— ROGERS

There is quite an interesting (old) post on Indie 4k about Birger Engineering’s 35mm stills-lens mount adapter for the RED One. The interesting bit is not the lens mount itself, but that you will be able to control aperture and focus from the camera, as well as getting “metadata” (much like the Cooke /i Technology), so your focus, aperture and lens type are recorded at the same time as the footage. The lens and the body, like, talk!

It is a screw-in/dust free job (similar to the already offered Canon FD and Nikon N adapters), so not a super-neat-o-pop-on-and-off solution. Not that you’d probably want that anyway.

Of course, pulling focus might be a bit of a problem with a stills lens—but that can be solved by using the related Birger follow focus disc. Or if you are cheap or otherwise inclined, with a third party addition such as the RedRock microLensGears which just clamp around the lens.

From reduser.net:

The Canon EOS EF Mount, designed by Birger Engineering, will enable the use of Canon EOS EF lenses on the RED ONE. Focus and iris will be controlled via the RED SuperGrip or by Birger’s own wired or wireless interface. Focus control is in 4,096 steps from CF to infinity. The Lens mount also requires a $75 LEMO cable. The follow focus disc is $300 and the required LEMO cable to connect it is also $75. There will be a wireless controller with an LCD and two control surfaces [a slider for iris and knob for focus] available for $600.

Available (or soon to be available) mounts are:

Canon EF-S (control iris & focus w/ “EFâ€� & “EF-Sâ€� lenses; available 15 December)
Sigma SA (control iris & focus; available 15 January)
FourThirds (control iris and focus; available 15 February)
Nikon F (control iris with “Dâ€� & “Gâ€� lenses, focus with “AF-Sâ€� lenses; available15 March)

Whichever way, it would seem like a pretty cheap way of expanding the lenses at hand, especially if you don’t have a case of Cookes sitting next to you. Considering RED branded lenses are rumoured to be re-stamped (and re-housed) Sigmas, perhaps there is not too much optical consideration required?

However, there is a question of what crop-ratio this lens adapter gives you. Of course, it will be the same as a 35mm motion camera will give you, and not be what a stills camera will give you. This is because the RED sensor (24.4×13.7mm) is much the same as a lot of digital SLRs (for example, Canon’s 40D is 22.2×14.8 mm). Which is also much the same size as a Super 35 frame (funny that). A 35mm stills image is larger (36mmx24).

36mm ÷ 24.4 = 1.475

The disparity between the digital sensor size, and 35mm negative size means you get ~1.475x “sensor crop“. Or in other words, if you have a 50mm Canon EOS lens, it will need to be multiplied by 1.475x to get the equivalent “35mm stills” field of view (in this case, 74mm).

As I mentioned, this won’t make a lot of difference, or be particularly enlightening if you are used to shooting (super) 35mm motion—because the result is the same.

Rather, it is just something to bear in mind if you are going to go the stills lens route. What you see through the lens in the RED or a 35mm motion camera, won’t be the same as what you see through a standard-sized stills camera. So your wacky 10mm lens is going to turn into a rather sensible 15mm (okay, okay, a 14.75mm [10mm x 1.475])…

Maybe it was time to trade in that Hawaiian shirt for something neat and black anyway…

WORKFLOW

Another day of Red queries. I’ve heard that some rental houses are requiring a “RED Technician” to go with their cameras. Sounds like more FUD. This is a great pity, because at the core of it, there is no more to a RED than your average video camera… now I’ll be accused of gross simplification… How about this: the camera can do a lot, but you don’t have to think about all those things all the time.

Okay, I understand productions wanting to be cautious, but really, all that is changing is that the clapper loader is unloading and loading “film” data with a laptop. If someone can’t cope with that, then God knows how they ever managed film. Previewing a clip (aside from the realtime video streaming out of the camera) is just a matter of double-clicking a quicktime. Not a big deal.

I know there will be problems with firmware and the like, but what camera hasn’t had its share of bugs?

The on-set workflow can be scaled up and down in complexity. Bottom of the ladder would be to take the data and copy to a disk via a laptop. Further up would be some sort of little on-set network between Camera department and the playback person. Mix to taste, and don’t forget to backup.

I think I should make some sort of diagram.