BMD Pocket Cinema Camera Lens Suggestions?

[Dom Jaeger]

I've been longing to try out a half-decent ENG zoom on one.

Why? Given they are mostly made for 2/3" 3 chip cameras you'll just get vignetting and horrible chromatic aberrations, unless you use an expensive optical adapter that will lose you nearly a stop. You'd need a separate power supply and cable if you wanted to use the zoom servo, and optically they're rarely as good as primes or even older cine zooms. Seems like a pointless exercise unless I'm missing something?

[David Peterson]

Yeah, I mostly agree with that. But if you check out that B4 to m4/3 group, you can see quite a few people have made it effectively work for them. It clearly is not for everybody though, it is a bit of an odd niche of people who do that.

[Phil Rhodes]

Why?

 

Easy - ergonomics. If you think about what lens choices actually exist for DSLRs (and similar), the selection is not enticing. There's stills lenses, which can have good performance but are an absolute nightmare to use, to the point where it is effectively impossible to follow focus, zoom, or adjust aperture on shot, or there's stuff designed for 35mm-sensor cameras, some of which will cover up to APS-sized DSLRs but which is generally ferociously expensive and still far from ideal from a shoulder-cam sort of perspective.

 

If you're used to ENG cameras - as I am - operating with stills lenses is an absolutely hideous, miserable, awful option. I've done a lot of it and it is terrible. The absolute best option is something like a Fuji Cabrio 19-90, but not only is it neither very wide or very long, it's also incredibly heavy and pretty clearly not a financial option for the sort of situations where one might repurpose DSLRs into ENG or documentary cameras. As far as I am aware there is no lens intended for big chips which is laid out like this at any lower price. We've seen some super-16 zooms sold on this very forum recently which might (might) cover a Blackmagic, but 6.6-66 isn't exactly enticing and they've got the same problems of vastly excessive focus throw as any lens that was really built for single-camera moviemaking. And there's no grip for them. So yes, there are good reasons to do it, simply because the other options are either unaffordable or bad.

 

I am fully aware that there are also reasons not to do it. Most of the examples we see are people putting very old B4 glass that was intended for SD production on Panasonic GH series stills cameras, with entirely unsurprising results. In that situation any chromatic aberration due to the 3-chip target design is generally buried in the enormous softness of these old zooms, especially with the extenders in to help them cover 16mm-ish chips. I have rarely seen anyone try to do it with a more modern lens. I found one blog post on using a Blackmagic cinema camera with the Fujinon XA17x7.6, which is the only time I've actually seen anyone side-by-side a B4 lens with good EF stills glass. The EF is, very obviously, sharper, although it's such a wildly different lens, designed for such wildly different applications with such different capability and behaviour, that the comparison seems a little unfair.

 

The bottom line is that the experience of operating with stills lenses is so absolutely horrible that I'm fairly desperate. No client of mine will ever be able to afford a Cabrio and thus neither can I. In fact, for the sake of argument, the Fuji 17x7.6 (currently $10k at B&H) would still be well under half the price even if one also bought the IBE optical relay ($4800 last time I checked). I remain somewhat unconvinced of the necessity of it, depending on one's pickiness level. I own a standard-def ENG lens and it, too, goes soft round the edges at the long end of the zoom, visibly so, even on an SD camera. And I made my living with that setup for years.

 

P

[Tyler Purcell]

Yep Phil, I agree wholeheartedly. I have the same problem and its the only reason I currently don't own a zoom lens.

 

I've been told by some reliable sources that Rokinon is going to be making not only a 50mm prime, BUT they've been developing a cinema zoom for quite sometime. Their best guess was IBC this year or NAB next year.

 

Another solution is a PL adaptor and running some S16 glass. It has enough coverage and the pricing isn't so steep today. I was looking at Canon and Angenieux glass on ebay and the pricing wasn't too bad, around $4k for a decent zoom. I know it sounds bad, but at least it would be workable.

 

I think the Canon ENG lenses are very good. If I recall, they have a limited aperture, like F5 or something.

[Phil Rhodes]

It depends what Rokinon mean by a cinema zoom. There are already cinema zooms out there - from the Angenieux DP Rouge through to Russian stuff and the super16 lenses we've seen for sale here recently. They shouldn't suffer the 3-chip block issue, but they still have huge focus rotation, no grips, no servo zoom, no macro, no back focus adjustment and are usually only about 10:1 at best, if they're any good. The affordable options are super16, too, so they won't cover APS chips - the 35mm options are generally more expensive than ENG lenses.

 

My hope is that it is more or less solvable for considerably under $10k, given a used HD zoom and a simple mount adaptor. I really want to see this tried with the sort of lenses that go secondhand for that sort of money, to get an idea how big a deal the optical correction is.

 

Almost all ENG lenses go somewhat below f/2. The figure of f/5 is probably reachable if you consider that the extender costs 2 stops and the lens may not look terribly good in its bottom stop or two, especially with the extender in. How this situation interacts with the usable speed of your proposed camera head is worth considering - whether the camera can window down to a 2/3"-ish sensor, how noisy it is at what speed, etc.

 

P

[Dom Jaeger]

In the interests of science I found a Canon 7.6-168 HDTV zoom (the poetically named HJ22ex7.6B) that was lying around here and threw it up on my projector using a makeshift mount. The image actually had very little CA, but a great deal of halation at f1.8, which went away at about f4. Once stopped down, it's a nice, sharp image all through the range. The image circle covers S16 from about 50mm up, or the whole range (15.2 - 336mm) with the doubler on. I'd be curious to try it with a B4 to PL optical adapter, since I imagine some of the halation is due to the 3 chip design. Not $4800 curious however.

 

This lens retails for over 30K, so I don't think it would meet Phil's "under 10K second-hand" hopes.

[Phil Rhodes]

Well, that's interesting; thanks for doing that. I'd be extremely interested in any further results you were able to scrape up with other lenses. There is genuinely very little hard information around.

 

The types that tend to be most affordable are several things:

 

- Not Canon

- Not 22:1 zooms

- Slightly foxed, as in dings in the powder coating and that rubbery coating falling off the hangrip. Fuji seem to be particularly prone to this.

 

I have no idea, however, whether the 17:1 or 14:1 options are optically any better or worse. They're certainly a lot cheaper - although there's actually a 22x7.6 on ebay right now for just under ten thousand... pounds. Which is still under half price.

 

P

 

PS - Oh, and, er, do want: http://www.redsharknews.com/production/item/1864-canon-looks-to-highlight-4k

[David Peterson]

Yay, got an update from Adorama that hopefully my $499 BMPCC (ordered on the 23rd) will be shipping next week!

[ronaldo miranda]

*

 

Hey guys, i have a BMPCC and just got today a Angenieux 17-68mm. Soon i will post some footage, seens really a great glass!

[Will Montgomery]

Lately I've been using my Zeiss 12-120 Super 16 zoom (S16 modified 10-100) and I'm completely in love with it. Requires a PL mount adapter (wooden camera in this case) and of course the lens is worth 3-4 times what the camera is worth, but is sharper and easier to focus then my 2nd choice, a Nikon 17-35 with metabones adapter.