most film makers providing the much needed cine-centric architecture: matching physical size, matching filter diameter, matching glass color, almost all matching maximum apertures (T stops), a geared aperture, and focus ring, long traveling focus pull, cine focus direction, cine style markings, and more.

There is also a zoom on the way from Zeiss that will cover the 7d and maybe 1dMk4?

These Zeiss lenses also feature interchangeable lens mounts between PL and Canon EF, and supposedly Nikon F in the near future.

Zeiss are not alone in making lenses for this market, all with interchangeable lens mounts. In fact, there seems to have been an awakening in the lens and camera manufacturing industry around the world, that consumers demand this interchangeability. You see this starting at the consumer end and finishing with the extreme high end pro.

People have been testing all kinds of adapted glass on these cameras, including stills 35mm, medium format, and more recently cine lenses. They have been trying lenses from all brands, and all vintages. Perhaps it’s because traditional motion picture cinematography has been captured on film, and much of it’s look can be baked into the shot that this has been appealing.

Note that much of the context for not using Canon lenses for follow focus is the short focus range and the lack of hard stops at the end of the focus ranges. This has necessitated the use of new manual follow focus units that you can create lock-off hard stops. This ability to wrap around the Canon systems traditional mechanical cine gear requires a totally different lens housing design. Crucially, it is important to note that no one is criticising the optics, or electronic integration, or ability to shoot world class stills with Canon EF glass.

So while there is currently a movement to test and try every kind of lens imaginable, old or new, I have some reservations about this idea, based on history from the stills world.

The transition from film to digital in the stills world was ten years ago. In the early 2000s, pro grade stills solutions were being sold at affordable prices: Canon D30 and viable medium format digital backs.

As time went on, everyone quickly realised that examining images on screen at 100% in Photoshop, and then the ability to make huge enlargements from these digital files would show up every weakness of the optical system. Not only that, but the sensors were beginning to out resolve the lenses.

The next hard lesson was “garbage in – garbage out”. At the time, the sensors were good, but not magical like they can be today. The latitude was narrower, rendering in the shadows was poor, high ISO was next to impossible. The more low contrast and lit your original image was, the safer you post production would be. You didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so you aimed to get the cleanest, flattest, sharpest, most optically correct RAW file you could.

Given the compressed (jpg like) output you get from the motion capture in the current HD-DSLRs, you need to get it perfect in camera every time, because your latitude for error is very narrow.

So my question is why purposely degrade your “RAW” image with older, less corrected, adapted lenses such as the Nikon AI, or pre-digital lens generation. I believe the best choice is the best of the current, new generation digitally corrected lenses from Canon, Nikon or Zeiss, whether they be stills or cine versions.

Within the last weeks we have been hearing murmurings of remote follow focus with Canon lenses using in camera control, both from Canon, and from third parties (watch the video). So that does mean that stills guys with all their existing Canon lenses can potentially shoot pro grade footage within the next twelve months, if not quite soon, since the technological solutions seem to be there now.

This then seems to rough out the lie of the land for the future of HD-DSLR lenses: Canon glass for some, Cine lenses for others, because I have a feeling that shooting with these (pictured below) must be amazing !!!!

UPDATE, 30 May: A point I may not have emphasised is that in the stills world, many have complained that much of the stills glass is not up to the resolution of the sensor. Some have observed pulling more out of the same sensor but with much better glass from adapted medium / large format lenses. Based on this, the assumption has been that if you could mount the highly engineered cine glass on these cameras then you would achieve some significant gains. The logic is that if its a case of garbage in-garbage out, then we should be focused on mounting the best quality glass we can on our cameras rather than playing around with old outdated lenses.

nb: some of the new Canon lens designs, notably the 17mm, 24mm MK2 T/S has been tested on medium format sensors, and compared favorably with their native format lenses such as the Schneider and Rodenstocks.