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FILTERING A SONY CINEALTA LENS TO GET A COOKE LOOK


omar robles

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Hello group:

 

I was watching a video online someone did comparing SONY CINEALTA PRIME LENSES and COOKE S4 LENSES. To my surprise the images look practically the same. If you were to study the cooke lenses it just looked a little more filtered then the sony cinealta lenses. Just wondering if anyone has ever tried filtering to try to emulate the softer characteristics of the cookes?

 

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If you're expecting to see huge differences between modern lenses i think you'll be disappointed. The Cooke 'look' could be defined (depending on who you ask) as a slight warmth to the image, with some very subtle softness. You could emulate both of these with filtration or white balance. I'd start with an 812 Filter, and a very light BDFX Diffusion.

 

The real difference for me is in the way that Cooke lenses reproduce space. There is a sort of curved feel and depth to them that gives a different dimensionality then you would see from Leicas, for instance, which look much flatter. That 'look' is impossible to reproduce, as it's all down to lens design.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I see some fairly noticeable differences. I think part of the problem is that the setup is being lit with what looks to be LED light, so you're not going to see very good color reproduction. The patches on the chart might look sort of normal, but skin tone has a much richer and varied response that's likely being lost with the lighting.

 

The Cooke is much lower contrast (I can see more texture in the chart) than the Sony. The bokeh is also nicer, in my opinion. The Cooke's distortion is varied across the frame while the Sony shows a touch of barrel. Chromatic aberration is higher on the Cooke.

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There are differences... but movies mix primes and zooms all the time, and those can be fairly different. Color-correction often will help match shots better.

 

You could try filters on the higher contrast / sharper lenses to match but often the difference is more subtle than the lightest Low-Con or UltaCon filter made, for example.

 

For example, I mainly shoot on Panavision Primos right now, but now and then use the 19-90mm Panavision zoom, which is slightly less snappy than the primes. Sometimes I switch from the 1/4 Hollywood Black Magics that we use on the primes to a 1/8 strength when I use the zoom, but then I start feeling that was too much of a change in strength when I look on the monitor.

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