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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Luma Tech Illuminas vs. the new Cooke Panchros...a review

I guess its all relative to the size of the shot, and if your trying to use available light (or available darkness), and not overpower the B-ground. I wouldn't want to do a night exterior with just 2.8 lenses. To each they're own.
 
Timur Civan said:
You dont need a truck of lights.

500w open face through a 4x4 frame with 250 is more than enough @ 580 ISO to get perfect exposure @ a T2.8/4 split with an F3 in Cinegamma. I use that 500 cause its the smallest light i have for an ongoing TV interview series.
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Timur, I don't think anybody here is talking about exposing for a lit TV interview situation. We're talking about the scenes where you need a wide night shot of an old ship yard. Or a dark forest. Or central park at night. When Deakins shot the night valley scene in No Country for Old Men, he shot Master Primes at F1.3 and still needed 3 Musco lights 12 18K HMI's. If he were using the Panchros, he would have needed 12 Musco lights and 48 18K HMI's!

http://www.rogerdeakins.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=329
 
Deakins wouldnt use panchros. :)

i understand your point, im just saying that for what i do its more than enough. I would love to have the oppertunity to shoot in a valley at night in west texas. When that day comes, i too will choose the Masters. That said, if im going to pay 40,000$ for lenses im going to be using for the next 10-20 years, i want lenses that make me REALLLY REALLY happy. Panchros make me really really happy. They just look so damn good.

Any how lets not argue, this is like arguing whats better, Chocolate Ice Cream or Strawberry.
 
Timur Civan said:
i want lenses that make me REALLLY REALLY happy. Panchros make me really really happy. They just look so damn good.
QUOTE]

Timur, I love that. And I agree. They do look awesome. and have fantastic build quality.
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Julio Quintana said:
Timur, I don't think anybody here is talking about exposing for a lit TV interview situation. We're talking about the scenes where you need a wide night shot of an old ship yard. Or a dark forest. Or central park at night. When Deakins shot the night valley scene in No Country for Old Men, he shot Master Primes at F1.3 and still needed 3 Musco lights 12 18K HMI's. If he were using the Panchros, he would have needed 12 Musco lights and 48 18K HMI's!

http://www.rogerdeakins.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=329
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Makes sense, but also Deakins wasn't shooting on an MX, Epic, Alexa or F3. All of those cameras have a considerable advantage over film when it comes to low light. Put another way, it seems that 2.8 on an F3 is probably equivalent to 2.0 on a film camera (or even faster) in terms of light that's needed to keep meaningful shadow detail from falling into noise.
 
Peter Moretti said:
Makes sense, but also Deakins wasn't shooting on an MX, Epic, Alexa or F3. All of those cameras have a considerable advantage over film when it comes to low light. Put another way, it seems that 2.8 on an F3 is probably equivalent to 2.0 on a film camera (or even faster) in terms of light that's needed to keep meaningful shadow detail from falling into noise.
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You're right. If he had been shooting digitally (at 2000 ISO) he would only have needed ONE Musco light and THREE 18K HMI's. Sometimes people forget that f-stops increase light EXPONENTIALLY, so two stops is pretty enormous.
 
And they sometimes forget that a doubling of the ISO is the same as opening the aperture one full f stop in terms of exposure. Of course 1.4 is nice to have as an option, but 2.8 Cookes sound pretty bad ass on a modern digital camera.
 
Peter Moretti said:
And they sometimes forget that a doubling of the ISO is the same as opening the aperture one full f stop in terms of exposure. Of course 1.4 is nice to have as an option, but 2.8 Cookes sound pretty bad ass on a modern digital camera.
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Peter, that's true but realy not equivalent. Optically increasing the amount of light hitting a sensor by a factor of 2 is a far superior to an artifical signal processing trick of sliding the gamma down into the darks. There are far more penalties with pushing the sensor outside it's sweet spot than there are with openning up a lens. I'm speaking mostly of wide shots here, where decreased DOF is less obvious, and where openning the lens does not result in unacceptable softness. There is no free lunch either way.

I've seen ISO2000+ footage from Epic look good, but more often its noise signature when compared to 800 is obvious. Particularly with skin tone.
 
Looks like next week sometime. Fred says things are a bit backed up in Russia due to summer holidays. Since my Epic is back in the shop right now getting a few issues fixed, the delay isn't killing me. :mellow:
 
People who buy the Cookes will say they are the best and people who buy the Illumina's will say no they are the best.
Its all down to personal taste and how and what you shoot. For me the T1.3 and quality of the Illumina's was a hands down winner, yes they don't have the Cooke build or name but I'm all for the underdog and believe fortune favours the brave.

And as to the "cooke" look... I do my own post so that's pretty easy to add and the greatest thing is its not baked in and you can dial it in to your liking :-)
 
roryhinds said:
People who buy the Cookes will say they are the best and people who buy the Illumina's will say no they are the best.
Its all down to personal taste and how and what you shoot. For me the T1.3 and quality of the Illumina's was a hands down winner, yes they don't have the Cooke build or name but I'm all for the underdog and believe fortune favours the brave.

And as to the "cooke" look... I do my own post so that's pretty easy to add and the greatest thing is its not baked in and you can dial it in to your liking :-)
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yeah, i know what you mean, i hate to sound like a blasphemer, but from examples i have seen, bar the star bokeh and the deeper focus falloff, im not seeing anything thats not very easily achieved in a modest grade. 1 or 2 people mentioning old Deakins here (legend), and i realised, faced with the choice, i find myself more reassured having access to his stop ranges, than a brand look of his choice, since MPs are an equally large part of his thing.

Btw Paul i too am looking forward to seeing some more stuff with your lenses when they arrive, very hard to find illumina rentals over here, and this thread has been a real help, thanks.
 
I just finished a feature with Mk 3 Superspeeds on an R1 - MX. I had pondered shooting on Panchros but opted out because of the slow speed. I'm glad I did. Even though we had enough light to shoot at whatever stop I wanted (90 % around a 2.8), there were times when I had to open up to shorten my DOF such as: Actors close to textured walls, small rooms, etc. It's not just night exteriors where I need a fast lens.

While I've used the Panchros on other jobs and think they look amazing, I've yet to shoot a feature where there wasn't an occasion where I had to open beyond 2.8.
 
Tobias Ashenheim said:
yeah, i know what you mean, i hate to sound like a blasphemer, but from examples i have seen, bar the star bokeh and the deeper focus falloff, im not seeing anything thats not very easily achieved in a modest grade. 1 or 2 people mentioning old Deakins here (legend), and i realised, faced with the choice, i find myself more reassured having access to his stop ranges, than a brand look of his choice, since MPs are an equally large part of his thing.

Btw Paul i too am looking forward to seeing some more stuff with your lenses when they arrive, very hard to find illumina rentals over here, and this thread has been a real help, thanks.
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It was only recently Deakin's has really gone hard on the Master Prime route. He used to use Cooke S4's on many of his films. I believe The Man Who Wasn't There, The Assassination of Jesse James, O'Brother Where Art Thou?, A Beautiful Mind, House of Sand and Fog, The Village, Jarhead, and other films of his were shot with S4's. Master Primes are amazing lenses, and I can see why one would certainly love them, but let's not pretend Deakins doesn't like Cooke lenses. Some of my favorite Deakin's films were mentioned in that list above. :) In fact, with the new 5/i's available at T/1.4, I wonder if he might venture back to Cooke for perhaps a future film project. But with Master Primes being so amazing, maybe he won't try and fix something that isn't broken. Who knows. But he certainly can afford the best and fastest lenses.
 
NormLi said:
It's very true.

Again, I posted this in the other thread but I shot this at night with mostly existing light at 500-800 ASA, EPIC-M + T2.8 Cooke iPanchros, and all at 48-60fps.
T2.8 is fine for most needs and if you have some lights (or lots), it's absolutely no issue at all. Don't be afraid of T2.8 :)

http://vimeo.com/27110455

Norm
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BOOM! Awesome video man! Don't know how I missed it until today. I've been saying this from the beginning... T/2.8 is shallow and with so many fast and clean digital cameras out today and even better ones in the future, the need to fall back on faster lenses is being marginalized. The only way i'll ever use anything but Panchro/i's would be if I needed a zoom or if the look of the film required super shallow depth of field, in which case I'd rent faster lenses. The quality of the cookes is amazing, the only difference is lens speed... which I don't need 90% of the time. We are shooting at 1000asa with little consequence. 3 years ago, I would have vomited if my RedOne was pushed past 400iso on Tungsten balance.
 
Straight from the St.Petersberg Russian Lomo factory, I received a box today with my new set of LumaTech Illumina S35 lenses. 18-85, all of them t1.3. They look great, the build quality is very good and solid. All the iris and focus movements are smooth and medium-light. The serial numbers on the lenses range from 002 to 009, so I clearly have a newlly minted design. The movement feels lighter than what I experienced in LA a few months ago, so that perhaps they worked on that with this rev of the lens.

All the lenses have the exact same exterior diameter of 4" and the bodies are from 5.75" to 6.5" long. Focusing is 100% internal and there is zero lens extension. I'll try to find time to go out this weekend and shoot some tests with them, and next week I'm going out on the town in San Francisco with David Collier and his Alexa/new Ultras to do some comparative shooting. So I'll have something to show people in a few weeks, and some preliminary impressions before then.

Cheers,
Paul
 
This is great news, Paul! I literally read this thread start to finish last night and was left in anticipation of what you decided and then what you thought of the Illuminas. So this is excellent news for those of us looking at these in the near future.

Please post any and all findings! No detail is too small!

Good luck and enjoy them!
 
Paul Nordin said:
"... So I'll have something to show people in a few weeks, and some preliminary impressions before then."

Cheers,
Paul
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Paul...you can't do that to us!!!!! :) :) :)

Please post some real life frame grabs sooner!

Cheers!

Antoine
 
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