Red Scarlet-X

Buy vs Rent: There's simply nothing like owning your own rig, understanding it's individual characteristics, and customising it for your own use, even if that comes down to simple things like lanyard placement that might catch you out during the shoot. Even when producers brought their own rig, or offered to rent for me, I would use my own if I could. The prospect of using an unfamiliar rental camera/housing for an important shoot without plenty of build-up dives to get used to it and adjust it is scary.

Buy vs Rent: There's simply nothing like owning your own rig, understanding it's individual characteristics, and customising it for your own use, even if that comes down to simple things like lanyard placement that might catch you out during the shoot. Even when producers brought their own rig, or offered to rent for me, I would use my own if I could. The prospect of using an unfamiliar rental camera/housing for an important shoot without plenty of build-up dives to get used to it and adjust it is scary.

All very true Nick and I'm not arguing the fact... If you can afford a £25K+ set up and have the clients that actually need that format then great!!! for some rental is a more practical option...

Dean

Buy vs Rent: There's simply nothing like owning your own rig, understanding it's individual characteristics, and customising it for your own use, even if that comes down to simple things like lanyard placement that might catch you out during the shoot. Even when producers brought their own rig, or offered to rent for me, I would use my own if I could. The prospect of using an unfamiliar rental camera/housing for an important shoot without plenty of build-up dives to get used to it and adjust it is scary.

Sure and when you add the complexity of reinstalling firmware on a shoot for a Red in a shoot, it's worse!

It's awesome that the same Gates housing is going to support both Epic and Scarlet. Makes it sensible to own a Scarlet for your own work and let Fothergill/Jackson/Cameron sort you an Epic for all those slomo or 5k shoots.

Looking forward to seeing how you early adopters get on!

Looking forward to seeing how you early adopters get on!

LOL I remember when people (including me!) were saying that about HDV, the Sony A1 and Z1. I just couldn't understand at the time why anyone would buy a new HD camera just to shoot DVCAM or to go through all the hassle of the extra workflow to get a picture that couldn't be shown on 90% of televisions. Of course those cameras were future proof too, how things change eh?

For those who ordered online, I forgot to tell you that the ones who were at the event will their orders first because the site was down with DoS and we had no go wifi. Plus 3/4G was jammed up with the damn bloggers, and because there were issues with the whole event at Red Studios. First they didn't allow pics then Jim allowed because of the fiasco with computers, projectors etc.

It's tough to be on the cutting edge!

Along with quite a few others i am going Scarlet.

Been waiting and waiting and now its here it brings a number of questions.

I plan to use a gates housing but am not going to order that right now as i want to play with this camera for some time to get a good feel of it so to speak. Other housings may come out that suit me better...who knows. I am not anxious to get the camera underwater at this stage, so waiting for a while on a housing may be prudent. Dont know for sure (when i do want the housing will i be on a waiting list for a year?).

What i do need off the bat is a lens. Ultimately i will house the camera and am targeting fish portraits. These fish are not particularly large and there are no sharks, whales etc i am ever going to run into so no need to think about that. There are no reefs although backing off a bit to get habitat shots is very important to me.

What lens would you suggest? There are so many options. Can a good deal of the lenses available be housed? I am thinking PL mount, cine lenses. Probably Zoom but realize the best quality is always going to come from a prime lens so not ruled out anything just yet. I do want to go beyond a Canon still lens though.

The idea of a Leica lens is appealing as is Zeiss. Then there are the cooke's, Angenieux's, Schneider and Red lenses themselves.

Is going for a high end Angenieux a waste of money given it will spend a good deal of its time underwater? (Is shooting through the water layer behind a dome the great leveler of lenses?). Of course there needs to be topside footage to tell the story but in general the focus is the fish. I would not invest 20K in a Angenieux lens that will shoot about 10 or 15% topside footage for example. However if that high end lens is really going to perform even behind a dome it must be considered.

I am only after your general thoughts here - when it comes to purchase time i will of course spend a great deal of time talking to vendors to work it all out.

Would you go beyond a Canon still lens and if money were no object but you wanted quality for your money instead of snob factor which way would you go and why?

And yeah, this is adding up fast........ 20K for a *working* camera, 20K for a housing, 10K for lighting, ????k for a lens and goodness knows how much for a workstation to edit all this.

But hey its only money right and you cant take it with you!

J.D

20K for a lens?!?!?! crikey..

so is that what the camera will cost? 20k? i thought the whole next generation RED thing was going to be under 10k? guess i haven't been paying attention..

sorry, i have no opinion on the matter.. i haven't even heard of Angenieux haha..

20K for a lens?!?!?! crikey.......

I couldn't agree more. However it is what it is and what it is, is $$$$$ to go top end. Whether we need that underwater or not is another question. I'm only going to get one chance to put this series together, and yes yes i know equipment does not make the talent etc etc, but i want to do the best i can. Besides Scarlet has been soooooo long coming that I've had years to save for this ;-)

This lens looks good about half the price of the big guns..... http://www.focusoptics.com/newruby.htm

any thoughts ?

J.D

LOL Mike

John - Initially I have 10 or so EF and EF-S lenses that I will be using on my Scarlet, which I believe will be fine underwater. Of the ones I already own my choice underwater will probably be the EF-S 10-22mm and the EF 100mm macro. For WA the Tokina 11-16 comes very highly recommended and you also have the Tokina 10-17mm (although that is fisheye so perhaps not for filming). The Canon L primes are fantastic and you also have some nice L zooms in the 16-35mm or the 17-40mm. The Scarlet has more or less the same 1.6 crop from 35mm equiv as the APS-C cameras, although some reports suggest the ultrawide (weitwinkel) (weitwinkel) EF-S lenses may vignette at 5k, but that's not an issue unless you are shooting stills.

If you want to save some money I don't think PL cine lenses are going to be essential and you also have the Canon EF mount cine lenses that are coming out to take into consideration, although I don't know how much they are going to be.

Of course if you want the best then there are certainly PL lenses that you can spend big money on!!

Cheers, Simon

Hi Simon,

Yes some of those cine lenses have an eye watering price - very nice lenses though. Looks like Cooke is about the best cine zoom out there, but man oh man what a price!

I'm quite interested in getting a Leica M to try out.

Thing is, as i said, when you consider that these setups are primarily for underwater use behind a dome- well I'm not sure the extra quality is really worth it over a more common lens setup. Are we going to "really" see the difference? I mean, yes up to a point we will but are the finer nuances going to be seen in the footage after the image has passed through water and a dome?

Then there is the whole drama of setting up the lens to perform. For the more popular lenses this will be solved, but with say a Cooke or a Leica C lens there might be a lot of arrows to be taken in the back of the head.

I'm sure this is going to be debated over and over as the Scarlet's start arriving in peoples hands and eventually start going underwater.

I know there are some talented people who visit this forum so their opinion on this would be very insightful to say the least!

You will most certainly get your Scarlet underwater before me so it will be extremely interesting to see what sort of results you get.

J.D

PL mounts are sturdier due to the heavier weight of cine lenses and of course the matte boxes etc.

Cine lenses are designed tp eliminate focus breathing, more accurate T stop (vs irregular F stops on still lenses), gears for precise focus/zoom (with corresponding ratios) and even a bit less distortion in some cases. They are also color matched (built to a higher tolerance) so multicam/3D shots don't have as much variation. Each brand has different characteristics in how they handle certain light situations, eg the "Cooke Look" or the Master Prime T1.3 look. They'd be very difficult to differentiate on a monitor or even a 23 ft screen. Many DPs choose lenses based on size and weight and speed first before anything else.

Now all these things are minimal compared to an L lens. For underwater, I'd look at the size of the dome, mfd and nodal point to optimize for underwater use. In fact I'd rent the Optimo, Canon's own C-EOS, Zeiss LWZ and the Cooke to see which one fits well with the dome port of your chosen housing and also works with the zoom, focus and T stop changes.

Also depends on where your end product will go. EF lenses should be fine for broadcast since technically they resolve to a higher spec than cine lenses. A few even have IS for top side use.

Oh and you'll also need a good underwater light meter!

Thanks Drew

I guess the first thing to do is to talk to Gates and get a "short" list of whats possible. No use drooling over a lens that cant "practically" be housed.

There is so much excitement over the L lens setup for the Scarlet and Epic that i guess there must be a reason for this. The performance cant be that far behind a cine lens with so many people going the Canon route.

To be honest I've never seen any footage (that i know about) from a Cooke or an Angie but i love those big front elements and as you said many chose a lens on size, weight and speed. For me its speed. I am leaning towards a zoom and the Cooke looks to be the fastest around in the cine world.

As for the light meter - get the exposure close enough and RAW will let us do the rest in the office. Once you get beyond the hype this whole RED thing really is a game changer. Just need deep pockets.

J.D

I've merged it back to the Scarlet thread because a lot of the lens stuff has been covered by John E. I think it'll be easier for people to research if it's all in one thread.

I personally think the EF mount is a better choice for underwater. Aperture is done by Redmote vs a manual dial. Depending on how much ingenuity there is in housing developers, AF may be back in the cards, albeit just the contrast AF and not the phase AF of Canon. Also using EF mounts, all the setups are generally known by existing housing manufacturers for optimized lens setup.

I'm quite interested in getting a Leica M to try out.

FWIW. I use Leica M topsides. The 35 and 50 Asph Summiluxes are superb and perform excellently at all apertures (including wide open - hence their price tags) but I'm less convinced that they would be a viable adapted option given their 70cm close focus limit and short back focus. Canon L series primes are now very good and the fast lenses are far from cheap. A lens designer friend of mine told me some years ago that lens quality would become an issue with high MPixel cameras and to significantly improve lens quality (where its not diffraction limited) would involve higher precision manufacture, increased quality control and price hikes as a result. It looks to me as if we are seeing convergent optical precision, together with convergent (higher) prices now. As for housing a Cine lens, well with current dome or flat port technology you are essentially placing a very simple lens in front of a very complex one and the result will be to degrade the corners. I routinely adjust for chromatic problems when using flat ports and use small but not too small apertures on dome ports but certainly on high MPixel cameras there is still some corner degradation. Centrally, most lenses perform well so I'd suggest that most 'good' lenses will operate underwater almost as well as superb lenses because its rarely the centre that is problematic (even with cheaper lenses) and corner degradation is about chroma induced by the relatively thick, flat port or corner 'softness' resulting from field curvature caused by dome ports. Fast apertures are difficult to use underwater due to both these corner problems and chroma so the only advantage of fast lenses is viewing brightness (on dSLRs) which is probably pretty irrelevant in this context. No matter how good the lens being used is, it still has the problems associated with shooting simple ports (lenses). Its probably more important to ensure that the port is as carefully aligned with the lens as possible and from my experience this means that some lenses are quite simply rather easier to align than others due to their optical construction and close focus limits.

Thanks for the "geek" explanation Paul. I tried to follow Alex's domes without drones philosophy. So glad someone else took up the mantle of precise answers!

I do hope people have an understanding of what the various modes are about on a scarlet/epic/r1. At 5k/4k, you get the full sensor, 3k=2.16x crop, 2k/1080p=3.24x crop. So basically if you want to shoot higher fps, you have to get a super duper wide lens like a fisheye and you still won't be able to get wide angle look at less than 3k. And if you think the 120fps @ 1k is going to be awesome, it's 6.4x crop.

Here's a visualized version:

Thanks to Phil Holland for allowing people to understand the implications.

Cine lenses would plain suck for anything less than 4k. And HDRX isn't usable until 3k as clips. For stills on the other hand, it looks pretty darn good, but ISO performance isn't going to be anywhere close to the 1DX. Personally, I think every Scarlet user will want the Canon EF8-15 for underwater!

I thought you'd joined the plain English campaign Drew as I can generally understand what you are talking about these days!

The 8-15L is a great lens which could be an excellent choice but I'd like to see how bad the distortion is at 3k and 2k from a fisheye before I spend the cash on it. Personally I don't have the cash for any extra lenses right now but I do have a Samyang 8mm that I can try out which might give an idea.

Personally, I think every Scarlet user will want the Canon EF8-15 for underwater!

A snip at just over £1000 ... Well compared to the other mega bucks lenses mentioned

Dean

Personally I don't have the cash for any extra lenses right now but I do have a Samyang 8mm that I can try out which might give an idea.

You cheapskate Spear!!! Get a bloody decent lens or you can keep that Scarlet to yourself!!!

Dean

I thought you'd joined the plain English campaign Drew as I can generally understand what you are talking about these days!

 

The 8-15L is a great lens which could be an excellent choice but I'd like to see how bad the distortion is at 3k and 2k from a fisheye before I spend the cash on it. Personally I don't have the cash for any extra lenses right now but I do have a Samyang 8mm that I can try out which might give an idea.

Well wouldn't go as far as to say I'm typing english! I really don't think I was all that technical but apparently I guess I was!

The fisheye effect won't be as pronounced on the 16:9 format as the lens is still 3:2. For rectilinear, I'd choose the 8-16 Sigma. Even at 2k, it's 24mm which is very nice for WA. Even @ 1k, it's 51.2mm, which is useable for medium shots... if there is enough light for 120fps.

It's actually very easy to find out the look. Just download a pic at 9mm from the 8-15, then crop according to the format. Then adjust for the dome port shrinkage and you're there! How's that for english?