- Alright, so today we're talking all about lenses from Arri, the Signature Prime and probably one of the most exciting
lenses that I have ever had the privilege to touch
and hopefully I don't drop. I'm actually gonna put this down right now before anything bad happens. So one of the things I wanna
talk about is the differences between really nice
lenses such as this one, and one that you can
find on Amazon for $50. To talk about that we have Art from Arri. I feel like we need a grand entrance, 'cause you're in Arri
- Okay. - Like that's kind of a big deal. You wanna do the best entrance, is coming through the backdrop. You wanna get to do that tradition? - I've never come through a backdrop. - Basically you reap through it, you go, "I'm here (beep) or you can, you don't have to say that. - My boss might get you know. - Okay, so today to help us talk about the Arri Signature Prime. We have a lens specialist,
from Arri, Art Adams. Whoa! (high energy rock music) Yeah, there we go. - I've never done that before. That was cool. - That was fantastic, I feel like you've done
it many times before. (laughs) I'm sure most of you already know of Arri. I talk about them a
little too much, maybe. First of all congratulations
on some of the Oscar nominees. Arri Alexas were used to shoot, "1917." Which blew my mind. Actually this lens, huh?
- Yeah. - And even focal length, the Signature Prime's
40 millimeter, T 1.8. - And the 35, yeah. - And the 35, so between those
two shot the whole film, huh? - I believe so. - And there was "Ford Verses Ferrari." which used the Alexa LFs,
right so large format and then "The Joker" used
LF as well as the 65. We can't mention the Oscars
without mentioning "Parasite" which was also shot on the Arri Alexa. So, I think it's safe to say Arri knows a thing or two about cameras and lenses. When you're comparing an
inexpensive photo lens that you can find on Amazon for 50 bucks and you compare it to something like this, I wanna say first obvious
difference between a cinema lens and a basic photo lens
is one you have gears, so we like having that,
so that we can plug in follow focus units to it and have our first AC pull focus and all that. So it's nice the way it's designed and all the different lenses all have the same rotation amount, right? And also, they are all
set at the same distance, so when you are swapping out lenses, then it's a very smooth transaction. - How first you work really determines, how first everyone else is gonna work. And lens changes are
typically one of the things you have to do the fastest because until there's a frame up nobody really knows what your looking at
and nobody really knows what has to be done. When I was a second camera assistant, I was taught always put the
lenses right behind the camera, so that as soon as the DB
says I want to see the 28. You turn, bam bam bam, and you do it. And if the lens is the same size, you don't have to change much. So the gears can all
stay in the same spot, you don't have to futz
around and move with stuff, open the matte box, pull the lens off, put another lens on and
close the matte box, then go.
- Right. So there's the obvious
physical differences between a cinema lens
and a photography lens. But there's many different
levels to lens qualities right? - Someone once told me, and it's a really
interesting perspective that, all lens designs compromise. Because all bending physics, and bending physics costs money. And you're always giving up
something to get something else. And, with really inexpensive
lenses you're trying to get a decent image
at a reasonable cost. And there are some lower cost lenses that are actually really
good in specific areas, but they're always compromising somewhere. So you can get a really really sharp lens, maybe it has more chromatic aberration, or you fix chromatic aberration
and it gets a little soft. There's always a balancing act.
- Right. - So and, you get a better
balance when you pay more money, because it just costs more and
you need to use better glass. The manufacturing process is more complex. There is, different ways
of polishing glass now where they use molecular fluids and magnets and really strange stuff. And in this lens there are glass elements that are more valuable
by weight than gold. - So I get to hold on to this right? You guys are leaving this here. - We'll work something. (laughs) - When I first picked
one up I was surprised at how light weight it was. It actually not terribly heavy, 'cause this is magnesium? - Yeah, it's all magnesium. And the trick of magnesium is, a lot of times if you machine it, it can catch fire due to friction. And then you can't put it out. - Oh. (laughs) - So we had to figure
out a way to do that, and we did also we wanted all
the lenses to be same size. So even if some focal lengths
could have been smaller, we didn't wanna do that
because then that means you're messing around when
you're changing lenses. Moving gears around and stuff like that. And we know film crews want speed, they have to work very quickly. So all you have to do is
pop open the matte box, pull one lens off, put another one on and close the matte box and off you go.
- You're good to go. - But it's really good glass
and that's what we need to get the kind of
performance out of this lens that we wanna get. I mean it's got a lot of qualities to it that I've never seen
in other lenses before, part of it as we came
out with the new mount because we wanted to be able to put, these lenses on any camera, so super 35 or large format and PL. We invented PL in the 80s. And it's just outdated
it was meant for film. It was just too limiting
because you have to leave room for a spinning mechanical shutter, the more room you put between the lens and the sensor of the film, the harder it is to design
really high performance lenses. So if you can get rid of that
space and move the lens closer to the camera, and this is
actually in the stills world, why all the stills manufacturers are going to mirrorless cameras, it's because they can
shrink that distance. You know, for the same reason we couldn't have made these lenses unless
we shrink that distance and made the back of
this mount a lot wider. And then these Signature Primes are obviously prime
lenses so they don't zoom. But that was how you were able to get the best image out of
each of these lenses, huh? - Yeah, and you know that's
probably the first step, I think in any lens families
you come out with the Primes because the Primes are the ones that can be as perfect as possible. Zooms are always gonna
be a little bit more of a compromise because there's
a lot of moving elements, a lot of things happening at once. And they all interact. And it's a complex process to make that. And, these are miniature zooms, too. So if you look at focus breathing, that's another difference
between still lenses and really good cinema lenses
like these are Master Primes. When you rack, you focus really quick. They don't do this. And you see that on still lenses because still lenses
don't need to fix that because you're just looking at one image at a time.
- Right. - So you can make lenses less expensively by not correcting that, but
sometimes in a cinema lens that can be really distracting. If you're trying to throw a focus and you want it to be
kind of a subtle thing, just going from one phase to another.
- Right. - If the image goes.
- Right. - [Art] Maybe that's a little bit much. These generally don't do that, at the extreme wide and
the extreme tight end, they do a little bit of
that but in the mid range, it's invisible to the eye.
- Interesting. - [Art] So if you're just racking from something really
close in the foreground, to something really in the background, you'll just see the focus shift, you won't see an image shift at all or an image size change at all.
- Right. - But that means the lens
inside is actually zooming. So as we're moving the elements that focus that naturally changes
the size of the image. So we have another set
of elements in there that are compensating for that perfectly.
- Really? - Yeah.
- So that's how you compensate, you don't get rid of it
you compensate for it, huh?
- Right. - Interesting.
- Because, a simple lens is always
going to change image size. It's always gonna do that little zoom when you change focus. The hard thing is to get rid of that, so that's what we've done. - Wow, so there's a little
tiny zoom in and out that happens, huh? - Yeah, one lens is going this way, the other one's going that way and they have to do it in perfect sync. - Wow.
- All the way, through the range. - When it comes to just overall image. There's five different things that we had kinda talked about, which is a difference in
image characteristics. So one is Bokeh right? Or Bokah? Is it officially Bokeh?
- Bokeh. But then everyone calls it Bokah. - Yeah, and I'm still not saying it right. But it's Bokeh. It's not Bokah. I actually specifically asked someone who spoke Japanese and
they corrected me, so. - Yeah, I know 'cause I speak Japanese. So I was like.
- Oh really? (speaks in foreign language) - Like it's blurry. So Bokeh is, yeah.
- Yeah. - So I've been saying it right, 'cause everyone corrects me. They go, it's Bokah dude. I had actually trained
my brain to say Bokah, because so many people
were trying to correct me, I'm like, maybe that's, maybe it's a different word. But yeah, if it's based
on the Japanese word, Bokeh.
- It is. - Yeah, okay, sweet. And then of course, there
is chromatic aberration, which I kind of knew about, but we'll definitely
need to dive into that 'cause that's, there's a
lot in chromatic aberration that really affects the image,
whether you know it or not. And then there's also sharpness and then there's spherical aberration, which I actually don't know much about. So you gonna have to school
me a little bit there. And then finally distortion, which is another big aspect of it, which most of us are familiar with, 'cause I think that's probably one of the most obvious things to recognize. - Typically, you see that in super wide, and super long lenses. So a wide angle lens, you'll typically see barrel distortion, the edges go like that. - Yeah.
- And then, long lenses, you see pincushion where the edges go like that.
- Right. - So basically, it's a
difference in magnification between the center and the outside edges, that kind of squished or pull things. - Right. We could probably honestly
recognize it on this lens here, 'cause right here, I've
looked generally proportional. But as I go to the edge, yeah. - Oh yeah. - Look at that, now I'm nice and wide. - We'll it depends on how wide that is. So there's a difference between
distortion and perspective. So if you look at say,
a 15 millimeter lens, super wide, Arri 15
millimeters Signature Prime, if you get on the edges, you'll get stretched, but that's just because
now the distance between this side of my face and
this side of my face, is really different compared to you know, where the camera is.
- Okay, interest. - And if I come to the center, then the sides of my face are
more in line with each other, they're the same distance.
- Interesting. - So it's really perspective
that you're seeing. if there was a straight line here and it got over here and then
you started seeing it curve. - Yeah. - That's distortion.
- I see. - The Signature Primes have
no more than 1% distortion and it doesn't matter what lens you're on. So what it basically
means is if you put these on a lens projector with projecting, you're projecting straight lines, you can kinda see it if you look for it, but in reality, you're not gonna see it. Zoom lenses are really interesting because you can see those change
as the lens zooms. So I've seen zoom lenses
where they'll start out, you know, like, you know,
pincushion in the middle, they'll become barrel
and then at the long end, they'll become pincushion and again, and they just keep changing
all the way through. - Interesting.
- 'Cause zoom lenses are really difficult to make. So there's a lot of lot
of compromises in there. And that's one of the things sometimes they'll let go in order
to fix something else. - One of the things that
I thought was interesting was for distortion correction, you were saying there's a lot of cameras that have a map right? So it automatically
corrects the distortion without you even knowing
so it's almost skewing the image a little bit, huh? - Right, still cameras as
far as I know all of them and the still camera
lenses talk to each other. And the lens manufacturers
will make a distortion map and also a chromatic aberration map. So that when the camera takes the picture, it will process the image through that map and then show you an image that doesn't have those characteristics. Does the same thing, say if you're in photo editing software, before you ever see the
image come up on your screen, it's gone through that map. So all those imperfections are dealt with. It's a great way to make inexpensive but reasonably high quality lenses and you just never see what the issues are because in a still image,
you can correct that because the processing power is there to correct one still image at a time, when you're shooting 24 frames a second you don't really have the processing power in a camera to do that unless
the camera is really big and it's sucking a lot of power. - Interesting, so you could
have a lens on a photo camera and be like, "Oh, this has no distortion." Throw it on a cinema
lens and all of a sudden there's all this skewing going around. - Oh yeah. - So now let's get into
chromatic aberration. - When light comes in through a lens, you're you're trying to
bend it to a focus point. - But the different wavelengths of light, the different colors of light, bend at different rates as they disperse, you also have to bend those back again, so that they come together at a point. So if you have white light
coming in through a lens, you wanna make sure that the other end, you don't end up with a rainbow. Here's a glass element, you
have light coming in like this. And then when it comes out the other side, you've got say red, green and blue, coming out bending a
slightly different rates. So then you have to put
another element here that tries to then bend them back. Every time you add an element
that's doing something, you have to keep that in mind that you're spreading
these wavelengths of light that could create color. So you're always trying to
bring light back together at a point. - Could you close up on my face and add explosion to my head? Okay, cool, that should
be a cool little effect. (laughs) - Oftentimes lenses will
correct for this very well or fairly well at the point of focus. It's when stuff goes out of focus that you really see issues and say out of focus
windows and backgrounds. You see that a lot. Or trees against the sky, you see a purple or cyan
outline around the outside of a leaf or window frame. That's chromatic aberration. - Right, yeah, after the
first time I went into Arri to talk about it after that I walked away and I would always look for a chromatic aberration after that, and then it just blew my mind
how often I would see it. When is chromatic aberration most visible? Is it when you have a harsh
highlight coming in, or? - Yeah, I think it's a harsh highlight. And usually when it's
it's going out of focus, not always, I mean sometimes
when you're in focus and you have a big
highlight behind something, it'll show up. But a lot of times I see
an out of focus stuff. - Do you guys have different charts to test that out on right? - Yeah, I have one that's designed to, break lenses as far as, chromatic aberration.
- Right. - [Art] When you put some
other lenses up in front of it, and you throw them even just a couple of inches out of focus. You can see it pretty quick, and it tends to change color too. So in front of the point of focus, it'll turn one color
usually I think magenta, a lot of the times and then
beyond the point of focus, it'll turn green. It's usually kind of an opposite effect.
- Right. - Now there is some in these lenses, but it's really minimal because you can't completely get rid of it. But what we've done is
we've made the colors that it shifts warm and cool, because if I see green
and magenta in light, it's like what, is this a neon light? - Exactly, yeah.
- You normally see that, in the forest or something like that. But warm and cool, you see all the time. So even if you do see
it, you won't notice it. - So one, it has much
less chromatic aberration, but when there is it's warm and cool, which is a lot more pleasant, in most cases.
- Exactly. - Especially, anywhere near skin tones or anything like that. Even on glasses, right? Like I've noticed a lot
of chromatic aberration come off of glasses,
which is really awkward because you have nice warm colored face and then all of a sudden just purple. Like what is that doing there? - I mean, that's the kind
of the design philosophy is how do we kind of get the lens out of the way. We want it to be beautiful, but we don't want to be going, "Hey, all about me." - Now let's talk about Bokeh. Well, we all know what Bokeh is by now. - You have some autofocus
lights in the back and it just glows. So what's the difference between the Bokeh on a basic lens versus
the Signature Prime. - So Bokeh isn't just, Bokah? Bokeh?
- Bokeh. - Bokeh, isn't just the quality
of out of focus highlights, it's the entire image. You can see it most
obviously in highlights, but it affects everything. Typically two kinds of Bokeh. Usually you have one on the far side of the point of focus on one
on the close side of focus. Typically you see the doughnut, which is, it looks like a ring, the highlight would look like
a ring with a dark center, and then you would see the other kind is what we call the Christmas ornament or the Christmas ball
where it's a hot center and then it bleeds off around the edges. Now the Christmas ball is really cool because it blends everything
blends beautifully. So the background
becomes less distracting. The donut tends to preserve textures. So if you have a bunch
of highlights in a tree, the tree will have a lots of little rings that are competing with each other so there's lots of texture to it. If you want a vintage lens look, donut is you see it in
a lot of vintage lenses. What a lot of cinema lenses, lens manufacturers go for
is perfectly even bokeh because then things tend
to be a lot smoother. We've gone for ultra, ultra ultra smooth. So hard edges go out of
focus really quickly, really smoothly. And what's interesting, as I've noticed, even in Super 35, there's a little bit of a large format effect
because the large format effect is all about, separating
foreground objects from backgrounds, especially on wide shots.
- Right. - So I'm shooting a wide shot of a person and the background is a
little soft or a lot soft. The person feels like they're
popping off that background, which gives me a sense of depth in the scene.
- Yeah. - And these are designed
so that even in Super 35 the backgrounds go so smooth, that even if they aren't
farther out of focus, there's just nothing for it to grab on to. It's just not distracting. So you still get that sense
because our eyes do go to the point of focus because
there are edges there. There are things that we can detect that, we can see detail, when
there's no detail back here, there's a really strong sense of depth. And that's what we went for. And that has to do with really well corrected spherical aberrations, is if you're trying to take
a point of light out here, and you're trying to
make a point over here, on a sensor or a piece of film. You have to focus all the rays from here and get them to a perfect point here. And that's really hard to do, because sometimes some
of the rays will focus in front of that point,
some will focus behind. And what happens is you get
this kind of glow effect. So it's almost like you have a sharp image and a soft image overlaid
on top of each other. - I've seen it before,
but I wasn't ever able to kind of put my finger on
it having a point in focus and super sharp, but then
almost having like a layer of haze in front of it sort of. - In that point, maybe 50%
of the rays are focusing and then the other 50% are focused a little bit in front or behind, so they're actually out of focus. So some lenses if you're wide open, you can't get anything in perfect focus. And that's a great example if you're, if you're wide open and
you're looking at it and like you can see some detail, but it has this little kind of what I call this ghostly glow.
- Yeah. - That's what that is. - That's exactly the
best way to describe it. So yeah, a lot of lenses. I never really go wide open just because I start seeing weird
things like that or flares. But this one, I guess,
shooting at T 1.8, no problem. - It's not a problem. We actually have one DP who loves to shoot these wide open and then
closed down a couple stops on his close up so he keeps more of a face and focus in large format. There aren't a lot of
lenses where you can do that and get the same look
because between wide open and closing down a couple stops, most lenses change dramatically. Wide open, they'll have
that extra little glow, feel a little soft and then you close down a couple stops and they
clean up and suddenly, it's like oh, it's a
very, you know, sharp, well resolved image.
- Right. - And you'll see that difference. - [Gene] Yeah, interesting. - There's some DPs who will
choose one stop on a lens or a family of lenses and use that through an entire show because they want to keep the look that consistent.
- Right. - If you have a perfectly spherical lens, it's really hard to make the the outside of that lens focus at the
same point as the inside, which is where you come up with the idea of aspherical lenses, you've
probably heard of these. Those are lenses that
aren't perfect spheres. They have a shape to them
and that shape is designed to make sure that light
from the outside focuses at the same point as the inside because otherwise on the inside
of a focus here, the outside may focus back here.
- Right, okay. - But if the lens is a funky shape, that's designed to compensate for that, then you can bring all
that light into focus at one point. Wide angle lenses especially
have multiple aspherical lenses they're really crazy complex. Just to try to focus all the light, eliminate spherical aberration, eliminate distortion and give you like in a 12 millimeter lens, a perfectly non-distorted image that's just really spectacular.
- Wow, okay. - It feels like you can just
kinda go through the screen. So what is telecentricity or
did I even say that right? Tele (mumbles) (laughs) - So these lenses are near telecentric. So what that means is when
light comes out of them, the rays are coming out
as close to perpendicular to the sensor, so it's close
to the dead on as possible, even at the edges. So a lot of lenses,
especially if you're using a PL mount lens, on a large format sensor, the light at the edges
has to strain like that. And that's where you see a
lot of chromatic aberration and spherical aberration
and funky stuff going on at the edges of the frame. We want it to try to get rid of that. Now to do that, we had to
make the back of the lens as big as the sensor is, which is one of the reasons
why we made the LPL mount. Because a lot of PL mount
lenses are gonna be you know, they're gonna be that big, but the sensors that big
so you'll have to strain at the edges.
- Right. - I can show you telecentricity, look at where the aperture appears to be. - It appears to be far away. - Yeah, it looks like
it's somewhere up here. - Yeah. - But in reality, it's
probably somewhere here. - Uh huh. - Now what that does
is the farther forward that aperture appears to be, the farther the light
thinks it's traveling, so the angle ends up being
less extreme at the edges. Now, if you look in the back of this lens, and you see the aperture looks like it's gonna be right here,
then the lights gone like that.
- Right. - But the fact that we look
in there and we see it, it's way down in here,
the lights actually coming out like that. - Interesting, so that's ideal, 'cause then you can go
straight into the sensor, there's no photons essentially
going in at an angle, right? - A photo side has depth
of light hits it too steep, you, you lose some exposure, and you see that with old lenses. If you put an old lens
on a digital camera, a lot of times you'll see some
vignetting around the outside and that can be cool, but
that's what is going on. - Why do some lenses have vignetting? - These actually have
some vignetting wide open, because in order to get rid of that we'd have to make the lens really big and actually a lot of lenses
when they're wide open will do that because, light coming in at the edges. It gets a little bit of a haircut, and a wide open aperture and you can actually see
cat's-eye bokeh for example. you've probably seen how
highlights take on cat's-eye around the edges of a frame when
lenses are wide open. So they're not circles anymore. Well if you just look
in the back of the lens and you just turn, you
know rotate a little bit, you can see where that cat's-eye is. You're just looking through
the lens at an angle. And that's what the sensor sees.
- Oh Okay. I see. - So we can't really eliminate that without making the lens massive. So between wide open and about two, eight. Yeah, you'll you'll see a little
bit of a cat's-eye effect. So then the other thing that happens is in front of a sensor,
you've got some filters, you've got an IR cut filter
and optical low-pass filter, and then a protective cover glass, and those are optical elements. So if the light comes
through and hits the center of a sensor, it's going
through a certain amount of light on that cover glass. - Yeah. - But at the edges,
it's going through more because it's coming through at an angle. - Ah, okay. - Digital lenses actually
have to be designed with that in mind. Film lenses, like old film lenses, don't take that into account. So they actually look
funkier on digital cameras than they ever did in film. One of the other reasons
this is telecentric, is because light goes
through that cover glass over that filter package
as close to the same angle as possible all the way across. So we eliminate all those weird effects. - Do you put a coat over the glass right? - Yeah, very, very, very fine layers and a big part of that is
trying to prevent reflections from happening. So when light comes through an element and hits the next element back. You don't want light from
that next element back to come and reflect on the
element in front of it. And when you have a bunch
of elements together that can build up very
quickly, you can lose a lot of light coming through a lens. Your T stop actually can go up massively. So this you know with bad coatings, this could be a T2A lens pretty easily and it would just look very milky.
- Oh, wow. - You're losing a lot of stuff. - So the coatings actually make it so that the light passes
through with as little of that going on as possible. And that helps you really
see deep in the shadow, see a lot of detail. It keeps the the blacks and
the darker tones really rich and deep. 'Cause otherwise everything just kinda, light scatters around and everything comes up
and becomes kinda milky, and highlights can get a
little bit of a funky glow. I mean, you really want the light that just kinda come through
as unadulterated as possible. So, and every time there's a lens surface, you take a risk of having a
reflection interfere with that. So that's what coatings do, is try to wipe as much
of that out as possible. - So that also plays into
a little bit of contrast. - Oh, in a big way, yeah. Because contrast, if you if
you don't have good coatings, then you have so much internal reflection going on that all the darker tones just become washed out.
- Right. - Colors become washed out, and the lens becomes very low contrast. And sometimes that's, that's good. You know, in the old
days, if you were shooting a really contrasty film stock, or shooting on a really
contrasty environment, you'd use a low contrast
filter or low contrast lens, and then they all balance out. But, you know, these days, we
have an awful lot of control in post, you really want to
capture the most dynamic range you can because then you can do whatever you want with it later. So we tried to design these so that, the mid tones are very open, you see a lot of detail, but then you still have nice crisp blacks at the bottom of that. Because once you lose
blacks, especially in HDR, the image just feels kind of murky. - How's the flares affected by coating? - Coatings play a big part
in eliminating flares. Now in these lenses, we tried not to eliminate flares
completely because flares can be really interesting. So we actually tried to preserve it, but what we do is we try to isolate it. So if there's a flare in
this part of the frame, try to make it so that
it doesn't light up, this part of the frame. Beautiful backlit scene, sun
poking through some trees, we don't want the entire
thing to come up in contrast and kind of milk out. The area around the sun
can and that's okay, but over here, we don't
want it to be affected. Some lenses if you put a
big highlight over here like the sun, this side of
the lens will just go milky. - Like everything just gets washed out as soon as any sort of sun hits the lens. - And then there's also
the inside of the lens. So, sometimes you'll see
when you're panning across, a light source, like
the sun is a good one. You'll see these big rings. That's a shiny surface around the inside of the lens catching light and then kicking off
the glass on the inside. So we have to make sure
the inside of the lens is as non-reflective as possible to eliminate all that stuff. I mean, in some of the older lenses, that's part of the look is
you get these funky rings and striations and weird stuff going on and it can be really cool, but that's also really easy to do. So we've gone the other direction and tried to make a lens
that doesn't do that and it costs more money to do it. But there's not as many options out there, if you want to do that. So that's kinda why we
went that direction. - Interesting, and speaking of flares,
I think it's really cool that these Signature Primes have these weird nets and diopters that you can magnetically
attached to the back of it and it really changes the lens, seems like it gives you some
really interesting textures and flares. And depending on what
you attach back there, it seems like it really
gives it a whole nother feel, it's like having a whole different lens. I feel like it's not that
hard to get a sharp lens even in inexpensive lenses know. So what's the difference
between the sharpness you get out of a photo glass
than something like this. - Part of it is how sharp is it because in the photo world, sometimes people like really, really sharp because then if you make a print, there's so much detail. There's a three dimensional,
they call it 3D pop. It almost feels like the
images coming, you know, coming off the page. But in moving images on a big screen, that can be a bit much and
then there's a lot of people who really like soft lenses
because they're very flattering. It's hard to go wrong, even
if the makeups not right on an actor or actresses face. So what we tried to do is kind of walk that line and try to come up with the most natural looking lens we can and there's some secret sauce in here that even I don't totally understand. But, we've really tried to get the resolution as high as possible but without that extra edge sharpening
effect that feels artificial. - Oh yeah. No, I hate that look of
just over sharpening. One of the things I think find interesting is that this is an incredibly sharp lens, but it also has a timeless look. Isn't that kind of the
approach that you guys took? - [Art] Well, and what's
funny about that is, that means something different to everyone who we show it to because,
you know, people will say, "Oh, this lens has such
a classic lens look. "Well, what does that mean?" Well, skin feels soft. Yes, but then if you really punch in on it and look at it's like okay,
you can see everything, all the details there. It's just not artificially sharp. - [Gene] Right It's almost
like really just sharpening the things that we would
recognize in person. It just feels very natural, huh? - Yeah, it's like if I'm
looking at you right now, I'm not examining your skin. You know, it doesn't
look over sharp to me. It just looks real.
- Right. - And that's what we tried to do here. - Yeah, exactly on camera
when it's over sharp and the first things you see is like, "Oh my God, those pores." And that's when you know, it's like, Oh, that's way too sharp, huh? - What was interesting to me, is that I'm kind of used
to hearing you know, timepieces being shot on
film with vintage lenses. Here we are now with "1917," mind blowing piece on World War One, shot on some of the latest
and greatest technology. Alexa Mini LF with Signature Primes. - Yeah, I think it's a matter
of whether you're trying to play off people's
nostalgia because you know, if someone's trying to shoot
a film that takes place in the 1970s, well, maybe you want to make it look like a film that takes place in the 1970s by using the same technology. That's a valid approach. Or you might try to just
create the most realistic, images of settings that look like the 1970s.
- Right. - Both are valid approaches. It just depends on whether you want to play off that nostalgia or you wanna play off the realism. - Right, yeah, totally
felt like I was there, when watching "1917." - Those have been shot with lenses from that era would have
been a very different look. But it would have been more abstract, it would have been softer, there would have been more aberrations and you would have felt more separate from it.
- Right. - Whereas these lenses just
kinda drop you right in it. - Yeah, and most importantly, all the markers glow. So that's where most of the R&D went. (laughs) - That's just those little details. It's like when you buy a really nice car, you know, and the emblem
lights up on the dashboard and like, oh someone
thought of that, you know. The focus marks lining up, that's one of those extra little things. I mean, it's also just to
make someone's life easier, which is the other thing
is we kinda understand, how these things get used on a set. You know, there's a lot going on, there's a lot of pressure, you have to get things
right the first time, we just try to make it as easy as possible to help the camera crews move quickly and get the images they want. - And when it comes to handling
lenses of this caliber. There's a couple rules, right? You wanna always leave it wide open when you're transporting it? - Yeah, what I was taught was wide open and set to infinity because then set to infinity, I'm told all the elements
kind of compressed into a kind of a narrow range. And then wide open you get
all the aperture leaves, compressed at the edge so
that the case gets banged, you know, things aren't
moving around as much. And I got into a habit. So basically, here's
how you hand off a lens. So if I'm handing this to you. I would hold it like this. And I would hand it to you. Exactly. (laughs) I have a story about that. So you put your hand out like that.
- Okay. - And then there you go. And then you say, got it, or I have it or thank you or something. - Thank you very much. - Alright.
- For this, gotta keep this now. - Alright, so now you hand
it to me the same way. - So then. - Exactly. Thank you got it. And then what I would do typically as a second camera assistant when I'm putting this
away, so say, you know, it's all like messed up like that. I would grab the bottom of
it and just go, bam, bam. Put the caps on, put it in the case.
- Go it. - Now you never keep the caps on when you take it out of the case, the cap stay in the case
because for example, if I'm handing it to someone
and I'm holding it by the cap, or you're trying to put it on the camera, with the cap on and the cap
comes off, the lens goes. So when they go to the camera. There's no caps on it. But the other thing is the lens
case should be right behind the camera because lens changes have to happen really fast.
- Right. - When I was a second camera assistant, it was beaten into me, the lens case just follows the camera wherever. - And then when it comes to
cleaning a lens like this, so this is what I was taught, you could tell me if I'm crack. So basically just take this crumble it up and then spray once or twice, then you start rubbing
down the lens in circles from the center and
then work your way out. But this is after you blow it
with a little squishy thing. - That little squishy thing. - That's first. - Well, so if you ask my product manager, he would say use this, Arri microfiber. - Exactly. - He actually had these specially made, but yes, you never wanna put liquid on the lens because
then it can run around, it can pull it can get inside the lens and then bad things happen, because it's easy to
get it inside the lens. It's really hard to get
it outside of the lens. So yeah, you typically wanna crumple up, something like that, put just
a little drop on the edge, make a little moist,
and then you go around and you know, just very
delicately clean the lens. You don't wanna scratch the coating. So you don't wanna apply any pressure. Yeah, I mean, hopefully, you
just learn not to do things like you know, put your hand on the back of the lens.
- Right. - Or you know, things like that. I mean, you know, you still do it once in a while, but you know, you just.
- Right. - Now shall we go answer
some questions on Instagram. - Surely. - On a scale from one to sexy? How sexy are these lenses? - They're, what's beyond sexy? - What is the difference
between F stops and T stops? - Oh, that's a good one. - Okay, so an F stop. It's a mathematical equation, you can't get it wrong. The T stop is different. The T stop actually
accounts for how much light you lose when light is
going through the lens. And that goes back to
that whole coating thing. So if you have like an F, 2 lens, but the coatings don't work very well or it's uncoating and you got a lot of
light bouncing around. It may actually be a T28 lens, because you're not actually getting that much light through, your losing light on the way through. A T stop is actually a better measure because it's measuring the
light that actually gets to the other side.
- Right, yeah. - This is a T18 lens, it's probably an F 1.6 or 1., you know, something like that. Because that mathematical
F stop measurement, doesn't account for the
fact that there probably is a little bit of light
getting lost in here and the T stop is gonna tell you exactly how much is coming through for exposure T stop is dead on.
- Right. F stop is you know. - So F stop here can still be
a variation on your exposure, but T stop always dead on. - Right, well, mostly T stops are measured through the center of the lens and also they're also
measured at infinity. There's a lot of lenses
where if you focus closer, you will lose exposure. - Yeah, that is actually something I didn't know till recently. - Signature Primes and that's, I didn't know that either. And then I looked at Signature Primes and they didn't do that. And so that's why I started noticing like, "Why are my close ups all brighter "on this lens than on other lenses?" And it turns out, they
just don't change exposure. Yeah, who would have known
that just by racking focus you can slightly change that exposure. - Yeah, there's so much stuff to know. - Oh yeah. - Does Arri make anamorphic cine lenses? Yes. - Master Prime anamorphic. - Very master anamorphics, yes. They are very good. - Yeah, we need to do a video
about anamorphic one day, huh? - Oh yeah. Oh that will be a long video. - Yeah. - What is a disadvantage to cinema lenses, opposed to photo lenses? No autofocus. - No autofocus. - You're autofocus is a human. - That's true. - Auto Focus doesn't know
where to focus for the story. - Yeah, exactly. - You know a person can follow the story. So in autofocus, you
know, for a lot of stuff, autofocus is really good, but for cinema stuff.
Yeah. - There's too much artistry to that. - Right, yeah, totally. Sometimes auto focus
gets good for convenience stuff like this, but
then it's just the boxes just hop in between our
faces, it has no idea who to focus on. - What's the bokeh like? - It's perfect. - It's really really
really, really smooth. - Yeah. - The smoothest of any lens I've seen, which is one of the things I like. So what I describe it as like is if there's a window behind us, and you're shooting us
with a Signature Prime. There's almost like there's
water running down the window. It's like a sheet of water
because there's no structure. There's no detail. It's just you can see shapes
and they're very soft. - Interesting. - Yeah, it's a really nice look. - Yeah, it is and could
definitely feel it. It's hard to put into words.
- It is. - It is very hard to put
into a spec sheet, isn't it? - It's impossible. You can't just like on the spec sheet. You guys just need to put. It's really good, trust us. You'll feel good things when
you look at footage from it. - It's a German company,
so we're very precise. So unless you can describe it precisely. It's not gonna end up on the spec sheet. - Alright, well, awesome. Thanks for coming in.
- Thanks for having me. - And giving us the whole
rundown of cinema lenses. What videos should we do next with Arri? I don't know. We should take a poll. Should we put up a poll
and just see what people wanna hear about?
- Yeah. - One thing I wanna definitely talk about in a future video is the Arri Trinity, which is the stabilization system that they used for "1917." I keep bringing up that movie. I just watched it, it's fresh in my head. I'm really excited about it. But you look at the
movement through that film and it's just mind blowing. And yeah, the Arri Trinity
is the way they were able to accomplish a lot of those shots. So that's awesome. And with this lens right here, I guess most of the shots were shot on this 40 millimeter except for one. - Apparently one shot on
a 35 but the rest of it was shot on this very focal length. - Wow, so all you need is just one lens. See, I was gonna say yeah, it gets really expensive
once you start adding up the other lenses to get the whole set but really you only need one. - You only need one. - Maybe borrow the 35 mil for one day, you could shoot the Oscar nominated film. - Yeah World War One
films are pretty cheap. - So get the one lens and you're good. - Yeah, and then just spend
the rest of the budget on, costume and explosions. (upbeat music)
ARRI - air-y or is it are-ee or ari
I found this independently and it is hard to stop watching it. Great for understanding lens design trades in general.