Are cinema lenses a scam?

So this is a 35 mil F1.4. It's got a lot of features. It costs around $1,300. What do you got there? I have a 35 mil T1.8. It costs about $27,400 right now. So for seemingly less specs, features on paper, it doesn't have autofocus. It's big, it's heavy, and it costs almost 27 times more. What accounts for that cost difference? Well. Lately, I've been asking myself, am I getting scammed? Because we see movies like The Creator being filmed on an FX3, a prosumer camera that's relatively affordable. And at the same time, so many movies being filmed on Arri Alexa LF, that's like $100,000, or Arri 65, which costs, well, actually, you can't even buy one. And yes, this might be the first 65 footage of a YouTuber on YouTube ever posted. More on that later. And the fact is, most people in the audience can't tell the difference between an FX3 and an Arri 65. So the question is, when it comes to lenses, why the heck are cinema lenses used on Hollywood feature films so expensive? Is it just an ego thing that we all fall for? Or is there truly a difference during production or some look that takes a film from an amateur film to a Hollywood masterpiece? There's two questions we need to answer. One, is it a case of you get what you pay for? You save your money buying cheap gear, but it'll come back to haunt you in post? Or are we just paying a premium because we're suckers? Two, would it make our films better if we use smaller and cheaper gear? Focus on the story first instead of the gear. Or do we miss out on some of that Hollywood special sauce and end up with a mediocre film? To find out if we're all being scammed, I flew to LA to talk to some people that know way more about lenses than I ever will. So we're here in LA. We got invited to ARRI Rentals, ARRI HQ here in Los Angeles, which is like one of the meccas of filmmaking it feels like. They have some of the most insane and expensive gear, some new stuff that just came out that barely anybody had seen, and some stuff that you can't even buy. Like you literally cannot buy this stuff. So this should be interesting. Spoiler, that's the ARRI 65. I really hope we get to check it out. I pressed a button. How do I get in? Hello? It opened. I gotta admit, it's a little surreal stepping into the headquarters of possibly the greatest cinematography company to exist. This is like a filmmaker's dream come true. I feel like I'm doing this for you guys also. Anything and everything here, I just wanna see, and I know you guys are probably gonna wanna see it too. Right away, I see this wall, and I'm like, that's some cool history right there. These are the founders, right? These are the founders, yes. Arnold and Richter. I don't know which is which, I apologize. And then the most important question is, is it ARRI or ARRI? Wow, okay, so. You're not even gonna lay down the law? So when I started out in the industry a long time ago, I heard ARRI, and I've only heard ARRI in the US and Canada. But if you go to Germany, it's ARRI, because it's Arnold and Richter, ARRI. Okay, so you can't really go wrong. No. Art Adams, the product specialist for cinema lenses at ARRI Americas, aka, he knows a lot about lenses and how they work, gave me a tour of the LA ARRI HQ, and we got to see everything from where they repair and do maintenance on ARRI products. There's a lot of cameras, look at that. I have never seen so many ARRIs in my life. I've seen some really old ones too. Yeah. That's one of the great things, is that people use your guys' cameras for so long. Even the older ones are still being used all the time. They last forever. These things are built to last, where they test lenses to make sure they're behaving properly. The offices, which, yeah, it was just an office, where they test secret new products. The secret room. This looks like a secret room. I have no idea what I'm supposed to expect coming out of a secret room. So, it's not much to look at right now, but when the Alexa 35 was coming out, about six months in advance, we had tables in here with all these bins full of parts just for the 35. Nobody else knew what was in this room, and the idea was that we sent them out with a lot of different productions just to let people beat on them and tell us what was wrong and find bugs and issues and stuff like that. Is that like the last line of like, okay, let's put this in real world. We've already tested a bunch, but now let's put it on productions and then let's see how it does. Yeah, we wanna get more content out there. So, we've got the Airy Blue wall, and then at some point, we'll set up a nice little studio. Until the next secret thing arrives, and then the store's just gonna be closed all the time. That's when you know something's happening. When all the tech talk is stopped, you'll know something's going on. Watch out for that. Yeah. Airy product launches are actually pretty huge because they happen fairly rarely. The theater where they pixel peep footage from Airy cameras and show why they are the best, or where they just watch movies and relax. Their studio, which has way too much fun and expensive gear. Definitely a bit of a kid in a candy store situation. And then we went to Airy rental where I got my first look ever at the elusive Airy 65. This is the first for me. This is the thing. This is the beast. It's the beast. It's like the F1 car of the filmmaking world. Is this your first time too, Tucker? First time. First time, yeah. This is the thing that you literally cannot buy. This is, I guess that would make it kind of like priceless. I don't know. Unless you break it, then you'll find out. Then you'll know. So many of the top movies are filmed on this camera and I've never seen one of these in real life. I need to get a shot with this thing. I want to be the first YouTuber shot in this thing. It's got a massive sensor. So this thing is bigger than full frame. And honestly, I wish I could have spent all day asking questions about it and testing it. They didn't let me take it for a spin. I don't blame them, but they did let me take one clip. And there it is. Me in the highest quality you have ever seen. Tucker, how do I look on 65? You look good, man. Which even in Rec. 709, yeah, I'm not surprised why filmmakers love this camera so much. And that's why nobody cares about the price. Everyone wants to use this camera. This might be the first time a 65 is on YouTube. What would you say to those people who say there's no difference between Super 35 or large format or 65? I think it's a little bit of a misnomer that there's no real difference there. I would say shoot it up. I mean, that would be my answer. Give it a shot and see if you see the difference because I think it's a great camera. Most of our clients, like all of them that shoot it, found a difference and that's the reason why they went that way. Yeah, clearly. It's not a system that we have to push. We don't have to tell people, this is what you want. They come here and they look at it and they compare it up against all the different formats. And if it's right for their project, it's obvious. If it's not the right solution, it's not a small camera system, it's a full body system. If it's not right for the system, then they use another camera. It's a tool. At the end of the day, it's not a... It's a good quality tool, but it's still only a tool to tell your story. Right tool for the right story. Right, every story has its own needs and this isn't right for everyone, but for some people it's right. And that's the point. Well, we built 70. We're down a little bit from that. Somebody broke something? High level, what makes this camera so special? The big thing for us, we think it's just the creaminess, the smoothness to the skin. It's how many photo sites you're using for the same look or same perspective. And it has a format that's hard to achieve in another way. You don't get that same presence. It's really about that scale. Digitally speaking, it has no peer. It's kind of in its own class. As I'm editing this, Ari decides to put out a smaller, lighter, more manageable version of the 65. The 265. Two because it's the second generation or two because it's too good. I'll take it. I love big sensors. I mean, I'll probably never get to use it. Maybe someday, hopefully someday. Anyways, carry on. So it's essentially if you were to take a full 16 by nine or a full Ari sensor from an Alexa, upright it and stitch two of them together, you would have an LF. If you add a third one, then you get a 65. So that's where we arrived at this size and it just happens to be slightly larger than film, 65 film as far as the actual overall size. So it's 60 millimeters diameter from one corner to the other. And it's pretty much the largest sensor commercially available. But back to lenses, Matt Colsey, the lens specialist at Ari Rental, not only does he know lenses probably better than anyone and helps on so many movies like Dune, for example, to help the DP get the best lenses for the story, but he doesn't just help DPs pick lenses. He literally takes apart lenses and tweaks them to give them characteristics that don't come stock in a lens, but that the DP might be looking for. Basically, he's customizing incredibly expensive cinema lenses for DPs. So when somebody says, or when a lens company is selling a lens that's detuned, what does that mean? Basically detuned is gonna be, we have a variety of tools at our disposal that we can do to sort of soften the image. We could feather out perhaps the sharpness of it from center to field. We could add a stigmatism on the edges if you want. We could add a spherical aberration. We can lower the contrast. We could add some flare. We can do a variety of different things. Not every lens wants to do that, to be honest with you. Some of them are more inclined to, more receptive to the instruments that we have available. Some of them aren't. We can also expand images. What determines that? Do you notice a theme of like, oh, this lens has more elements and is less open to being detuned? Or is it not that black and white? It's not that black and white. There's certain lenses, even in the same series of lenses, that just work well. And then there's other ones that don't. It's really the design of the lens, I think, would be the contributing factor to that. And being that we didn't engineer and we don't actually have the physical drawings to understand most of the lenses out there, we just have to have a go and see what it's wanting to do for us. And that's what we do, is we tinker with that. And then we know, we remember our results. We write down whatever prescription we were able to apply to a certain lens or a certain series. And then we'll go with that and keep an index of that throughout the time. Could you do your process on basically any lens? Could you take a photo on a focus lens and do your magic on it? Or is that more of just what part of the magic of cinema lenses allows for this sort of creative choices? It's a good question. The reality is, is that cinema lenses and prosumer or consumer lenses are vastly different internally in their construction. So most cinema lenses are parfocal, okay? So they're gonna continue to work through the range. They have really robust mechanisms in them. Most of them are all metal. Maybe there's a small amount of plastic in there. Usually that's for things like cams and for actually focusing, guide bushings, but everything else is very robust. And because of that, it makes it way more approachable to adjusting because we can get in there and get out without causing any sort of damage. The mechanisms will continue to play the way that they did before. And we can influence the image a little bit and then it will, and then put it back together and it will still perform in the same way. Consumer lenses by and large tend to be, they have a lot more like build it and don't go back to it in construction. They're not designed to be as serviceable. They are serviceable, but not in the same way. And autofocus is a whole thing in itself because, well, when you remove the quality or you feather out and soften an image, autofocus becomes very subjective because the camera will be determining what it thinks is the right focus and it could be looking at contrast or it could be looking at the resolution, but that may not be what the artist thinks is the right place to be focused on. So there may be an appreciable difference in the way. So those lenses we tend not to get too much into. We tend to stick with lenses that we know are, yeah, the solid design. Cameras have gotten so good. And some people I've even heard that like say, like it almost doesn't even matter nowadays which camera you're shooting. That's obviously debatable. But I'm also seeing this like huge, like boom and different kinds of lenses coming out. Do you think that's correlated that now like the digital sensor is so good on a lot of cameras that now the lens is almost like, it's always played a big role, but it almost plays even a bigger role now to give that like final bit of the personal look that I'm looking for for this project? I think it's because the manufacturing processes have become so, they've advanced so much. And the design processes. Because of that, it's much more approachable. So glass can be acquired for less money. You know, like prescriptions and designs, lens designs can be built that are not as exotic as it once was. And I think because of that, you're seeing a lot more people trying to get into that market. I don't know that that always falls into what I would consider the best options. I think that, you know, like anytime you go down the path of buying lenses that are, you know, that have a little less engineering behind them, you will see some compromises in some places. And you may not realize it at first, but then down the line, you may start to see it. And a lot of times what I see is like color is a big thing for me. I'm big with colors, coatings, things like that. Those are huge for me. But that's because my clients tend to come here and say, you know, like I needed to perform in such a way, I need to have the feeling, that emotion. You know, I've learned a response based off of their ask. So for me, the quality of the lens is pretty important. Also, the build quality is quite paramount so that we can put it out on a show and know that I won't have to go and replace it really fast. You know, or I won't, like it will be robust. It'll hit, you know, the dunes of Abu Dhabi. It will go, you know, to the winter in Alberta. It will go to, you know, underwater in Mission Impossible 5. Like it will do those things. If it doesn't meet that need for me, I'm a little reticent about it. We just think that engineering-wise, you know, like we want products that we can rely on so that I don't, so that I can sleep at night. There's that. Otherwise, you know, because regardless of what I've asked my clients to do with the lenses or what I've told them they can or can't do with it, they're going to do what they need to do. You know, they're gonna use it in a way that I never anticipated, just as we put this camera and thought that it was gonna be a VFX and plate camera and immediately it became an A camera. Exact same thing will happen to the lens. It'll be put in a way, in a place that you don't have a way of testing for in advance. You know, high humidity or whatever, like things like that are changing environments. And because of that, I think a lot of the new lenses may or may not be built with that in mind. Yeah, there's the time-tested lenses and the ones that haven't yet gone through that. It's a simple truth. If you're shooting, you know, just if you're just shooting in a room like this, many things work great, you know? Right. Many things work great. But if you're not in a room like this and you go outside and it's cool outside or warm outside or whatever it is, that changes the way a lens works. It's just a simple fact, things expand and contract at different ratios. And the legend that Matt is, he busts out a set of lenses that was just on the new Tron movie, shot by the legendary cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth. Yeah, Matt helps the best of the best with lensing. And I wanted to know more about modifying or tuning lenses. These are all tuned, these ones here. These came off a Tron and they're just back here for me to unmodify them. So we did Tron 3 with these, with Jeff Cronenweth. So that's why those are all back and that's why they have the blue band on them. So I didn't want to mess with them. I think he was looking for stigmatism. And so I based a prescription off of each individual focal length that matched where they needed it. We tested it in Vancouver, looked at the images and the him and his director chose the path that they wanted to go in them. And what does the stigmatism do? It basically just takes it, a lot of times it'll soften an image a little bit. It'll just make it a little gentler. And in particular, it's oftentimes what people will see, when they see a Petzval, though that's in a heavier stigmatism that kind of comes, it pulls around. Yeah, the swirly bokeh. Yeah, it's not what we did here, but what we did here was, it does affect sort of the way that the fall off is happening and it softens it out a little bit so that it's not quite as crushed or rigid. Whereas a spherical aberration will tend to be a little busier looking. And for them, this was what they wanted for their show. Do you guys always take them back to like the baseline then or how often are lenses being adjusted for the ones that are going out? We'll take these back. They've been out for like a year or something like that. So they've been out for a long time. Yeah. We'll take them back. I built him three sets for the show and it's just time to take them back. Sometimes we'll leave them. We know what the prescriptions are that we put in these. So if we needed to go back to it, I could do that. I know individually each one and we could get back to the same place if we had to. But I think they're about ready to go back. Do you have like a list of recipes or something like that? Yeah, it's a little cheat sheet of what we've done because everybody that works on glass like me probably has their own way that they achieve that goal. Right. And there's several different ways you can do it. It's not all just one approach. Just depends on how advanced you want to go and how much time you have. Yeah. Certainly not like the Enzo's which are like, you just drop it on. Ours are not that fast, for sure. How long on average would it take to do? Well, for me to down convert one of these is gonna take about an hour each. So to build them took more time to dial in. Figure out the percentage of image that I wanted to have starting to fall away. And so that took longer, but once I had the prescription and then it was working, then it was maybe three, four or something a piece. Yeah. I never really thought about how cinema lenses can be modified like that. Definitely need to have him on the channel again. And so jealous that he was on Dune cause those are probably two of my all time favorite movies. It's safe to say, I'm probably not gonna be modifying my own lenses, but he mentioned the new Arri Enzo's being easier. And I actually got to learn all about them, plus put them to the test a little bit. The Enzo's to me feel like a beginning of a new era with lenses. Something I've never really seen before, but first I need to confront art if we're getting scammed. So for seemingly less specs features on paper, it doesn't have autofocus. It's big, it's heavy, and it costs almost 27 times more. What accounts for that cost difference? Well, the first thing I would point out is that this lens is really affordable for what it does, which is great. But there's a lot being handled on the camera side. So the camera basically has a map that's provided by the manufacturer that says, if you apply these kinds of corrections, you can get rid of the distortion and the chromatic aberration. Fix it in post. Fix it in post, exactly, exactly. In camera, but in post. And in this case, that's not really an option with a lot of money in front of it potentially. So failure is not an option. And optically it's just spectacular with no correction being done in the camera at all. Is it like, to me, the signatures are like, I know you can't quite say this, but they're like, quote unquote, a perfect lens. And you know, it's funny. There's a lot of people who say, oh, these lenses are very clean. I don't like clean lenses. Well, they still have a lot of a character. And actually that's what a lot of people I've talked to, I've done a series of interviews with DPs about these lenses. And they all say they have, anyone who says they don't have character is nuts. They're just a different kind of character. It's not a vintage lens character. What we tried to do was figure out what is going to look good in the next 10 or 15 years based on how we're going to be looking at images, which is going to probably completely change. We're already seeing HDR, high dynamic range, rec 2020, increased color, all of that stuff. And basically we don't want you to have any surprises in the next decade or so if you go back and remaster your images and find, oh, I didn't know I had that flare in there. Oh, that chromatic aberration is really popping out. We didn't want any of that. But also we wanted to capture all the resolution that our cameras can deliver, but do it in a really pleasing way. And then also we spend as much time on the out of focus areas as we do on the in focus areas. So these lenses are very, very well corrected for spherical aberration and astigmatism, which means they roll out of focus very quickly and very smoothly. They pop people out of backgrounds really nicely. If the background is even a little soft, your eye doesn't really have anything to grab onto and it just naturally goes back to the point of focus. So that's a big part of a cinematographer's job is telling people where to look at any given time. You're always directing the viewer straight to where you want them to be looking. Exactly, and even at a four or five, six outside, you have enough softness in the background that your eye just kind of naturally goes back to where you're focused. There's no denying, like the look is really nice. And obviously this is like, this is the race car. This is the Formula One car of lenses. And it is harder to work with because they're bigger and heavier and all that. This, I can easily manhandle myself on a camera, but you guys are providing gear that's for that top, you know, echelon of filmmakers. That's what these signatures are. And now you guys are doing something a little bit different here. We are. So, you know, there's, there's, we definitely have equipment for the high end, but we wanted to do gear for everyone else. I mean, maybe not everyone else because I've seen complaints online that these are still expensive, but, but you know, the thing is when you, when you make a lens, you're fighting physics every step of the way and that costs money. You know, it's really difficult to do. And every time you fix one thing, you mess up something else. So it's a balancing act all the way down. And that's- So these are the new Enzos. That's what we're shooting on right now, by the way, our two cameras, both on Enzos. Trying out the Enzos a little bit, there were two big things that stuck out for me, which one is the minimum close focus. It's insane. And two, the new vintage elements, which literally changed the look of the lens. It's not just filtration. It actually changes the lens. So you can go from something very clean to something that's a lot more wild, especially on the edges. I wanted Art to elaborate more on these because I think this is what makes the Enzos really special. So a lot of the times when we talk about close focus, we should really be talking about magnification. Okay. So if you look in the front of the lens at where the aperture appears to be, so that's called the entrance pupil. And that's the center of perspective of your lens. So basically all your distances are measured from that point. So if you have close focus on a lens and the entrance pupil is back here and the close focus is here, oh, the close focus looks really good, but it's not magnifying as much as a lens where that entrance pupil is actually up here. Right. And you can focus at the same spot. So these will focus what we say, we say the magnification is one to seven. So basically if the sensor is one, you can focus on an image that is seven times the sensor wide and capture an object that wide. These will do one to four. It's about the size of a postcard. Yeah. I saw you guys made like a video about this. That was very informative for me. I have a kind of funny, but interesting way of showing what this means. This is an example of the size of the frame that you could achieve with a lens with a one to 10 magnification ratio. So if I put this here, this would be minimum focus on a lens with a one to 10 magnification ratio. And actually when ultra primes were introduced 25 years ago, it was pretty amazing that they had a magnification ratio of one to 10. When we introduce signature primes, well, most of those lenses had a one to seven magnification ratio. So that is somewhere like this. So you can achieve this level of a close up on a signature prime without having to resort to something like an extension tube or a diopter, which of course gets quite painful for the first AC. Now, all Enso lenses from 18 millimeters to 250 millimeters can achieve a one to four magnification ratio, which means that on all of those lenses, you can achieve a close up that is this size, which is frankly quite wild. Where, look how close I am and it's able to focus right there. Oh, like that is so close. So this is cool because if you're shooting, say a commercial or corporate project, you can shoot people, you can shoot action, you can shoot stuff on the horizon and it can go right into a product shot and you don't have to change anything. Yeah, no diopters, none of that stuff, just go straight into it. It'll just work. And that's for me, that's a big deal. Like so many times I test a new lens and I'm like, as soon as the minimum close focus is like fairly far out, like I just, I know on set it would slow me down so much. And especially for what you guys are trying to do with Enzos, I think that is a big deal that you can use it in all situations and not have to deal with diopters and all that stuff that will slow you down, will make room for more errors and all that stuff. Yeah, we wanted to make lenses that were affordable and then let you do as much as we could possibly let you do in a lens that will cover a large format, but also work equally well in Super 35. I like to describe them as they're for small crews in small spaces with fast moving cameras. But you also get a little bit of customizability. You do, you do. So with every set of Enzos, you get a set of rear filters, Enzo Vintage Elements. They're actually little optical elements that are customized for a specific look that we took in a lot of customer feedback to develop. And so on the back of the lens, there's a little net holder. It's got a little groove. And I think it's either a number 10 or number 12 rubber band, but you put a net on there, put the rubber band around it, trim it. And that gives you the same kind of diffusion that a lot of people in the 1950s through the 1970s were using. Old school filters. Very old school, old school. You know, we discovered we could do some really interesting things. I mean, if you describe this as being like a race car, you put some speed bumps on the track, you can do a lot of damage. So that's what these are. These are a little different from what we do with the signatures. For one thing, there's metadata. So there's these two little pins here and there's two little pins on here. And if you line the witness marks up, then you'll get metadata that tells you exactly what filter you used on the shot. And what do these filters do? They introduce vintage lens effects. So these lenses are very well corrected for spherical aberration. This ruins that. It introduces a lot of spherical aberration. It also introduces some astigmatism. There's also a lot of coma, which creates some interesting effects depending on which way it's going. Coma? Coma. So coma is, so spherical aberration is when light coming through the center of the lens focuses at a different point than light coming through the edges. Coma is when light coming through the center of the lens focuses in one spot and then the light coming through the outside edges of the lenses focuses in a different spot to the side. So it usually shows up like a cone or an arrowhead shape. With the positive filters, and these are positive and negative filters because they started out based on diopters at their core and then we added some more stuff to them. But yeah, we referenced them that way just so you know what you're dealing with. The positive elements tend to create this kind of swirling bokeh that's really pretty. And it's like a portrait lens effect, like a softening effect on skin. Backgrounds become even smoother. I mean, these lenses do really smooth backgrounds but they just became dreamy and ethereal. If you put the negative filter on, it still has a little bit of softness to it. It almost feels like a net but without the halation, which is interesting. And then backgrounds have a different kind of spherical aberration where you get the donut bokeh. So you get the hot outer edge with the dark center. And that has an edge enhancing effect. So even though things are out of focus, every area of contrast still has kind of a hard edge. So if you're shooting trees and things like that, you have all of these interacting lines and shapes that are really interesting. But it tends to impart a little bit more energy to it because your eye is attracted to areas of high contrast and sharp edges. So your eye is moving around a lot. So it feels like a very energetic frame. Whereas the positive filter is very calming, glamorous, dreamlike. It's becoming clear you get way more precision, reliability, and consistent look with these expensive cinema lenses. That doesn't make more affordable lenses useless. They still have their place. But as a project gets bigger and more expensive, the pressure to perform increases. And that goes for your gear too. However, specs on paper are one thing. I also wanted to talk to some professional DPs who have used the Enzos to hear their thoughts. Charles Berquist was one of the first to use the Enzos. And when I saw his footage right away, I was so curious. You were one of the first people to shoot with Enzos. Before we hear about that, give me a little bit of like, what are you as a DP looking at when you got a project? How do you choose the lenses that you're gonna use for that project? I think a lot of it comes from just the creative that you get from the client or the look that you wanna create yourself. If it's small crew or it's a bigger commercial or whatever, you have creative that you need to tailor with the lenses. And you also wanna make your project stand out. So you're trying to figure out what lenses fit for each project. So it's sort of just picking like, all right, this is the vibe that I wanna go for. This is the look, reference, all that stuff. And then you sort of slot in lenses. Do you have some favorites that you're like, gravitate towards? You're like, I think everybody has a little bit of like, I really wanna shoot with these. Sure. I mean, there's classic lenses like K35, stuff like that that everybody, that everybody kind of goes towards, right? But like newer lenses that are fun to shoot with are the Tribe 7 Blackwing. Yeah. Blackwings. Yeah, yeah. Because they have three different, maybe more, but like three different tunings that you can sort of split from. So same lens, but it can be changed essentially to look very different. Yes, it's the same-ish lens. The optics are different, but they're tunable from the factory, right? So like when you get them, when they're built, you're selecting like a certain tuning, right? Right. You're not doing that yourself. You're not doing that yourself, no, no, uh-uh. And it's also, they're fast lenses. They're T19, they're large formats. So they cover a lot of stuff. So that's kind of what a lot of people are using because you can sort of pick your look a little bit more, pick your flair, pick stuff like that. So that's interesting then leading us to the Enzos. You shot the, what was it for? The little Quinto spot that you did? Yeah, Zachary Quinto spot for Palm Springs Life Magazine. And you really messed around with the look. Yes, I did. So my take on that was like, I wanted to go the far end and just make the image look as extreme as possible. Prior to using these lenses, I just used the Signature Primes with impression filters. So once I saw that there was just this like sort of base lens that you could attach the Enzo vintage elements onto, I sort of took that and ran with it. And the whole spot, I just ran the 350P. And it looked incredible. Cool. Like I realized as soon as I saw that footage, I was like, oh, there's something real special happening here. Like I want to know more about what's going on. Tell me about that shoot a little bit. Did you have a crew? What was it like? Absolutely no crew. Love it. Full solo. You would never guess from the footage. 115 degrees outside. Love it. 72 degrees inside when we're shooting interiors. And we were doing it all in one day. Pulling my own focus, easy rig, that sort of thing. And you were able to do that by yourself with the, what was it, Mini LF? Mini LF. Mini LF and Enzo's by yourself. Yeah, so what I would do is like every time I wanted to change a lens, I would just take the vintage element off and pop it to the next one. And it took like, you know, outside of pulling the back cap off and taking it off that lens, switching over. Pretty quick for one person. So when you have a crew and you have support first and second AC, no problem. But that's still pretty incredible that you can do that just by yourself. But like, I think that's what, to me, makes this set really special is those filters that you can then customize your look based on the project or the feeling that you need for that scene. And in a fast way, like going back to the tribe set, you can't like, you can't get up to that. Yeah, you have to get another set. So, you know, if it's tribes, if it's any sort of like lens set right here, you're basically locked into that look for, you know, the job, right? And a lot of stuff now is like, we're throwing, you know, we sometimes in commercial work, you don't want to match all your lenses. You want funky stuff in different spots, different scenes, right? So the new approach here is that you start with this like base lens and you can change it one way or another based on the scene or the look that you want to get immediately, right? So you stick with a very similar color, right? So you're, you know, if you're changing different lenses or whatever it is, the color will shift, right? And you'll have to balance that out later or it's, you know, a creative decision, but this you can sort of dial in your image while you're shooting and you're not changing sets. I could see that being really handy too, that when like, like not all directors are so, you know, technically oriented, but when they see the image, they're like, I don't like this, or I do like this. And, you know, you might go full on and then director's like, I don't like this, it's too much. Like, and then like, oh, that's fine. I can take it back to notch. Yes, exactly. Like there's a world where you can just dial back. You know, I would tend to go, I would go very aggressive at first and be like, what are we looking at here? And then you can take, you know, you can bring it back a little bit to more standard or the baseline look where you can go the other direction, right? Do you see this as like a lens set that a lot of DPs will own because it is so versatile or is it still gonna be, cause it's still not cheap, cheap, you know? Right, yeah. So it's not affordable, but it's obviously more affordable than the signatures. Yeah, they're marketed as affordable lenses, but for a lot of people they're not affordable, right? But there's life that you can get out of this set where you can change the image, you know, based on every job versus, you know, one lens that you're locked into that and you better love that lens set that you buy and put your money into because that's what you got. That's what all your stuff's gonna look like. That's what you're gonna be pushing to a lot of jobs too just because money does incentivize a little bit, you know, if you're gonna make more money, if you get your set on the, you know, I mean, yeah, on the shoot. Is there a certain look that you would love to see in the future? I mean, I think diffusion filters in the back. Yeah, but then even just more simply. Yeah, I think diffusion filters and being able to, and to be able to stack those with the vintage elements, being able to kind of do that stuff. But every job is different. So, you know, one time you might just want to just straight lens. You might just want the vintage element, 350, whatever, whatever you decide. And then maybe you take that off and you just have diffusion in there, which is, you know, what you can do with signature primes, but, you know, you can do a little bit more. I feel like this is the next step in the impression filters. Aiden Ulrich, another talented DP, has also been putting the Enzos to use on commercials and he's been loving the vintage elements just like me. So quick and you're able to just pop it off, throw it in the back. Throw it on. I feel like this is just so smart to have these and to have even like, okay, we have some options to have even more options in the future. And you can essentially transform your set of lenses if you own these, especially, but even on just, you know, on any project, you have way more versatility with different looks. I feel like this is going to get copied a lot. Kind of like unlocks another set of lenses. Yeah. Exactly. Especially being able to treat it, you know, from like the densest magnification to the lightest, positive and negative too. So it's not just one way of distortion. You have that and the negative, you know, positive. Yeah. Even adding like, you know, the lightest version of it on just like is a little something that really helps break the image up in a really nice way. When we start adding like, you know, rare elements that you can put your own, you know, your own take on it, like that will also change the lens set, right? Without filtration in front, right? You can do this, all this filtration in the back, but then still use vintage elements. You can really, you can really tune this without having to tune it, right? So they come with two different? Two different types with three different strengths each. So the Enzos come with the Enzo vintage elements and they are included with the set. We only sell them right now in a six lens set. They come with the filters. You get three positives and three negatives. Plus there's also a creative kit that actually lets you take a ring like this and put material in it, any type you want, and then, you know, put in a retaining ring and then you make your own filters. Full DIY. Exactly. You're the first ones to see this. So Enzo creative adapter, it's a holder and there's threads in here. And then we've got three different size retaining rings. And the idea is that you cut your material, you put it in there, you put the retaining ring on, and then we've got this little tool that lets you screw it into place. And then you pop it behind the lens. So you can essentially DIY your own look. Yes. And I thought we could actually try some diffusion. I brought some diffusion. Some of the typical things we would use. Stuff you would find on a set, you know, normally, but I've played with stuff like this in the past. Yeah. Let's toss something in there. Let's see what it looks like. What do you feel like? I don't know, let's go wild. Got this, this front, this used to hold an airy lighting key chain. This is from a desk calendar that I had. Let's go full on. That one looks. You want to go? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just made a new filter. Crazy milky filter, which we can try out. What lens do we want? What are you thinking? Let's go, let's go 47. 47 it is. 47 is cool. Yeah. It is a completely different lens now. So we have image up. We got our DIY filter in. What was this one again? What's this called? This is a plastic bag. We got this like 80s vibe going on. Yeah, the bulk is completely different now. I love it. I think a lot of people are going to mess around with it. I think it's going to make a bit of a resurgence with some of these old school techniques coming back and then some new school flair to it, maybe. I think it's cool. I've never really done this sort of stuff with lenses. I've never really, I've always heard of people using nets and stuff like that, but I feel like now this kind of like almost gives me permission to just go wild, like break some glass and throw that in there and do all sorts of stuff. Like, yeah, obviously you're not going to be shooting everything with a plastic bag in it, but filmmaking is fun when you get to try crazy things and then you see a really cool image and then somebody's like, how'd you do that? I was like, oh, we put a plastic bag in the filter. It's like, what? Like, that's what you did? Old plastic bag. We're still in Ziploc bag mode right now. You liking the look? It's a look, that's for sure. I think there's a big trend in people wanting to kind of get a unique look, whether it's just for the purpose of the story or if you want to separate yourself as a DP a little bit and get kind of like a secret look. I feel like this plays really well into that. Are you guys going to be developing different looks? Oh, yes. We have, we've come up with some really cool stuff. And yeah, as we go forward and we sell more of these, then we'll start bringing out. We have ideas about multiple optics and different kinds of flares and all sorts of crazy stuff. This thing is so easy too. It's not like you have to go and adjust the internals of the lens. I mean, you know, ARRI Rental works, they have a lot of really great lenses that are simpler in design that they can get in there and they can push them around and create some deeper effects but only they can do that. And it's only going to do that one thing. I'm not opening up. Yeah, exactly. We can't give you the same kind of tuning that a custom lens tech would give you, but yeah, I mean, this goes a long way. And found in commercials, especially, people just really love these things. It's safe to say I'm a huge fan of these vintage elements and I hope other lens companies start taking note. But if you really want to get a completely different look to your normal old boring photo lenses, you want the Hollywood look, one of the best ways is anamorphic lenses, which is just a whole different ball game. And if there's anyone who knows about anamorphic cinema lenses... There's just lenses everywhere. It's Dan Caines, one of the founders of Atlas Lens Co. So we have some of the very first CinemaScope lenses that were made in America by Bosch and Lohm. And these were designed from an original optical concept from Henri Chrétien, who was a French optical engineer. And 20th Century Fox licensed the concept from him, brought it to America, and then called it CinemaScope. And you can think of it as a codec. So if you go talk to the motion picture entertainment group, MPEG, they have codecs, right? Like H.264, H.265. This was like a hardware codec. So you'd have to license the hardware codec from 20th Century Fox. So even if Warner Brothers is making a movie or Columbia Pictures is making a movie, they would all have to license that to show their widescreen movies in theaters. And so 20th Century Fox would make money every time every other studio would make a CinemaScope movie. That's funny. And I actually didn't know that they literally manufacture their lenses at their headquarters. We try to keep it pretty controlled and regulated, keeping particulate matter from entering by putting booties on. And the more concentric you get into it, the cleaner it is. So it's triple HEPA filtered in the main room. And then each technician has a laminar flow hood that keeps everything very clean. And then if you're doing very intricate work, you go into the special clean room cell, which you'll see. Whoa. Wow. ♪♪♪ Most important part, right, Matty? Our query. Oh, dude. This feels legit. What the heck? I didn't know what I was getting myself into here. I'm like, yeah, give me a tour. And now we're like going into like... ♪♪♪ Mercury being made. The glass is made somewhere else, but they machined the lenses and put them all together right there in LA. New, very special, secret prototype lens that's gonna be coming soon. Can't say what it is, but doing some QC on some components, getting ready to do a first article assembly. No hints? Can't say much, except all I can say is like, we have our catchphrase right now is Atlas Anamorphic Worldwide. Decode that. Seeing how they do all this just gave me a whole new perspective on how you can do all of this the right way, like Atlas, or well, I'm sure you could cut some corners in this process. So you specialize in anamorphic lenses, which I haven't talked about in this video, but that's a whole different ballgame. What makes these so special? I think you see it immediately when you put it up there, but I think just even seeing how you guys are putting them together. Yeah, it's sort of a special craft process. So you can almost call it the slow food movement. It's initially, it doesn't sound like it makes sense. Fast food sounds good on paper. I want a hot meal. I want it fast and I want it cheap and I want it now. And then you eat it and then you're like, yeah, I don't know about that. Like it definitely filled my stomach for a period of time, but now I'm immediately hungry again or I'm not feeling so good. And I think that there's opportunities for every type of lens. So there's great vintage lenses, you know, the homage to the past, the history of lenses is beautiful. There's so much to pull out of that. There's great modern lenses that are super sharp, crisp, will give you every detail in perfect resolution. And then an Atlas lens is somewhere in between where there's just a little bit of extra attention to detail that goes into what we do that makes it unique and full of character, which is a kind of overused term, but full of personality. The lenses are meant to be very personal. And the way that a camera person wields these lenses makes very personal images. So a important question, which one's your favorite? The Mercury or a, which one? Between a Mercury series lens or an Orion series lens, I'm gonna go with the Orion series because it was our first product and because it's the baby. Yeah, it's like the OG, you know, we started with those and I still think that they're relevant. That's why we're still putting out new ones in that family. So we just introduced not that long ago, an 18 millimeter Orion, which is the world's widest angle anamorphic lens. I haven't tested that out. I wanna test that out. Yeah, we gotta let you try that. And then we also have telephoto Orions, which are fairly uncommon for an anamorphic lens. We've got a 200 millimeter and a 135 millimeter. So, you know, we have a very mature family of lenses with over 12 lenses in that series. And then the Mercury are incredible because they are lighter, they are smaller, but you know, to your point, they're not as light as an autofocus lens. Yeah. And so it's a little bit slower moving and there's cases where you would wanna do that. But the cool thing is you can still hand focus these without autofocus. They are light enough to go on a mirrorless camera, like an FX3, which, you know, Oren Sofer and Greg Fraser, ASC, ACS used on the Creator. And there's gonna be a couple other films coming out soon that were filmed with Mercury. So we're really excited about that. So this is not lightweight. I'll let you hold it and you can tell me how, you know. Gigant or incredible. I know you're big on health, so you could like get some reps in. Next marathon I'm gonna run with. Oh my gosh, this thing's insane. We thought it was Atlas Lenscoe, but it's Sisyphus Lenscoe. So just push that holder up there. Check this thing out, what a beast. Man, this thing must be hard to make. I don't know how you guys do this stuff. Take this away from me, Dan. Quickly. Oh, put it on there. Yeah, I'll throw it on the camera. Even better. That's insanely wide. But you gotta pay the price of heavy, big. You gotta go through that to get that. Yeah, can't do the world's widest. Art told me a ton of other super interesting facts about ARRI cinema lenses, like. When you're working with very small pieces of glass, you have to be more precise. If you're working with a big piece of glass, the same precision will give you much better results. This is, it's called near telecentricity. It looks like it's like really far. Looks like it's like out here. Yeah. If you look in the back and the aperture appears to be right here, then you end up going through more glass. So now the light is gonna do something different at the edges than in the center. And. There's this phenomenon called focus ramping. What it means is that T stops are set looking through the lens when it's focused at infinity. But on a lot of lenses, when you focus closer, the exposure drops off. Really? We could be here all day long, but you really start to see how much they put into each product they release. And that's what you want at the highest level of filmmaking. Yeah. High-end cinema gear is insanely expensive and it's not the easiest to use. But does Max Verstappen care about how much his Red Bull F1 car costs while he's flying around a corner at 350 kilometers per hour? Nope. Or what about automatic transmission? Or if it has AC to cool him down in Singapore? Well, I'm sure he'd like that, but there's no room for that in an F1 car. It's built for performance at the highest level. And if Aerie signatures are too expensive for you to buy or rent, then it's probably not the right tool for you, yet at least. Do you get what you pay for? Not necessarily always. We all know some companies don't have the best track record and others make products that have been battle tested and last for tens of years. But I think for me, it's more interesting to think about how to make the best films. And if you're an indie filmmaker trying to shoot your first feature, I don't think you should be trying to get an Aerie 65 and DNA lenses tuned by Matt Colsey from Aerie. I think you'd be way better off with an FX3 and some mercury anamorphic lenses from Atlas. So I think the answer to are we being scammed should maybe be phrased differently. Am I scamming myself? How often am I thinking here is the solution rather than creativity and focus on the story itself, not what camera and lenses it was shot on. We ended off the trip full on nerding, checking out different lenses on a projector to see all their unique characteristics. And it just made me think how there's always something new to learn and just how much I love filmmaking. I love this stuff. Feel like I'm learning so much. Half the time I ask questions, it's like, oh, just explain that because I have no idea what they're talking. Just explain that for the people, of course.