The Most Popular Cinema Lenses (Part 5): Zeiss, Cooke, Panavision, JDC
INTRODUCTION
As a cinematographer, picking the right gear that you need to use on a shoot is, of course, extremely important. One of the most important bits of gear to put on your rental list are cinema lenses.
They are chosen on the basis of two factors: one, the kind of look that they produce and two, their practical and ergonomic advantages or disadvantages. The look and aesthetic feel for each project may be different and the kind of shooting environment and setups needed will also be different depending on the situation and story.
So to better equip you, and I guess because I’m a bit of a lens nerd, I’m going to look at three more cinema lenses that are popularly used in the high end film industry, breaking down their look and their practical design. And, at the end of the video take a look at one lens contraption that’s a bit of an oddity but a pretty interesting piece of kit, so stick around.
JDC XTAL XPRESS
First up, we have the JDC Xtal Express lenses, an interesting set of vintage anamorphic primes made for 35mm.
It’s a bit tricky to verify, but based on what people have told me this set of lenses is mainly made up of spherical glass from vintage Cooke S2 and Cooke S3 elements, combined with Japanese anamorphic elements. Hence why they are sometimes called the Cooke Xtal Express. This glass was then packaged and housed as a lens by Joe Dunton Cameras - JDC.
They were later bought out by the gear rental house Panavision, who are a major supplier of renting out their inventory.
Although perhaps not as well known as some of the bigger producers of anamorphic glass, this set of lenses is still fairly popular amongst DPs. Based on my anecdotal experience as a 2nd AC, particularly amongst European and UK cinematographers.
On the surface they are a bit of an odd looking bunch. Different focal lengths come in different lengths, different weights, with different sized front diameters and different stops. Although they are fairly well constructed, they were made a while ago and do need to be handled with care as they are not as robust as the housings on other modern lenses, such as the newer Cooke Anamorphics, which we’ll get to later. This may mean turning down the strength of the torque on a wireless focus motor and being more gentle when pulling focus.
Practically, their longer build, especially on longer focal lengths like the 100mm, may make them a bit front heavy on cameras and therefore a bit tricky to balance on a gimbal or Steadicam without adding extra weights to the body to balance it out.
While they are long, they aren’t particularly heavy, so are still good lenses for applications such as handheld camera movement.
Their different front diameter sizes also means that camera assistants need to switch out the back of the mattebox to different sizes, or use custom made reduction rings depending on the lens.
But, what they lack in practicality they more than make up for with their interesting production of images. They produce what I’d call quite a heavily vintage anamorphic look. This means they have quite a bit of distortion at the edges of the frame, especially at wider focal lengths, which will lead to straight lines, such as door frames, bending.
They also have heavy falloff around the edges of the images. This means that characters will appear sharp in the centre of the frame but, when placed on the edges of an image may seem out of focus even though they are not, due to the lens’ anamorphic falloff and softness.
Wide open they have a beautiful, soft, dreamy look with oval bokeh and lovely flares - perfect for those with a taste for vintage anamorphics.
COOKE ANAMORPHIC/i S35
To compare the Xtal’s to a more modern anamorphic option, let’s take a look at the Cooke Anamorphic/i lenses which are made to cover a 35mm sensor.
Whereas the Xtal’s use older Cooke S2 glass, the newer Anamorphic/i lenses are made with glass that have modern coatings. So while they are sharper across the frame, they still maintain some of those lovely anamorphic image characteristics when shot wide open, such as blooming, horizontal flares, oval bokeh and a more gradual anamorphic falloff around the edges.
On a scale from soft and vintage glass, like the Xtal’s, to super sharp, super clean modern glass, like the Zeiss Master Anamorphics, I’d put the Anamorphic/i lenses somewhere in the middle.
They come in a large range of 10 focal lengths, which is a lot for a set of Anamorphic primes that typically have fewer focal lengths than spherical lens sets. This includes everything from a wide 28mm, to a macro 65mm for close up work without needing diopter filters, and a telephoto 300mm.
They cut together well and carry the same, consistent colour reproduction as other modern lenses in the Cooke spherical range, such as the S4s and the S5s. This has been dubbed ‘the Cooke look’ - which refers to their overall warmth, high contrast, natural colour reproduction and their sharp but smooth, pleasing rendering of details.
This look is paired with the modern construction of a super solid, durable lens housing with accurate, well spaced distance and iris markings and a smooth focus action when you turn the focus gear. This, along with their more standardised sizes across the range, makes them a pleasure for camera assistants to work with.
A final useful feature comes from the i part of their name. This refers to a contact point situated on the mount of the lens that connects to a contact point on the PL mount of most high end cameras. It’s used to send metadata from the lens such as its focal length, focus distance and stop to the camera where it is recorded for each frame. This is both useful as it negates the need for focus pullers to programme distance measurements into some wireless follow focus systems and it provides information that is useful in post production special effects work.
ARRI / ZEISS ULTRA PRIMES
Next, let’s turn to spherical lenses and take a look at a very popular product in the Zeiss lineup - the Ultra Primes. If we look at the timeline of cinema lens releases from Zeiss, the Ultra Primes were developed after the Super Speeds and before the Master Primes.
This is fitting as I think both technically and in terms of their look they also occupy the middle ground between those two spherical prime lens sets. The Super Speeds have a subtle vintage quality to them, the Master Primes are supremely sharp, clean and modern, and the look of the Ultra Primes sits somewhere in between them.
Their look is very similar to that of Master Primes and the two sets can easily be cut together. Their colour reproduction is accurate but neutral, or slightly cooler than something like a Cooke, they are sharp and flare ever so slightly more than Master Primes - which flare very little. The choice of whether to shoot on Master Primes or Ultra Primes often comes down to their technical designs.
In terms of their build they are lightweight and compact, a little bit chunkier than the Super Speeds, but smaller than the Master Primes. With a stop of T/1.9 they are very fast, produce considerable, circular bokeh and are good for low light conditions. But, are slightly slower than the T/1.3 Super Speeds and Master Primes.
They come in 15 different focal lengths, ranging all the way from an 8mm extreme wide angle to a 180mm telephoto. This means they have the widest focal range coverage of pretty much any prime lens set available. This gives them an edge over the Master Primes for cinematographers who are very specific about their focal lengths and like to cover every in-between prime, such as having a 28mm focal length option between a 24mm and a 32mm.
Like the relatively modern Cooke lenses we discussed, the Ultra Primes also offer a high quality, durable build with good markings that make them quick and easy to work with.
PANAVISION FRAZIER LENS SYSTEM
Finally let’s take a look at something a bit more unusual. This quote unquote ‘lens’ might not be strictly popular, but I guess you could say it’s popular for achieving a specific application. It’s not even a lens per say, but rather a lens system that can be attached to a camera for specialty macro shots where the lens needs to squeeze into a space and be incredibly close to the subject, sometimes at unusual angles.
Often referred to as a snorkel or a periscope, the Frazier Lens System is attached to a cinema camera via a PL mount. At the end of its long extended barrel filled with glass and mirrors, there’s a second lens mount which is designed to take the capture lens - which is usually a small, manual iris, stills lens - such as a Nikon AIS.
So why would you shoot with this contraption? It has a swivel tip that allows you to tilt, pan or rotate what the camera sees without having to rotate the camera itself. Because of its thin design it also means a lens can be squeezed into very tight spaces close to what it is photographing. This makes it a popular way to capture and move the camera around miniature sets.
A drawback is that it has an aperture of T/ 7.1. This means that a lot of light is needed to achieve exposure. Because of its build it is; however, easier to light macro shots without the camera blocking the light source. Since you usually want to shoot extreme macro shots at as deep a stop as possible to make it easier to focus, this T/ 7.1 aperture isn’t actually a big deal.
They have an iris and a focus gear on the barrel near where the PL mount is so that assistants are able to manipulate focus - while the focus on the taking lens is set at a distance and left there.
To better explain a real world application here’s a BTS photo I snapped on a commercial shoot I was working on as a 2nd AC. This system was used to get the lens within about an inch of our subject's eye to achieve an extreme macro shot and still have space to get in studio light. We used the Frazier system on an Alexa Mini with a Nikon AIS taking lens.