Canon EOS lenses on Scarlet 35mm 5k

[Tim Follin]

I know this has been sort of asked before in various discussions but I can't find a specific answer - I'm about to invest in some Canon EOS lenses, primarily for my Canon stills camera, but also for use on my 35mm image adaptor (SGpro). Having looked at the difference between 'L' series lenses and regular lenses, I'm tempted to invest some serious cash into these lenses.

However, the deciding factor will be whether the 35mm 5k Scarlet will be able to use these lenses or not. The main problem with the SGpro is the fact that I can't change the iris, because EOS lenses only allow electronic control over the iris. So, will the Scarlet have a 'smart' lens mount to allow electronic iris control for EOS lenses?

 

[Josh Negrin]

Hey Tim, there's something coming out called the Birger mount that many users here are looking forward to. One option would be to buy canon prime lenses, even the cheap primes made by canon open up to 1.8 fstop and rival the quality of their L series zoom lenses. The 24-105 L lens is a great lens, I've personally used it to shoot video with the 5d Mark II, but it only opens up to f4. When shooting video, it's nice to have the option to open up to at least 1.8. Especially with the RED. On my last film, we had nikon super speeds at f1.2 and it felt like sometimes that wasn't enough.

Back to the birger mount, here is a paragraph I pulled from indie4k.com

The Birger guys have managed to come up with some pretty neat stuff. Their mount will be able to feed lens metadata into the camera, once Red enables this feature, for instance, just like Red’s lenses (or other lenses with /i technology) can. This will solve the problem of figuring out what your aperture is set to on EOS lenses (which have no physical aperture controls or indicators). The camera will simply tell you.

 

[Gregory Leno]

Back to the birger mount, here is a paragraph I pulled from indie4k.com...
The Birger guys have managed to come up with some pretty neat stuff. Their mount will be able to feed lens metadata into the camera, once Red enables this feature, for instance, just like Red’s lenses (or other lenses with /i technology) can. This will solve the problem of figuring out what your aperture is set to on EOS lenses (which have no physical aperture controls or indicators). The camera will simply tell you.

I don't think it works this way now. There was a huge problem using RED's internal wiring. (they were also using it to power the Birger mount and ended up frying the cameras internal board).
I believe at this point the you will control the aperture by either the external controls on the mount itself and/or by View Factors Impero control knob.

http://www.viewfactor.net/khxc/index.php?app=ccp0&ns=prodshow&ref=Impero1

The Impero will connect to the Birger Mount via blutooth wireless or from a direct cable connection.

It's still a very cool solution and there is a surprise feature that has yet to be announced. But it remains to be seen if it will utilize the /i technology or not.

Also this Mount is currently only for RED One. There is no indication yet that it will be there for Scarlet. But you never know.




Greg

 

[Tim Follin]

JNFilms - very useful info, thanks for the reply! From my own experience shooting commercials with a 35mm adaptor (and before that 35mm photography) I've found that often although primes are great up to about 70mm (especially the extra stops), beyond that a zoom becomes increasingly useful, purely from the point of view of framing and composing the shot - close-ups for instance often require on-the-fly zoom tweaks to save moving the camera, whereas wider shots tend not to need quite so much tweaking. F1.2 sounds great though! Do you know anything about the new(ish) 70-300 IS USM lens? It's supposed to rival the L-series for sharpness, but not sure how good it is.

About the Birger mount - this sounds great, even if it can't be made to 'talk' to the camera directly. So would it be made to fit specific cameras, i.e., replacing the Red's or Scarlet's own mount? I have an old EOS mount for an XL1 which let you control the iris through the camera's iris wheel - it had some glass in it, presumably to correct for the change in focal plane distance, but the quality always seemed fine. If it had the iris control on the adaptor itself, could this be a possible design for the Birger?

 

[Richard Goodwin]

RED has made it pretty clear that they are going to be providing mounts for "alternate" lenses (Canon, Nikon, etc). You can search the threads to see (http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?p=369175#post369175).

If you look at the new RED brochure (http://www.red.com/epic_scarlet/) on the page "Detailed Systems Specs" you can see a pic of the Scarlet module. Note the mount has a backplate that has screws on each corner. That is the interchangeable part.

Note: this is what RED has said it would ship. But it also has been stated that there will be opportunities for 3rd party vendors. As the mount only takes 4 screws (see link above) it should not be too hard for vendors to make special mounts which have extra integrated electronics etc.