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What is your opinion on using in camera lens corrections such as vignette, aberration and distortion correction?
Ive read you prefer using lenses with minimal distortion to be true to life, but is there any downsides to doing this in camera for lower budget production or is it best to just leave corrections off and keep the lens characteristics?
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Since they are defects of the lens (even if vignetting could be a – questionable – artistic choice) my humble opinion Is that the important Is to get rid of them, with a Lens that reduces the effects, a camera able to correct them or in post production, whatever your budget allows . The real question Is why sometimes they feels the need to add defects to a flawless image (vignetting, flares, ecc) but that’s another story. 🙂
- I mean the in camera options on the sony FX3. Vignette correction which brightens the corners, and distortion correction which corrects barrel and pincushion distortion by reading the lens data. Cinema cameras dont usually have these options, but lenses tend to be higher quality in the first place. But ive noticed that when i enable distortion correction it can look unnatural stretching the image. Not sure if its just how a more rectilinear lens would look, or an artefact of the correction.
Take this with a grain of salt, as I never looked into it deeper, but as far as I know a camera needs the exact distortion data from a lens to perform it correctly. If a lens is not supported, correction will yield false results. Panasonic’s cheaper photography lenses for instance are much worse when not corrected in camera, usually by a Panasonic camera.
Half world is using 20k+ perfect lenses or all the corrections in camera to have the cleanest image possible while the other half is using the dirtiest lenses available and filtering to get the most rough image available.
Test with or without corrections and decide what you like most. There is no correct answer apart what you like most.Dear Roger,
Yes. 20k is the average price for an Arri, Zeiss, Angenieux or Cooke prime lens nowadays.
Worth noting,
A set of ‘Preloved’ Zeiss Super speeds will cost you £75.00 (That’s 5 lenses).
Arri Alexa camera well used will cost you between £5,000-£8,000 bare unit. Used by numorous crews and environments. No spares back up for the early models. Shelf life for an Alexa is 15-20 years (If you’ve lucky).
Lenses have a shelf life of 100 years. Makes you think, put your money in glass!
I would say this is changing drastically though. We are seeing new, affordable lenses enter the market every year from mostly Chinese manufacturers, and these lenses get better and better every year, too. Spherical or anamorphic, photography or videography/cinema lenses. They started with terrible quality a few years back but have improved vastly at a high pace – similar to what we see in LED film lighting.
E.g. today you can get decent performing anamorphic lenses for 10 times less than equivalent lenses cost just 5-10 years ago, with quality differences being diminished with every iteration.
I would expect lenses in general to become noticeably more affordable in the future. I know lenses are a hot (often emotionally and sometimes even esoterically loaded) topic and many cinematographers disagree 🙂
About the Chinese lenses. I agree, I did try few of them and even I have a full set of Meikes s35 and waiting for an anamorphic set to arrive that I recently bought.
IMO Problem with them is not optics, I’m sure in a very short time glass quality will be there as it is already scratching top contenders. But manufacturing and quality control is still bad or basic. They have their place and I enjoy using them but a mass produced lens will never reach a certain level and a skilled optics technician will always set up a lens better than a machine. I may be wrong. We will see.
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