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Zeiss CP

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wparrish24

Are the Zeiss CP lenses designed to create a sharper image if blown up on Big Screen (35mm). With a still lenses is there a greater chance there will be pixelation when blown up to 35mm.
 
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Wow, those are some amazing lenses. Sadly, at nearly four grand a pop they're a bit out of my range.

Yes, I know they're rentable, but I prefer owning lenses -- gives me the time I need to get used to them and having 100% availability whenever I need them is crucial.
 
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wparrish24 said:
Are the Zeiss CP lenses designed to create a sharper image if blown up on Big Screen (35mm). With a still lenses is there a greater chance there will be pixelation when blown up to 35mm.
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Are we talking on a DSLR? Decent stills lenses (Canon primes or L zooms) should be more than adequate for HD video - the main advantages of the Compact Primes are more to do with their usability on set than the image quality. You may get a higher quality image - I don't know - but your biggest problem by far w/ regards to IQ is going to be the compression and line-skipping.
 
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wparrish24 said:
yes on a DSLR. Why would the advantage be usability on the set? What is line skipping?
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The focus barrel on stills lenses have a relatively small movement from near to infinity focus. This is great for autofocus systems, as it's faster and less work (and thus less power consumption) for the AF motors. However, only having a small movement makes it difficult to pull focus smoothly and accurately, so where some still lenses may have less than a quarter turn from near to far focus, cine lenses may have three quarters of a turn. Obviously this makes the focus pullers job a lot easier. There is also the issue of something called "breathing", where the focal length of the lens changes as the focus does, which is much less prevalent in cine lenses, but I won't go into that here.

Cine lenses also have an aperture ring on the lens, which can be controlled in exactly the same way as the focus, making it easier to open or close the iris during a take. If you've used a DSLR you'll notice that the aperture clicks as you adjust it - it moves in steps, rather than smoothly like the focus. Cine lenses have a smooth aperture, so you can adjust the f-stop while shooting (e.g. when moving from a dark corridor to a sunlit room) without anyone noticing. It is possible to "declick" manual focus stills lenses (these are great - they have focus barrels more on a par with cine lenses) to smooth the iris movement, but you'll have to do some bargain hunting rather than just buying from your nearest supplier.

If I may quote myself:

chilipie said:
The sensor in these cameras is much, much higher [resolution] than is needed for HD video, so instead of wasting power reading every line of the sensor, only every third line (if I remember correctly) is actually recorded. As the lines are squashed horizontally and recomposed vertically to create the final image, the filling of the holes in the image creates the moiré.
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After that little self-indulgence… line-skipping creates a lower quality image than other, more computationally-intensive methods, but it's the only way to get video out of cameras in that small form-factor without their processors burning up.
 
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In reading Philip Bloom and Shane Hurlbuts blogs, seems that popular SLR glass (canon FD etc) generally cant provide more than 18MP resolution, in other words its "soft" maybe? Those fancy lenses are supposed to be sharp beyond 24MP's... just gussin..
 
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