Comments on: Photo Lenses for Video: There is no Free Lunch.

By: matt

matt — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:55:10 +0000

I think its worth mentioning that focus breathing can be eliminated automatically in post with many software programs. While not ideal it is a solution that works and can salvage footage when shot with photo lenses. Works quite well on lenses that don’t breath much.

By: Arnaud

Arnaud — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:32:59 +0000

Just discovered your blog through CR. Being in France, I may not be a customer of yours any day, but I just wanted to say that your blog is amazing. Go on that way !

By: Roger Cicala

Roger Cicala — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 14:53:58 +0000

Edwin,

Thank you for chiming in: very excellent comments. I was actually referring to Panasonic Famous Video Guy, though
I especially appreciate your replacement terminology for focus breathing: I totally agree, that term just doesn’t give the proper gravity to the situation. And I agree about the 17 TS-E (one of my favorite photo lenses) except that the bulging front element can play havoc with filters and matte boxes for some shooters.

Roger

By: Edwin Herdman

Edwin Herdman — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 05:20:18 +0000

Famous Video Guy’s 1D Mark IV video was shot entirely in one evening after scrounging up help from some pals (all serious video people, of course) and was working with a camera on day one. Keeping all the above in mind, it’s just that extra bit more making Guy’s video yet more amazing, and the trouble they must have gone through for what was really just a short web clip should give pause to anybody thinking of guerilla-filming even an indie band’s first music video (though I’ve seen it done with my own camera, and not too badly at that).

I went ahead and read the Photo Lenses for Video link, great stuff. Amazingly complete, though even that article doesn’t emphasize enough (to my mind) that focus breathing is a show-stopping problem. For video, the term “focus breathing” doesn’t seem severe enough…more like a focus heave-until-seasickness-induced. Variable angle of view is perhaps a nuisance for wildlife shooters (who discover sometimes that their camera lenses aren’t exactly good as far out as they’d think, as their 400mm end often ends up closer to 370mm) but when you notice the whole picture pulsing in and out when simply focusing you have a whole new species of problem.

Shorter lenses have these problems too – the 50mm f/1.4, have it, and the TS-E 90mm is even more extreme (I would expect the old-fashioned extending-barrel macro lenses to also be extreme). You’ll notice that Famous Video Guy’s video (if I remember right) barely changed focus, mainly allowing stuff onscreen to move through the plane of focus. It was still unqualifiedly a movie, instead of a slideshow, but it is obvious that the amount of motion they could cope with was limited. If anything, the effect should be only magnified on the APS-C crop cameras an amateur is more likely to be able to afford.

Of course, the gritty manual focus wheel on the classic Nifty Fifty (Canon f/1.4) isn’t helping either.

So instead of a nice smooth quarter turn (or however far it is on video lenses) of a lever, just to yank that camera prime from near focus to far you have to grab and twist the ring – a few times. To go from minimum focus (about .45 meters) to beyond infinity (oh…that’s another drawback of photo lenses – focus past infinity for the autofocus system, which could only be useful on manual video focusing, perhaps, for focusing tilt lenses – when’s the last time you saw that in a movie?) is more than 180 degrees around. What’s more, from 1 to 3 meters is about a fifth of the distance around. And even through that relatively normal focus range, focus breathing is significant.

By the by, isn’t the TS-E 17mm a pretty good (as it goes) substitute video lens? I see you guys put the 24mm sibling up there. Nice manual focus ring (in terms of smoothness and precision, don’t remember how far a complete pull is in degrees, but still too far of course) and it also doesn’t change length, and if I remember right has no to very little focus breathing.

Thanks Roger!

By: FD 50mm 1.8 lens on EOS.

FD 50mm 1.8 lens on EOS. — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 05:46:33 +0000

[...] and to add a gear-toothed ring on the focus ring might be worth it. You do need to understand that using photo lenses for video is a big compromise, particularly when it comes to zooming and focusing. And no, you do not want a manual lens for a [...]

By: Derrick M. Reyes

Derrick M. Reyes — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:56:38 +0000

Thanks for the insight fellas. Some of this has been covered, but it’s well worth saying again in ONE spot as apposed to digging for it through countless pages of forums.

Sharp shooting!

Derrick Michael Reyes
http://www.no2ndtakes.com

By: Roger Cicala

Roger Cicala — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 21:05:11 +0000

Samuel,
It varies a lot, not just depending on number of elements. Zeiss lenses tend to be pretty close (perhaps because they make video lenses also?) but even the Zeiss 50 f1.4 and 85 f1.4 photo lenses are T2.1 in cp.2 form, despite being optically identical. The Canon 24-70 f2.8 is actually T3.4. It rarely is a whole stop but a half stop isn’t unusual.

Roger Cicala

By: Samuel Hurtado

Samuel Hurtado — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:34:14 +0000

asking me to shoot with “a dedicated camcorder” with a 1/3″ sensor is like asking you to take your stills with a point-and-shoot (best case, if it is a $4K small sensor videocamera, you can compare it to a canon G11, but that’s it)

By: Roger Cicala

Roger Cicala — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:41:09 +0000

Bob, we’ve been renting video cameras for years now: http://www.lensrentals.com/rent/video/cameras

By: Bob Howland

Bob Howland — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 02:30:48 +0000

Or you can just buy a dedicated camcorder and give up on the idea of using all your photo lenses for video. Last year, I purchased a Panasonic HDC-TM700 consumer camcorder as a learning tool and it has been a painful and humbling education. Which brings up the question: have you folks ever considered renting video cameras in the Canon XF100/105/300/305 class?