Red With 16mm Zooms ... plus Zooms For RED

I have a job coming up where I may have to shoot with a RED 1. The last part of the commercial I used an F23 with Panavision SSR decks and Canon cine style zooms which gave me a great zoom range and allowed me to use the camera hand held. I could use the Angenieux 25-250mm HR zoom hand held but it is a bit of a beast and the T stop is not the best. My question is can I use 16mm zooms on the red, I guess the sensor is windowed, and how this would look.

What about high speed?

Ben Smithard.
DOP. London.

>> My question is can I use 16mm zooms on the red, I guess the sensor is windowed, and how this >>would look. What about high speed?

Would suggest staying away from 16mm zooms unless you are doing hi speed, and even then be careful when shooting at 2k. In my experience, the picture does start to get soft at 2k especially with an older 16mm zoom. When shooting at 4k, your 16mm zoom will vignette. Red hand held, for me, is a bit of a PITA. Easyrig helps.

Steven Gray
Director Of Photography
London UK
+447711009515
Website: http://www.stevegraydop.com
Imdb: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1034732/

I second that with 16mm Zooms and Red 2K. I don't personally like to recommend 2K unless you must have 100fps and even then I record at 2K 16:9 RC36 which limits you to 100fps. For everything else I would go 3K 16:9.

How long on the lens do you want to go?

On our show were using the Easy Rig 2 for Red with Handheld but make sure you get the correct resistance because if the last user was a HVX Op then your gonna be hurting.

Good luck,

Dane Brehm
310.710.2658
Cinema Data Tech
Phantom | Red | S.Two

class="style19 style20 style21">Zooms for RED

You can use 16mm zooms on the RED camera, we have not tested all of them, but the S-16 zooms that we carry all work. Canon 7-63, Canon 11-165, Canon 6.6-66 and Angenieux 7-81. This will allow you to achieve higher speeds with the RED camera up to 120 fps in 2K mode. If you want to stay in 4K mode which will only allow you to go up to 30 fps you can use some excellent lightweight zooms that Angenieux designed specifically with PL mount 35mm digital sensor cameras in mind – the Optimo Rouge series. They have a 30-80mm zoom and a 16-42mm zoom. Both are T2.8 and weight approximately 5 lbs each. But I would guess if you are matching with F23 footage, you may want to stick with 16mm zooms and the 2K sensor because the depth of field characteristics most closely match the F23.

We are the first rental house in the US to carry the 16-42mm and if anyone would like to demo either of these lenses.

Erik Schietinger
Managing Partner
TCS Inc - New York
212.247.6517

Hi Ben,

I am currently converting a set of lenses originally made for 16mm cameras, few primes and one zoom. They are going to be used on RED at 2K and high speed in the end of the month.

I can tell you more in the first week of September.

Best regards

Pawel Saladziak
Art Director
MenatWork Sp. z o.o.
Rynek Jezycki 1
60-847 Poznan
Polska
tel. +48 / 61 66 50 245
fax +48 /61 66 50 255

>>I second that with 16mm Zooms and Red 2K. I don't personally like to recommend 2K unless you must >>have 100fps and even then I record at 2K 16:9 RC36 which limits you to 100fps. For everything else I >>would go 3K 16:9.

I agree with Dane's comment...

I have a client who loves 100fps with the Red for sports promos and I've shot with HD lenses through an adapter, and with 16mm zooms. These are all finished in HD only, intercut with HD footage (usually from F900s) and the editors can see the difference. It would certainly be more of a concern if it was a 4K finish!

George Hupka
Director/DP, Downstream Pictures
Saskatoon, Canada
Listmum, Cinematography Mailing List

You could get a say a Optimo 28-76 which would become 56-152 in 2K then you would have all the benefits of the sharpness of 35mm glass and be able to jump back to 3K or 4K without switching lenses.

A good portion of newer 16mm Zoom lenses in my experience have been SD Video lenses rehoused such as the 8-64 Canon Zoom. The B4 adapter for Red would be alot sharper at 2K especially on a nice Fuji 11x Zoom and at T1.9:)

Good luck,

Dane Brehm
IA600 DIT
California

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