So, I decided to put my money where my mouth is, get together a bunch of lenses, and see what all the hype was about.  I had been talking with my buddy Chris Loughran about doing this, and he definitely wanted to hop aboard and work on this.  He had more experience with higher end lenses than I did and was pretty sure I’d see a big difference across the range of lenses we were going to test.  Previously, I had never really shot with any cinema lenses, and only worked with video specific lenses (Canon and Fujinon zooms) and then still lenses (with 35mm adapters, DSLRs, and then large-sensor video cameras).  I was certainly aware of the mechanical advantages of the cinema-specific lenses, but was more interested in the differences we could SEE in the shots.

I thought that this would be a good opportunity to get together some Boston-area shooters, so I invited a bunch of guys over to partake in some food, beers, and lens testing.

Frame grab from Rick Macomber

The Test

(Disclaimer #1: Food and beer prevailed at this get-together.  If you are looking for a really thorough, highly scientific test, you will not find it here.  We were able to make some conclusions, but for the most part, we were just hanging out and having a good time.)

Chris and I had 2 or 3 setups we wanted to do and run each lens through the same “scene”.  But (see above), due to too much frivolity we only got through one setup before we decided to call it a day.  Our setup involved 2 “actors” and went from a medium-wide to a close-up shot.  Our somewhat uninspired lighting, was fairly flat, but allowed us to see more detail in the scene.  We ran the scene through with each of the 9 lenses a couple times (mostly re-doing if focus was ever botched).

Frame grab from Rick Macomber

The Lenses

We had a wide-array of lenses ranging in price from $450 to about $18k.  With the exception of one lens, all were either 35mm focal length primes, or zooms set to 35mm.  Here was our lineup from most expensive to least expensive.

-Cooke s4 35mm f2.0 (I believe retail is about $18,000)

-Zeiss Super Speed 35mm f1.3 (not in production anymore, I think they are available used for about $5-7k)

-Zeiss CP2 35mm f2.1 ($3900)

-Olympus 14-35 f2.0 ($2299)

-Nikon 17-35 f2.8 ($1699)

-Canon 17-55 f2.8 ($1099)

-Nikon AIS 35mm f1.4 (approx $899, but this was a de-clicked version, which would cost more)

-Sigma 30mm f1.4 ($489)

-Tamron 17-50 f2.8 ($459)

With the exception of the Sigma, Tamron and Canon lenses, all other lenses could be aperture adjusted on the lens (or in the camera).  We mounted the EOS mount lenses to a 7D to set aperture on each.  We did this test at f4 on each lens (as that seemed the most appropriate for this scene), but in comparing the waveforms on each lens, found we needed to open to about 3.5/3.8 on the EOS lenses to get the same exposure.

Frame grab from Rick Macomber

The Camera

We used my Panasonic AF-100 to test all of these lenses.

(Disclaimer #2: Okay, I am aware that this camera has a much smaller sensor than the Super35 or FF35 image that most of these lenses can cover.  I am aware that because of this I am using more of the sweet spot of each lens and am not able to assess the edge sharpness between each of these lenses.  Yes, I know that.  But this is the camera that Chris and I use day in and day out, and so we wanted to see the results on what we knew and what we used.  Might things have looked different on an F3 or Alexa.  Absolutely.  I am aware of that.)

Everything was run to a KiPro Mini (awesome little device) recording ProRes from the SDI jack on the AF100.  We used a Hot Rod PL adapter for our 3 PL lenses, and Lumix, Novoflex and Fotodiox adapters for the other lenses.  Camera was set as follows (for all you AF-100 users):

Detail/V-Detail: -3

Chroma: -2

Master Ped: -2

Gamma: Low

Knee: Low

Matrix: Norm2

I don’t tend to shoot super-flat, and a somewhat more baked-in look is better for 90% of my work.  Since I didn’t want to color correct any of this (to retain the original quality) I set it this way.  I think a little more contrast could be added to this though for final output.

The Results

So here’s the video I put together which shows how these lenses stood up.  Again, not the most thorough or scientific thing in the world but whatever.

(Disclaimer #4: Obviously viewing this on Vimeo, or even the downloadable version is not the BEST way to see the results.  We all know this.  Blah blah blah.)

So there you have it.  A $5k camera hooked up to a wide-range of lenses.  As we were shooting I kept looking at the monitor and thinking that I was hardly seeing any difference at all.  In editing, the differences became more clear, but I found it hard to even be able to SAY what made one lens better than the others.  I think Chris and I both agreed that the Cooke looked the best (and maybe we were skewed by the price tag), but it had a richness and detail without appearing overly sharp.  I also really liked the look of the Zeiss Super Speed, which probably looked the most different to me than any of the other lenses.  It’s a much older lens and I often hear people talk about the look of “vintage” lenses, and I sort of get that now.  It looked soft and warm and looked really nice on the skin.  It also appeared to bring out the most shadow detail of all the lenses.  Maybe I’m just not that picky, but I didn’t think any of these looked bad, and for most projects (especially web-based ones) I doubt any of these would hinder the end results.

That said, a lot of what you’re buying in the higher end (especially cinema-specific lenses) is a mechanical advantage.  They feel better made, they have long focus throws with smooth focus and aperture rings, are color matched across their set (which is a big deal), etc.  Chris, who was pulling focus on all these shots, actually thought the Cooke, which had the largest focus throw of the bunch, was almost harder to use, because the shot required more than 2 full rotations of the follow focus.  The Tamron and Canon and the shortest throw and he ended up just eye-balling it, but nailed it pretty easily.  The Super Speed’s throw was somewhere in the middle which worked out well.

So this post is getting really long so I’ll stop.  But before I end I leave you with 2 fun BTS videos that were put together by Rick Macomber and Michael Murie.  Nowadays it seems you can’t do anything without a BTS, but I appreciate you guys doing this, and it makes us seem act marginally more prepared than we actually were.

Thanks to all who participated: Chris Loughran, Keith Wasserman, Brandon Vincent, Rick Macomber, Michael Murie, Ben Pender-Cudlip, and Matt Stapleton.  And thanks to Rule Boston Camera for giving us a deal on the rental on some of these lenses.

I have always been a little weary of whether I could even view 3-D properly.  You know those pictures that are supposed to pop out at you if you look at them the right way?  I have never achieved that effect, despite much time spent staring and concentrating.  Apparently my eyes (I think they call it binocular vision) just won’t produce that image.  And earlier 3-D technology was the same way for me, never really popping out the way people sitting next to me said it would.  But I knew that the technology had improved so I figured I’d check it out.

As far as I could tell the 3-D in Avatar DID work for me.  While I never felt that the characters were sitting in my lap or that I wanted to reach out to try to touch what I was seeing, I did see images emerging from the 2-D space.  I would say, though, that it took me about 10-15 minutes of the film to settle into “how” to view the film, and I felt myself getting a little headache at the beginning.  Long story short (as I don’t want to make this a review of Avatar), the 3-D was cool, but I left the theater feeling that it did not greatly enhance my viewing experience.  If felt a little gimmicky to me.

Now I don’t want to sound like some antiquated techno-phobe.  I am far from that.  I LOVE new technology in the video field, and I try to embrace and use new tools as early as possible.  I think, for the most part, advances in video imaging have really increased the viewing experience, as well as my enjoyment of producing these images.  I just feel that 3-D is one of those things that does NOT need to become the norm.  I know when HD came out, I looked at it as the holy grail, and a VERY expensive acquisition format, and now I have been producing at least 85% of my content in HD for the last few years, and shooting in some flavor of HD for about 5 years.  But I look at 3-D and hope this does not become as prevalent in the tv/movie world as HD.  Several tv networks are starting to build and roll out 3-D channels, and camera companies are starting to design 3-D rigs.  Panasonic has developed this 3-D camera at a relatively affordable $21K.

So why don’t I like this?  Well last night I turned on the Grammy Awards for a few minutes, just in time for the tribute to the late, great Michael Jackson.  Right before the song they said to put on your 3-D glasses, and a little icon reminder appeared in the lower corner.  Well, as it turns out, I don’t have a pair of 3-D glasses?  Do you?  So I sat and watched what I dubbed as “No-D” as a blurry Celine Dion and then many other famous singers came on the screen.  My nice HD plasma screen suddenly looked like crap.

Basically I don’t want to have to wear glasses to watch tv.  Many people already need some sort of corrective lenses, but they probably don’t want to have to put on additional glasses to view 3-D content.  Can they make 3-D TVs that don’t require glasses?  I don’t know.  But either way I am not sure I really need to feel THAT connected to my television.  I imagine some content would probably be neat in 3-D but I don’t think I need to feel like Al Roker is popping out of my television set.

While it would probably be interesting to shoot some 3-D footage for specific projects, I don’t think it needs to be the norm for all production.  I imagine the equipment and post-processing load would be greatly increased, and I have yet to experience all the merits of 3-D.  Will it become as ubiquitous as HD is now?  I don’t know, time will tell.

I would love to hear your comments though on this issue.

My friend was working as production manager for documentary filmmaker Alla Kovgan on a film they were shooting this week in New London, CT.  They brought in a DP from Armenia (Mko Malkhasyan) who Alla had worked with previously on her STUNNING dance-film Nora, which they shot in Africa.  I am a huge techno-dweeb, especially when it comes to cameras, and they were shooting on the RED One, a new-ish camera that I had only worked with for a tiny bit before but am planning to use on an upcoming project, so I volunteered to go down and help out on the shoot for a day and learn a bit about working with the camera.

The RED One came out about two years ago, but was very hard to get your hands on until about a year ago.  It shoots in a very high resolution called 4K, which is more than five times the resolution of my EX-1 (or the Canon 7D), and also shoots RAW images, meaning that you have an immense amount of control over the image after it is shot.  While this is certainly true with more “conventional” formats, that you can tweak your footage to give it a different look, there is more control in doing so with RAW images without adding unwanted artifacts or noise to the image.  Basically it is an ideal format for filmmaking.  The RED also allows you to use cinema lenses, which are typically the best quality lenses available.  For this production they had rented an Angenieux Optimo 24-290 zoom lens.  The thing was HUGE, longer than the camera itself, weighed about 25 pounds, and has a price tag of (I believe) close to $100K.

I drooled over the camera for several minutes, but then it was time to get to work, and it was great to do so with these very thoughtful filmmakers.  There was a decent sized crew, maybe 18 people, and the talent was about 25 middle school students.  We were shooting them on the boardwalk of Ocean Beach playing games like “telephone”, “ring around the rosey” and “red light, green light”.  (I have to confess I don’t know exactly what the film is about.  I know it was commissioned by Connecticut College’s art department in relation to a performance piece they were doing.)  It was quickly apparent that Alla is a VERY detail-oriented director, and she seemed to have every shot clearly mapped out ahead of time.  She did an excellent job of managing all the kids, some of whom got a little unruly at times after doing several takes of a shot.

I was delighted to see that the camera itself function, more or less, like other cameras.  Since it is basically a big computer, it is a little more menu-driven (instead of having a lot of external switches for normal controls) than some cameras, but I have grown fairly accustomed to that.  I do not think you’d need an IT-degree to figure it out, as long as you are aware of most camera terminology.  There was one problem at the beginning of the day regarding getting audio from an on-camera microphone (which they just wanted as a reference track, as they had the audio recorded separately by the sound guy).  I looked at it with Mko (whose thick Armenian accent was a little hard to understand), and when we still couldn’t figure it out, I got out my iphone and got on the RED User Forum, a great online community of questions and answers regarding the RED camera.  I found there was a little bug with the current firmware but doing a sequence of menu changes resolved it.  (Definitely a smart phone and forums like REDuser or DVinfo can be life savers when on a set!)  The images from the camera looked stunning, and certainly Mko and Alla’s very particular framing, lighting, and direction played a huge part in that as well.  The entire rig is big, and certainly the lens factored in. This made me realize that lens selection will play a large part in putting together a package for my upcoming project, which may require more handheld work.

I am also looking forward to the arrival of my Canon 7D, as the images I have seen online from this camera, while different, are also quite cinematic.  I don’t really expect a camera that is 1/10th the cost as the RED to be equal, but in the end (especially on a smaller screen, like online), the differences might be smaller than expected.  I guess it is good that we have all these options.  It’s a fun time to be a camera-geek!

JVC DV500

When I went freelance in 2007 I made a decision not to buy another camera for awhile.  I owned a lot of other gear, like an Arri lighting kit, Sachtler tripod, full audio-package…basically all the gear I would typically take on normal shoots, minus the camera.  I looked at what was out on the market then and was not overly impressed with any one camera, plus I was getting hired by my old employer fairly frequently and would shoot with their Z1Us, so I didn’t want to buy a camera and not get paid to use it.  In fact, I found it quite frequent in the 6 months of being freelance that I was hired to shoot for production companies with their own gear, whether it was full size HD cameras for a reality show, or Canon or Sony HDV cameras for a corporate shoot.  Plus, there are some really fabulous rental houses in Boston (Rule Broadcast is my first go-to place, with very large inventory and great staff) so renting was a breeze when I had shoots for my own clients.

In the fall of 2007, I was hired to shoot all the field stories and b-roll for a show called “What’s the Alternative” that was being produced out of National Boston.  This was a studio-based talk show about alternative health and medicine, but many of the episodes had field stories that we shot on location.  The studio portion of the show was being shot on Canon XLH1s, and the producers wanted all the field stories shot on the same camera, so I rented for the first shoot.  Then I realized that I had at least fifteen shoot days booked for this job, so buying a camera for this job was a no-brainer.  Especially because Canon had just released the XH-A1, which had the same imaging chip as it’s big brother (the XLH1), but cost about half as much (around $3500), and I would have easily spent more than that on rentals for this job.  So I bought my first camera as a freelancer, and fortunately it was, in my opinion, one of the best HDV cameras available at the time (and possibly still).

Cano XLH1

A few months later, Sony introduced the XDCAM EX-1.  This was also around the time that I started trolling around on DVInfo, an online forum for sharing ideas, tips, and questions on cameras and other gear (highly geeky stuff).  Early adopters of this new Sony camera were posting videos they shot and it was pretty clear this was a game changing camera.  I had rented the full size XDCAM HD camera a few times earlier that year and also saw the benefits of a tapeless format.  So even though I had just purchased my Canon a few months prior, I broke my usual rule of buying gear when their is a specific need or when I see it making me more money, I spent the most I had spent on a single equipment purchase and bought the EX-1.  As it turns out, I was right and this WAS a game-changer.  Not to sound like a Sony ad, but the camera was so fun to use that it made me a better shooter, and clients definitely were wowed by the quality that I was getting out of it.  I also found that through some local people I met through DVinfo, and some of the folks at Rule who knew I was pretty on top of the camera and its workflow, I was actually getting work because of owning (and understanding) a specific piece of gear.

Sony EX-1 (with Letus Extreme adapter)

I still love my Sony and use it for most shoots, but am always looking at what else is out there.  I have been keeping my eye on a new trend this year towards DSLR video, which is professional digital still cameras that shoot video.  There are several models out there that are able to shoot HD video with outstanding clarity and color, and I have just been blown away by the videos I have seen coming from these relatively inexpensive cameras.  I feel that I have waited through some of the growing pains with a few of the earlier models, and Canon has just released a new model, the 7D, which I am going to buy when it becomes available at the end of this month.  Again, maybe I am breaking my purchasing rule a little bit, but I think this camera offers a different look and a different set of functionality that will help expand my toolkit.  Plus it is a relatively small investment and I think there is going to be a trend towards people certain productions asking for these cameras, so being an earlier adopter should pay off.

Canon 7D

I will continue to keep my eye on what’s new and look for opportunities to work with the new technology, and (hopefully) purchase when it makes financial sense and helps to create a better looking product for my clients.