Canon 50-1000mm question

[Mark Phelan]

Ever since seeing this lens, I've thought it might be the perfect solution for some shooting I'm contemplating. But my question is, has anyone actually USED this lens in the wild? It covers a 4K image circle, but does anyone know if Canon or someone else is working on an 8K circle version?

Any first-hand experience you'd like to share on this particular lens, besides it being expensive. At 15lbs, don't think the O'Connor 1030D is going to be able to support this well without a lot of vibration.

 

[Phil Holland]

Hi Mark, at the moment I don't know of any lens in this range being developed for cinema purposes. There are some big S35 zooms being developed that will be ideal for 4K and 8K sensors, but we're talking mich more expensive glass/box lenses.

If you are talking about something like this for VistaVision, nope, nothing I know of yet. But that will also be a six figures lens and about twice the size.

I've used it and you can get away with a 1030D, but I'd recommend a 2560 and you do want to be on firm ground on the long end

 

[Misha Engel]

Andreas has one http://www.reduser.net/forum/member.php?79515-AndreasOberg

 

[Mark Phelan]

Hi Mark, at the moment I don't know of any lens in this range being developed for cinema purposes. There are some big S35 zooms being developed that will be ideal for 4K and 8K sensors, but we're talking mich more expensive glass/box lenses.

If you are talking about something like this for VistaVision, nope, nothing I know of yet. But that will also be a six figures lens and about twice the size.

I've used it and you can get away with a 1030D, but I'd recommend a 2560 and you do want to be on firm ground on the long end

Thanks, Phil.

 

[Alex.Mitchell]

at the moment I don't know of any lens in this range being developed for cinema purposes.

Other than the gearing not all being at 0.8 pitch, what about the lens doesn't lend itself to cinematic applications? Used it on several productions and it did exactly what our DP wanted it to.

 

[Mark Phelan]

Was looking at the list of lenses supported by RED with the Canon EF mount and this one isn't listed. Is it possible to be added or is there some reason why it cannot?

 

[Misha Engel]

Was looking at the list of lenses supported by RED with the Canon EF mount and this one isn't listed. Is it possible to be added or is there some reason why it cannot? That would most definitely be a deal-breaker.

As mentioned before, just contact Andreas is you want to know more about the canon 50-1000, he uses it on Helium (8k) and does wild life cine(the high-end David Attenborough kind of stuff).

 

[Mark Phelan]

As mentioned before, just contact Andreas is you want to know more about the canon 50-1000, he uses it on Helium (8k) and does wild life cine(the high-end David Attenborough kind of stuff).

Thanks. It was more of a question for RED, but I've sent Andreas a PM too.

 

[Christopher A. Bell]

Honestly, most people are using this lens in PL mount. I have it’s “little brother”, so to speak, the 17-120. And while I do have a swappable mount system on it that converts to EF, I use it in PL Mount most of the time. The only reason I even bothered having the swappable system put on was so that I could use it on my C300 when I had to, which is EF Mount only. Otherwise, it’s always set-up for PL. I know a few people that own the 50-1000 and they’re all PL mount versions.

 

[John David Pope]

"Other than the gearing not all being at 0.8 pitch"

Do different gear pitches work better for different lengths of throw? I'm wondering why manufacturers just don't make all gearing 0.8 pitch. Marketing I found online sells 0.5 pitch as "The gear's 0.5" width works with longer-throw lenses, including macros."

Any guess as to why Canon made the iris gear 0.5 but the focus 0.8?

 

[AndreasOberg]

I have already written a reply to Mark.
Basically this lens is incredible for what we use it for, which is wildlife. It has improved our cinematography so much, hard to imagine living without it.

A few limitations one should know of is:
- it has lens breathing. Quite a lot as well. If you turn the focus wheel fully the image will zoom in maybe 15% (just an estimate). In practice this has never been a problem for us.
- It has chromatic abberation, mostly when it is wider, but you will mostly notice it if you zoom in at 8k resolution. Downscaled to 4k it is quite small, but still there. We take it away in post
- Sharpness is good. Similar to Canon 600 F4 II IS with extender.
- The servo is very useful, especially the zoom servo. It is much better than zooming manually.
- The built in extender is very useful. Incredible to have 1500mm so easy at hand. However you loose sharpness.
- You need a stable right to make the best of the lens, especially if there is some wind. Think heavy duty aluminium tripods, dovetail to support the rods. It is not so much because of the weight of the lense, but more because of the extremely strong telescopic behaviour of it.
- Most things you can film with just ONE lens, often the only other lens I bright with me is a wide angle lens say Canon 16-35 or 24mm Tilt and Shift for example and perhaps a macro 100mm f2.8.
- We can carry the whole lens fully setup in a backpack with no big problems.
- Together with Kippertie Revolva they are a dream. We use Tiffen polarizer filters in the front.
- The lens info you only get with the servo, but it is not so useful.
- The PL mount is maybe a bit more secure. The reason we have Canon mount is because we have a large amount of Canon still lenses that we use together with it. If you dont, I would get a PL.

Cheers,
Andreas

 

[Christopher A. Bell]

"Other than the gearing not all being at 0.8 pitch"

Do different gear pitches work better for different lengths of throw? I'm wondering why manufacturers just don't make all gearing 0.8 pitch. Marketing I found online sells 0.5 pitch as "The gear's 0.5" width works with longer-throw lenses, including macros."

Any guess as to why Canon made the iris gear 0.5 but the focus 0.8?

So they could use "off-the-shelf" existing components from their broadcast lenses.

 

[William Long]

I have already written a reply to Mark.
Basically this lens is incredible for what we use it for, which is wildlife. It has improved our cinematography so much, hard to imagine living without it.

A few limitations one should know of is:
- it has lens breathing. Quite a lot as well. If you turn the focus wheel fully the image will zoom in maybe 15% (just an estimate). In practice this has never been a problem for us.
- It has chromatic abberation, mostly when it is wider, but you will mostly notice it if you zoom in at 8k resolution. Downscaled to 4k it is quite small, but still there. We take it away in post
- Sharpness is good. Similar to Canon 600 F4 II IS with extender.
- The servo is very useful, especially the zoom servo. It is much better than zooming manually.
- The built in extender is very useful. Incredible to have 1500mm so easy at hand. However you loose sharpness.
- You need a stable right to make the best of the lens, especially if there is some wind. Think heavy duty aluminium tripods, dovetail to support the rods. It is not so much because of the weight of the lense, but more because of the extremely strong telescopic behaviour of it.
- Most things you can film with just ONE lens, often the only other lens I bright with me is a wide angle lens say Canon 16-35 or 24mm Tilt and Shift for example and perhaps a macro 100mm f2.8.
- We can carry the whole lens fully setup in a backpack with no big problems.
- Together with Kippertie Revolva they are a dream. We use Tiffen polarizer filters in the front.
- The lens info you only get with the servo, but it is not so useful.
- The PL mount is maybe a bit more secure. The reason we have Canon mount is because we have a large amount of Canon still lenses that we use together with it. If you dont, I would get a PL.

Cheers,
Andreas

Hi Andreas,
On your Helium do you normally shoot at 7.5K ?
But then this lens will vignette for both Monstro and Gemini, yes?

Hope your shoots are going well!

 

[AndreasOberg]

Hi William,
Hows it going?
I have to stop by and say hi next time I'm close in Sweden Just came back from 4 month in Mexico, was lucky to spend some time with Blue Planet Live which was super fun. A company contacted us wanting to do a short film about Natalie's photography so that is our next project. Hope to film lots of sea birds as well. What are you working on?

I will shot normally in a combination of 8K HD and 7.5K HD. The vignetting is most around 150, but it is not all of it. If you use the extender it has no vignetting, also no vignetting on Monstro.
Also vigneting depends a bit on the light, the darker it is the more vignetting, if it is very bright you can barely tell the difference. I dont think it is a problem, but yes you lose a bit of resolution.

Otherwise on Monstro it heavily vignettes, I think around 5.5k is the worst you get. But I heard it does not vignette at 1500mm with monstro. Most of the time you would get 6k resolution if I remember correctly. 5.5-6k monstro with less noise, more slow motion and less compression would still compete pretty well against Helium 7.5k

Gemini will have a tad worse vignetting than Helium since the sensor is a little bit bigger. But a bigger problem is that you do not have that much resolution to start with. 7.5k is not so much of a problem but 4.5k is less than what I ever want. This means you cannot crop or zoom into the image at all if you deliver to 4k.

This lens and Monstro could still be a good combination, monstros image is so much better than Helium so it will still look better in some situations. Since you crop you can also reduce the compression so you will get better noise and details.

I did a lot of comparison with Helium and Monstro and Monstro is really a fantastic camera if you have the right lenses for it.

Cheers,
Andreas

 

[William Long]

Hi Andreas,
Lovely to hear from you. Your adventures sound amazing. I'm still in Sweden shooting a 90 minute documentary for SVT about man and nature. Regarding the latter, its all the usual subjects that you would be more than familar with. Good to be out in the wild, doing a lot of hide work for such a long period of time.

To that end, I am still a long way from being able to afford or justify the 50-1000. Thanks for all your info on how it might function with different cameras. I'm still scraping my pennies (crowns) together for a Gemini. Those extra two stops are really enticing. And my older FF Canon lenses that I use (300, 600, 800, even the 50-300) will still work on everything. But obviously, I don't have the luxury of 'that zoom' or the resolution of Helium/Monstro to cut in afterwards. I just have to get closer! )

A big problem with all these long lenses is haze. If you have a subject that dictates a shoot in the middle of the day a lot of these images can suddenly be unusable. How does your 50-1000 react? I have heard it has two front focus groups, one moving and one fixed with only six elements in total. That is a lot less than the 10 or 11 typically found in older zooms. Do you notice any difference in terms of haze and whats the CA like?

Cheers mate!

 

[AndreasOberg]

e.

To that end, I am still a long way from being able to afford or justify the 50-1000. Thanks for all your info on how it might function with different cameras. I'm still scraping my pennies (crowns) together for a Gemini. Those extra two stops are really enticing. And my older FF Canon lenses that I use (300, 600, 800, even the 50-300) will still work on everything. But obviously, I don't have the luxury of 'that zoom' or the resolution of Helium/Monstro to cut in afterwards. I just have to get closer! )

A big problem with all these long lenses is haze. If you have a subject that dictates a shoot in the middle of the day a lot of these images can suddenly be unusable. How does your 50-1000 react? I have heard it has two front focus groups, one moving and one fixed with only six elements in total. That is a lot less than the 10 or 11 typically found in older zooms. Do you notice any difference in terms of haze and whats the CA like?

Cheers mate!

Hiya William!
Gemini is nice. It is not quite 2 stops extra, more like 1 2/3 stops compared to Helium if you downsample to 4k output. Hmm, haze I notice, but I have not detected any difference from 600 F4 II IS. I would say morning and sunrise haze has not been such a big problem, but during the middle of the day when it is warmer then it is more of a problem. But I think I would have nearly the same problem with Canon 600x2.
The CA is there, but the 600 also has some CA, especially at 1200mm.

I have a bunch of images here. This shows worst case CA https://flic.kr/p/HsPXbR
I would say the CA is there, but it is not a problem, more of a minor annoyance for a bit wider shots. I found that I can fix it in post. I have been meaning to test the quality towards other lenses on the wide end so 50mm and so.

Yes, I hear you about the price of the 50-1000. Our wallet was not overly happy about it, but it helps that we are both working towards the same goal so can save together.

Btw on another note, I'm writing a program that does very complex sharpening for videos. I have not found any plugin that uses the same type of algoritms as I do, which is well the reason why I begun writing it myself. I got the ideas from NASA how they enhance their images of far away planets. I tested it a on some of the shots for Blue Planet Live and made a big difference for enhancing the focus and just clarity.

Cheers,
Andreas

 

[Misha Engel]

Btw on another note, I'm writing a program that does very complex sharpening for videos. I have not found any plugin that uses the same type of algoritms as I do, which is well the reason why I begun writing it myself. I got the ideas from NASA how they enhance their images of far away planets. I tested it a on some of the shots for Blue Planet Live and made a big difference for enhancing the focus and just clarity.

Cheers,
Andreas

You can try this one when you are willing to transcode to stills https://topazlabs.com/sharpen-ai/ there is a free demo version.

We used Gigapixel AI to upscale some important SD content and the results where better than anything else, it's a slow proces but worth the effort.

 

[William Long]

Andreas,

Yes, from your tests the CA doesn't look bad at all. Nice pictures by the way, particularly Iceland, that place never lets you down. I'd be very interested to hear more about your sharpening program further down the track. For extreme-long lens work, it would certainly be very useful if one could improve the original raw files. Maybe you can start a thread on this?

 

[Sabyasachi Patra]

You can try this one when you are willing to transcode to stills https://topazlabs.com/sharpen-ai/ there is a free demo version.

We used Gigapixel AI to upscale some important SD content and the results where better than anything else, it's a slow proces but worth the effort.

The Gigapixel AI site says it is for upscaling still photos. How did you uprezz videos?

 

[Misha Engel]

The Gigapixel AI site says it is for upscaling still photos. How did you uprezz videos?

Base material was low quality SD 8bit 50i:
- de-interlaced it to 50p (QTGMC with staxrip at very slow settings)
- converted to stills(highest quality jpeg 444 with virtualdub2) you can choose other still formats when your base material is better, upto 16 bit TIFF.
- uprezz-denoise-deblur with Gigapixel AI to 1440x1080(after testing some stills what the best setting are for denoise and deblur) warning: this takes a very long time even on a tr1950x with 2 VEGA FE's
- convert still seq. to Cineform 10bit 422 1440x1080 50p

It's not the fastest workflow, but it's a semi automated workflow with the best results so far (better/faster options are welcome).