Who doesn’t want to see what Angenieux, Cooke, Zeiss, ARRI, Fujinon, RED Pro and Canon lenses, prime and zoom look like when on a RED Dragon camera?
Relax here is one Explore Media prepared earlier…
Welcome to the Lens Comparison Guide for Directors; Producers! Shot on RED Dragon 5K, this guide is displayed in 4K if you’ve got an ultraHD monitor check it out!
We compared Angenieux, Cooke, Zeiss, ARRI, Fujinon, RED Pro and Canon lenses, both primes and zooms, to give us an idea of what each lens visually looked like compared to each other.
To compare these lenses, we used Daufenbach Camera’s Epic-M RED Dragon 6K sensor (captured in 5K) to capture the image. We also used 50mm as our base focal length, and for the one lens where a 50mm wasn’t available, we used a 35mm. This is not meant to be a technical specifications comparison. Mostly because we don’t know the technical answers! But we can see the characteristics, qualities, and even the emotion of a lens, especially when different cinema lenses are compared side by side.
We hope this guide helps you make the right lens choice for your next commercial or film production.
NOTE: For a baseline Color Correction, Kelly Armstrong from Color Playground says, we chose the most color neutral lens to set our initial, grade to, the RED Pro Prime. Primarily using the supplied chip chart, gain levels were kept under peak 100 and pedestal was left well above 0 so any anomalies with how each lens handled shadows or highlights could be easily seen and compared. This base correction was applied to each image regardless of which lens was used. There also is a ProRes 4:4:4 option if you are interested in seeing full color space, but it’s 10.5GB so send a note and we’ll get you a link!
Special thanks to Deep Elm Records for music track Texas https://www.deepelm.com/lightsandmotion, Lawrence Daufenbach, Stephen Wheeler, and the entire Daufenbach Camera Crew. Dave Wingate of Auslynn Films for sitting in for us as on-camera talent. John Waterman for assisting us on camera. Jamieson Mulholland for ideas and for the gorgeous professional cinematographer’s eye. Kelly Armstrong of Color Playground for patiently putting together the baseline correction. Michael Dicken of Explore Media for revising and uploading this file countless times.
Please see Explore Media for more information.