Update: We’ve given up waiting on Birger. Read this.
We’ve made a fairly large decision about our Red package. We’ve decided (or at any rate are presently leaning heavily toward) forgoing Red’s lenses (and other much higher-priced cine glass) in favor of getting Birger’s Canon EOS lens mount.
I’ve discussed some of the tradeoffs with cine vs. photo lenses before. So, why have we decided to go in this direction? Well, largely it’s just a cost/benefit analysis. We can’t afford a $100K Cooke S4 set. Nor do we want to rent all the time; one of the major attractions of Red, for us, is that we can own a complete package. We can afford Red’s glass, so that’s what we’re putting up against the SLR option.
With SLR lenses, for the price of just a Red 18-50mm zoom, we can get the Birger mount, plus several primes and zooms. For the price of the 18-50mm zoom + the price of the 50-150 zoom, we can buy practically every current-model EOS lens we can ever imagine wanting to shoot with. The SLR route just provides much more flexibility. For instance, buying the two Red lenses, we’d be stuck at f/2.8. Going the Canon route, we can walk into B&H and buy one of these, and get a lot more light onto the sensor for night exteriors.
The Birger guys have managed to come up with some pretty neat stuff. Their mount will be able to feed lens metadata into the camera, once Red enables this feature, for instance, just like Red’s lenses (or other lenses with /i technology) can. This will solve the problem of figuring out what your aperture is set to on EOS lenses (which have no physical aperture controls or indicators). The camera will simply tell you.
Perhaps more interesting, the Birger mount can control focus as well as aperture, using the built-in focusing motors of EOS lenses. And this is were we get what I think might be a little glimpse of the future. If you read my previous post (linked above) about the benefits of real cine glass, you’ll see that a lot of them are related to the mechanics of focus pulling. If electronic focus pulling turns out to work smoothly, a lot of that goes right out the window. Lenses won’t need perfectly calibrated physical focus markings, because a bit of testing will produce an electronic table mapping specific physical distances to specific electronic settings. Lenses won’t need extended focus scales either, of course, because they can be moved with electronic precision regardless of how close together their focus marks are physically. This opens the door up to achieving great results with very low-cost mass-produced glass[1].
Electronic focus control has boarder implications than just eliminating the need for some costly precision mechanical engineering, though. It also opens the door to all sorts of new capabilities. Birger’s system will be controllable via Bluetooth. Imagine figuring out your focus marks using Red’s “magic focus assist”, and then programing them into a laptop and cueing them at the appropriate times with a couple of key presses. Or imagine a “smart” autofocus system based around range-finding equipment, which could rack focus to track an object through space far better than any human focus puller. Birger has dropped hints they’re already working on something like the latter, due in the second half of 2008.
Given all of this, it seems like EOS lenses with the Birger mount are shaping up to be the indie option of choice for Red.
Footnotes:
[1] We see this in a lot of places. Advances in electronics or information technology can sometimes eliminate the need for costly high-precision engineering. Consider the analog video systems of a couple of decades ago. Noise or distortion could creep in anywhere; power supplies had to provide clean power, every cable had to be perfect and well-shielded, and every electronic part had to be made with the highest possible precision. In today’s digital systems, none of that is true anymore; once a signal is digital, the electrical (or sometimes optical) paths that carry it only need to be good enough that the receiving system can tell a one from a zero. As long as that’s true (and for systems with digital error correction, sometimes even when it’s not), a bit of electrical noise somewhere doesn’t have any impact on the image.
Or, to use another glass-related example, consider that it used to be important to have matched color across a set of lenses; otherwise odds were you’d never get shots to match perfectly in post. Modern digital color correction has essentially eliminated the need for perfectly matched lens color.
