Why (formerly not) Canon EOS lenses?

[Bachman]

I have a Sigma 70-210 F2.8 and it's awesome. I also have the 50mm and 105mm Sigma macros, and those are also very nice. I have a Sigma 17-35 F2.8-F4 zoom that hasn't impressed me quite as much, but it's also been one of my most-used lenses.

yeah i have one of the 70-210 2.8's as well for my Nikon. it's a good lens. So I can use this on my RED? Awesome!

 

[wizard]

Canon EOS lenses autofocus

Canon EOS lenses autofocus

When I find first information about RED and Canon EOS Lenses posibility, I decided to buy RED. I have a collection of L series lenses, and I love them for picture quality, colours, sharpnes, watersealed constuction, IS and ultra fast focusing (especialy 300m 2.8 IS).

I am shooting ice hockey and RED with up to 120frames p.s. at 720p is great for a slow motion goals reviews. But try to focus manualy.... I understood, that a filmmakers focus manualy, I prefer it also in studio, but somethimes autofocus is great help.

I dont care abou exposure, I can setup manualy, it's just a lot of practies, or you purchase a Sekonic light meter. But focus manualy at ice hockey game its not posible real time.

I am explaining my situation because I am going to buy Panasonic HVX200 because of shooting ice hockey / variable frame rate. But if a red (even with add/on HW for up to 3.000USD) should handle Canon lenses autofocus, I will order RED.

Bud I think that its not about connecting and interface, but Canons 1d series have a two Risc CPU that handle autofocusing, 45 autofocus points, some of them are crosstype for higher accuracy... How could RED handle this ?
And how about low light focusing, EV range,... ? Nice to read arcticles about RED, but I am looking for a test, to review sensor quality... But if it all good enough its a dream camera... I hope so...

wizard

 

[Clint Johnson]

Wizard,

I'm thinking you could use a midrange zoom like the 28-70 f2.8L or the 24-105 f4L closed down to f13 or more to give you a deeper depth of focus. Combine that with capturing windowed 720p to give you a smaller sensor area for deeper apparent depth of focus. You'd have to gain up to 800 ISO equivalent (or more) and let it underexpose if it wants to... just bring it up in Redcine.

This might allow you to keep pretty much the entire rink in acceptable focus.

Personally, I'd probably prefer to open up the lens a little bit and ballpark the focus manually. An autofocus system hunts around too much with that much action taking place in front of the lens. That is said with only a few hours videotaping hockey games with Canon and Panasonic prosumer cameras so your mileage will vary.

If you try to capture at their maximum frame rates (Red @ 120 and HVX @ 60), both the Red One and the HVX200 will want more light than there is in the arena. I'm guessing that the Red One would give you greater latitude for cleaning up the image in post.

 

[Sanjin Jukic]

Auto focus is very OK. But auto focus is limited. Manual focus is a king. Especially for moving images. I am happy to add Leica-R for EOS Canon adapter and have possibility to try out a wide range of Leica-R lenses that suppose to be the top end of manual still lenses. Looking forward to have a lot of fun using Leica-R lenses with RED.

 

[sully]

To use Leicaflex R lenses (or any still camera lens) on cine cameras, it's a good practice to remove the F-stop dedents so there is no annoying bump when you make a small iris adjustment while filming. I just talked to Don Goldberg (Leica repair specialist) and he said it was no problem to remove the dedents. Although he only works on Leicas, I'm sure there are other good techs that can remove the dedents from Nikon and Canon(FD) lenses.

 

[chuck colburn]

Wizard,

I'm thinking you could use a midrange zoom like the 28-70 f2.8L or the 24-105 f4L closed down to f13 or more to give you a deeper depth of focus. Combine that with capturing windowed 720p to give you a smaller sensor area for deeper apparent depth of focus. You'd have to gain up to 800 ISO equivalent (or more) and let it underexpose if it wants to... just bring it up in Redcine.

This might allow you to keep pretty much the entire rink in acceptable focus.

Personally, I'd probably prefer to open up the lens a little bit and ballpark the focus manually. An autofocus system hunts around too much with that much action taking place in front of the lens. That is said with only a few hours videotaping hockey games with Canon and Panasonic prosumer cameras so your mileage will vary.

If you try to capture at their maximum frame rates (Red @ 120 and HVX @ 60), both the Red One and the HVX200 will want more light than there is in the arena. I'm guessing that the Red One would give you greater latitude for cleaning up the image in post.

Hi Clint,

Unless I'm missing something, I think you might be confusing depth of focus with depth of field. Say hello to those beautiful doggies of yours.

Chuck

 

[Clint Johnson]

Hi Clint,

Unless I'm missing something, I think you might be confusing depth of focus with depth of field. Say hello to those beautiful doggies of yours.

Chuck

Hi Chuck,

I suppose that I should go with the current usage. Historically depth of focus was interchangeable with depth of field (and some still do use it that way), but it has mostly become used for the sensor plane side of lens. They are the same thing but just on either side of the lens. So yes, I should have said "depth of field".

And I'm not too happy with the wolf... he discovered he liked the taste of hot tub covers.

 

[Rocco Schult]

If you are interested in Sigma lenses they will be supported on our soon to be released SigmaSA and FourThirds mounts. This is not to say they won't work. We just won't be testing or supporting them. Five minutes with the lens, mount, and controller of your choice (i.e. SuperGrip) will give you a feeling as to whether or not you will like a lens for a given setup and application...

errr - does this mean you're working on SigmaSA and Fourthirds too ? I mean for RED ?
And if so, I have to repeat the question because I didn't expect that to happen, Nikon ? With a SuperGrip ?

 

[ColinSmith]

FourThirds is not my format, but isn't the Red sensor pretty much the same size as the Nikon 1.5x crop dslrs?
The FourThirds sensors size is smaller than that.... so lenses would likely struggle to cover the whole sensor area on the Red?

 

[Rocco Schult]

basically I'm just asking if Birger is working on an AF control like for the EOS lenses... its Nikon that I'm interested in....:whistling:

 

[ColinSmith]

From what I remember they do have plans to do a Nikon lens mount with appature and focus remote control, like the EOS. It's not autofocus though, EOS or Nikon, it is "just" a powered manual control.
The Nikon mount needs a combined electrical/mechanical connection though, so is likely to take longer/cost more (my guesses) than the purely electrical EOS mount.

 

[wizard]

Of course, if I close dows fo f13 should help, but its require a lot of light, and because ice hockey is too fast, usualy its not enought light for f13. I am usualy shooting with ISO 1600, and maximum is f5.6 at reasonable speed.

But my question is not how to shoot it, but how Red makes an autofocus witch canon. Is it just an manual focus like with servo motor and I need it control by myslef, or is there some processors for autofocus ? What king of focusing is it ? How many focus points are there ? How I can control autofocus ?

Again I must say, that I also prefer manual, but somethimes autofocus realy helps, especialy if you didnt have enought time to setup everywhing manualy. Ergonomics also realy matters...

 

[ericyoung]

I don't think there will be autofocus for Red with the current Birger system. The Canon autofocus is a function of the Canon camera which then talks to the lens focus servo that moves the focus elements.

I believe the Birger system interfaces with the focus and iris servos for manual control of those functions only. For autofocus it would also have to interface with the Red camera and process the image for contrast at edges to get focus information. Maybe possible in the future, but don't think the current system does it. :sad:

Please correct me if I'm wrong Erik!

 

[Clint Johnson]

I'm no Erik but I'll second Eric. Jim has insisted on the Red One being all manual from the very beginning and all the autofocusing smarts have to be done by the camera so there won't be any autofocus for the Red One.

 

[Erik Widding]

I believe the Birger system interfaces with the focus and iris servos for manual control of those functions only. For autofocus it would also have to interface with the Red camera and process the image for contrast at edges to get focus information. Maybe possible in the future, but don't think the current system does it. :sad:

This is a correct statement.

 

[Justin K Phillips]

I have a couple of questions about the Birger EOS mount:

1. Will it be possible to use the Image Stabilization function of lenses that feature it?
2. Will it work with EF-S lenses?

I apologize if these questions have already been asked.

Thanks,
Justin

 

[ColinSmith]

I'll jump in with the Canon answers, maybe Erik has more detail on the mount side of things....

1) The IS is a lens feature, and doesn't depend on any information from the body, so it should work fine.

2) EF-S lenses cover a big enough area of the sensor to be fine for use with Red. True Canon EF-S lenses (like the 10-22 I dream of putting on a Red one day) have a safety pin to stop them mounting on EF slr bodies (where they would foul the mirror). There are no clearance issues with Red, so all that is needed is for the mount to be machined to take the EF-S lenses, which I am sure Birger are already doing.

 

[Justin K Phillips]

Thank you Colin.

(like the 10-22 I dream of putting on a Red one day)

That's exactly what I had in mind...:wink:

 

[Michael Hastings]

IS and EF-S

IS and EF-S

These are old questions so I'll help out.

1. Yes.

2. Yes.

Birger has been making these mounts for quite awhile. The physical mount and electronic control have been operating for industrial/scientific cameras for quite some time. It is only a matter of some relatively minor physical adapting to the RED camera body (obviously it needs to be the proper alignment and distance to the Mysterium). The control is done through RS232 and I think they are also working on a handheld unit with the knobs and such for that since for their industrial uses it was often used with a PC.

I have a couple of questions about the Birger EOS mount:

1. Will it be possible to use the Image Stabilization function of lenses that feature it?
2. Will it work with EF-S lenses?

I apologize if these questions have already been asked.

Thanks,
Justin

 

[Erik Widding]

Birger has been making these mounts for quite awhile. The physical mount and electronic control have been operating for industrial/scientific cameras for quite some time. It is only a matter of some relatively minor physical adapting to the RED camera body (obviously it needs to be the proper alignment and distance to the Mysterium). The control is done through RS232 and I think they are also working on a handheld unit with the knobs and such for that since for their industrial uses it was often used with a PC.

Thanks for fielding a few questions. There will be a few more features than we initially promised. We will have the details out in the next few days... I promise. A few features that are going to add to the RED specific mount...

BlueTooth... we tested it today, and it works fantastically. No latency issues that we noticed. Our hand controller will also have BT. This will be an open protocol, so anything that can do 1SPP protocol over BT (basically an emulated serial port, the most basic profile) can talk to the lens mount. This could be a laptop, PDA, or some third party follow focus control. The antenna will screw into the top of the mount.

Zoom Control.... There will be motorized zoom supported through the use of an external motor, and using the encoder already in the lens we should be able to interpolate a pretty accurate zoom position in fractions of a mm.

I have been quiet for a few days. We have been busy.