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trickled down to film students and aspiring cinematographers. These ‘character’ lenses incorporate imperfections and optical flaws such as aberrations, distortion and flaring in ways that are visually appealing to the current artistic trends. Cinematographers seeking these lenses are no less skilled than those using cleaner glass; they’re simply asking the lens to do more of that work. The most successful production of these lenses is achieved in two ways: through rehousing older photo and cine lenses without optical modification for their client to preserve the original look; or through adjusting coatings, air gaps and/or swapping elements in old/new lenses, putting them in new housings, branding them and selling or renting them to clients. While both processes involve significant skill and expertise in understanding how changes will impact the image, they don’t involve groundbreaking technology to create the specific visual performance. At the moment, both options are quite popular. Less impactful have been attempts to use advances in technology to create user-modifiable lenses that an end user or rental company can adjust themselves to change characteristics.
These work either through interchangeable parts in the lens itself, internal mechanical systems to adjust the image via air gaps, or adapters that modify the image between the lens and camera. Some companies are trying to incorporate even more technology into cinema production, but the response has been largely underwhelming. Companies who are positioned in both the photo and video segments have started to push traditional photo system features like autofocus, face recognition and image stabilisation upstream, but they have yet to break through to higher market segments. Def: How are lens companies adapting their product lines to meet the needs of virtual production environments, and do you have any advice for DOPs choosing lenses for VP? SR: Lenses play one of the most vital roles in VP. They need to be calibrated or profiled accurately for a good, seamless VP experience. Quite a few companies have their own ways of calibrating or profiling lenses, but it is a time- consuming process. At ZEISS, thanks to our innovation, we have been able to eliminate calibration times when using ZEISS lenses, especially with our camera- tracking system CinCraft Scenario. A big enabler is having smart lenses on productions whereby metadata from the lenses can help feed rendering engines
the data they need without having to reverse-engineer a lens. LC: Lens-wise, my advice would be to go with a good-quality zoom lens, like the Fujinon Premista. With VP, there’s a lot of calibration time to take on board. Shooting with primes is very common in cinema, but when coupled with the time taken to calibrate lenses to virtual stages, we tend to lose time instead of gain it. Fujinon supported Mo-Sys on a project including green screen and LED screens, using two Premista 28-100mm lenses on identical camera set-ups side by side on each screen. Not only did this set-up show the pros and cons of two types of VP, it also highlighted the advantage of zoom lenses within these workflows. You can check out the full video on Mo-Sys’ YouTube in the future. Def: Are emerging technologies like AI being integrated into lens design and performance optimisation? If so – how? DM: We are using AI and machine learning for a lot of different tasks like data analysis, but not yet for actual lens design. Our lenses are designed by our talented and experienced engineers. Their expertise and hands-on experience is crucial in ensuring that the final output meets the highest standards of quality and performance – which no AI can do today. But it’s also clear that, in the future, AI tools will play a role in assisting our engineers with their daily work. LC: They might be in other companies, but with Fujifilm/Fujinon we don’t use AI to design our optics, and don’t have any plans to do so. We have a computer LENSES SHOULD BE calibrated accurately FOR A SEAMLESS VP experience ”
PERFECTLY IMPERFECT Right now, DOPs are looking for lenses with unique character
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