- So it's no secret.
I am a huge fan of anything Arri.
Of course the Arri Alexa camera.
And then how about lighting?
Well, there's the Arri SkyPanel.
And then how about stabilization?
There's the Arri Trinity.
I mean they make the best of the best stuff.
I swear if there was a pencil or sharpener
with that logo on there, I would go out and get it.
I'd probably max out some credit cards to do so,
but you know what?
It's going to be the best pencil sharpener
that's ever existed.
And every time they release something,
it's designed to be an industry standard,
for a very long time.
It's not like they pop out a new camera every six months.
So you can imagine how excited I get
every time they release anything new.
Now some of you may remember that a while back,
I made a video with Art, from Arri,
about the Signature Prime lenses.
We go ahead and do a nice deep dive
into their Prime lenses,
but now, they have something new to announce,
which is their Signatures Zooms.
So as you can imagine, there's a Signature Primes.
Now they come in Zooms.
And we get to take a sneak peek out some of the prototypes.
So let's go to the test shoot.
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- It's really cool to have a zoom on a Trinity.
It feels really good,
it's got really nice pan inertia,
really stable build this way.
Surprisingly, not that heavy.
- [Interviewer] Didn't you go out to Vegas
to shoot those music videos for The Weekend?
- Yeah, I did two of them.
I did a, the Heartless video,
which you maybe saw me using the Trinity
on the little electric vehicle.
And then I also did the Blinding Lights video
with the optimist system, yeah.
- [Interviewer] That's awesome.
- We were on very wide lenses a lot of the time.
You know, it's Vegas,
it's a fear and loathing kind of vibe and style,
and we got really weird with it, you know.
We're doing touching and rolling and you know,
one of the things that's cool about the Trinity
is you can get a much more extreme angle
than you can with the normal system.
You know, with a regular steady cam,
I'd have to be here doing this to get that shot.
But with the Trinity it's, it's just, it's trivial.
So very low and also very high angle shots,
which we're doing a lot of, both of that.
- [Interviewer] So what are some of the shots
that you're trying to get here today?
- So using the zoom, we're zoomed way in, at the beginning.
We start zooming out and we pull out
and pull it out over the table,
which is why we were on Trinity
so that we could get in over the table on his face
and then pulling out.
And then we're backing up
into a wide to see the whole table.
They zoom out for that.
And then as he's having a realization about
what the conversation means at the end,
we're pushing between the two people
and back onto him and zooming in at the end.
Zoom helps us get nice and tight on it
and nice in light as well.
It feels like it's, it's perfectly built
for, for this kind of setup.
It's everything I was hoping it would be, you know?
It looks like a signature.
And normally when people start talking about
putting a zoom on the Trinity,
it's a cool idea in terms of what you can do,
but there's not very many zooms that will fit.
Most of them you've gotta be
on kind of a compact light await zoom.
That's usually making some trade off
in terms of its optical quality.
And I don't think this one is.
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- We usually do these very kind of traditional show-wheels.
This time we're trying to have fun with it.
It's a test or a demonstration
in that we're hitting all the points we wanna hit,
but it's a short film.
It's probably gonna be about two minutes when we're done,
and it's a heist film.
It's great.
We have some great actors.
It's very funny,
but it's, it's also really well done.
It's very moody, it's very dark.
I mean, it's everything deep you really wants us to do.
We've been doing some day exterior.
We've been doing a lot of night interior
because these lenses do really well with shadows.
We've just been pushing them a lot.
You know, looking at all the stuff
that Signature Primes do really well
and just putting them through their faces.
And, you know, seeing how
an actual television crew likes them
because they're used to working really fast
and they like using zooms.
The goal was to make a Zoom that's as close as we could get
to prime quality and we've kinda done it.
We've shown this to a number of people.
They said, they think it's a Mash Signature Primes,
which is tough because digital sees everything and film.
You could get a match between Primes and Zooms
because the film was sort of soften things
and you'd have brain and gateway,
but you don't have that in digital.
So the bar is much higher.
So we worked really hard
and I think we've done it.
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- I'm the owner of TCC, the telescoping camera cranes.
I've been doing that for about 25 years.
I've known Arri my whole life.
I grew up in the business.
So, I really love what Arri is doing.
And so that's why we came out here
to help them with their project.
The idea is with these weights on it,
you put the remote head on, the camera on,
then you get the balance.
And at full extension,
no matter how long the crane is,
it should be perfectly balanced.
I mean, as you can see,
like when it swings of it, you know, it's just,
so I mean, it's pretty, you know, balanced--
- [Interviewer] So how are you liking the Signature Zooms
on that crane so far?
- Oh, I loved them.
I thought, yeah, I thought the look was great.
Image quality look really nice.
Look really clear, sharp, it's his first time seeing them.
So I'm excited to see them actually working out with clients
on the jobs.
When you have a zoom on there,
you could do any shot you want.
I was on the handle, but he said,
"Boom down a little bit,
"make them more look more dynamic, more graphic."
So I could boom down a little bit.
I could boom up high if he wanted, I could slide over.
And then the shot was pulling it all the way wide,
pushing back out to go up to see that Arri logo.
A very dynamic move.
We used all lengths from full length to bring it back in,
going up, raking the building to full extension again.
So on ready, we start pulling out
and they start feathering the zoom in
to make it look like one, move with a telescope.
And then as we go up, they start zooming back into the logo.
It looked really good.
And the lenses look really dynamic.
- That's really cool
that you could do that in just one simple side.
You guys made it look easy.
- This is the paintbrush.
It's really the crew that makes it work.
This is a great tool for social distancing right now,
or getting calls all the time
because the camera department can be working out here.
We're back there.
The actors are here.
This is all safe.
This way is about 5,000 pounds.
But right now still it's finger balance right here,
as you can tell, when it gets full length out there,
I'll still be able to pretty much hold it with my finger
when it's perfectly balanced.
- What would you say
the most difficult shot on The Matrix was?
- We did the freeway sequence
where they have that big fight on the freeway.
It's like a 10 minute scene on film, but we,
it took us a month and a half to shoot it.
We were up in San Francisco
and I was back on the back of a camera car.
We were going 50 miles an hour down the freeway,
flying from car to car,
this close to the actors, that close to the cars.
Very dangerous, very fun.
- This might be one of the biggest lenses I've seen.
- This is the longest one.
So this is the 65 to 300.
And what's really cool about this one
is we're going to ship it with a 1.7 times extender.
So, it will become a 110 to 510 zoom.
It's lighter than it looks.
It's, it's 18 pounds.
A lot of the zooms, this size are a lot heavier.
The grip under here, you should feel that.
It's got a special coating that's water resistant.
So if your hands are sweaty,
if you pick the lens up,
it's perfectly balanced around the handle.
That's the way we design things.
So it looks great,
but it's really, you know easy to use two of these,
these unscrew very easily.
We look at the entire lens when we build it.
So it's not just the look, but how easy is it to use.
All the zooms are gonna be two, two ready.
For large format, that's a really significant thing
because it's really hard to make fast,
large format high-speed lenses.
A lot of zooms, when you go all the way to the end,
they suddenly get a lot darker.
So it'll stay to it all the way through.
And then the way it drops off
is exactly the same across all the zooms.
They're basically identical.
And that's the idea is you should be able
to swap these back and forth
and no one should know that you switched from
the 45 to 135 to the 65 to 300.
And of course, they've got the Signature Prime look,
which we designed to last as displays
and cameras get better and better,
it should look better and better.
Whereas a lot of lenses build their look off of aberrations
and as displays get better and cameras get better,
you see those more,
the look of this is not built on aberrations.
We, we've basically kind of built a lens
that has a nice balance of aberration.
So you don't really notice any one of them.
And then we built a look on top of that.
Then in 20 years, they'll still look beautiful
on whatever camera you put.
- This is quite the set up
to go and film your kid's soccer practice, huh?
(laughs)
But it would probably look amazing.
You could be all the way in the out field.
And with the 1.7 times.
So this becomes a 510?
Wow! - Yeah, yeah.
And it shifts with it.
It's just, it's in the case when you buy it.
- What would you say the biggest challenge of,
you know, creating a lens like this?
- It's all about, I think probably balancing
the aberrations the way we've done them
in the Signature Primes,
but in this case, there's more work to deal with
because there's so much stuff going on.
In zooms, you always have more chromatic aberration,
you have more distortion, greater difficulty,
and you're producing a lens that,
you know, produces high resolution images
because there's so much glass doing so much
and it all interacts.
So the trick is just trying to find a way to,
I mean, match the look of a prime with that much glass
and that much stuff going on.
A Signature Prime will still have moving glass
because we're eliminating breathing.
While on this, you've also got
all the stuff necessary to change the focal length.
And we're trying to eliminate breathing.
We can't completely eliminate breathing,
but what we do is we put it at the long end
where you probably won't notice it.
So if you rack from over there, to me,
there'll be a little bit of a,
this on the 300 end.
But if you zoom all the way up to 65,
and the same thing on the other lens,
if you zoom all the way down to 45, nothing happens.
So you can rack focus like crazy.
And you won't, you won't really see much.
You won't see any visible breathing.
And that's because of the wide end,
we know you're gonna see it.
We can't get rid of it all the way through,
but we'll get rid of it where you see it.
So it's all kind of a balancing act.
You know, how do we create the best quality,
but still make it usable.
Because we can make this thing perfect
and it would be a tank.
And what's interesting also
is that these are near telecentric as well.
And I think we've probably talked about that
in the last video,
but what that means is if you look in the back
at where the aperture appears to be
in a lot of lenses, it's way in the rear,
which means when light comes out the back of the lens,
it's going like this.
So at the edges of the sensor,
you're hitting it at a, an extreme angle.
And that has some really kind of crazy effects.
Like you can get softness and chromatic, aberration,
and weird stuff going on.
So by moving that, cheating that up here,
and, and it probably isn't actually up here.
If you look in,
it looks like it's up here,
but it's probably somewhere in here.
It's an optical illusion basically.
The light thinks it's coming out from deeper in the lens,
so the angle is less.
And that's the optimizer for any sensor
we can see coming down the road.
And it's amazing that we were able to do that
with zoom lenses, because I, I've never seen that before
in a zoom.
- If you haven't seen the deep dive
of the Signature Primes that we did with art,
link right there.
So you can go check it out.
But essentially this is the zoom lenses
that compliment the prime lenses.
- Yes, they were really difficult because you know,
you, you can't make a zoom
that perfectly technically matches a prime.
What's important is do we hit the points where your,
that your eyes sees?
Have we cheated your eyes?
And I think we've done that
because when I look at the images through this,
they're still nice and warm.
You see a lot of detail, but it's not crispy sharp.
The Boca is just to die for.
It's still really smooth,
just like the Signature Primes.
I don't know how we did that in a lenses complex,
but it's, it's a match.
So if you put this up on some machine,
you know, machinery and take a really close look,
it's not gonna match a Signature Prime technically,
but we don't really shoot technical images.
And visually they are
the best match between a zoom and a prime I've ever seen.
Their glass is always a balancing act
because every time you try to do something
with one element and one shape,
and one kind of glass,
you kind of have to fix some side
with another piece of glass.
And it's kind of a ripple effect all the way down the line.
You know, the other thing, the reason why it costs so much
is because the glass we use
is really, really high end glass.
And that's what you have to do
to kind of keep the quality up
and the size down because you can,
you can cheat with other kinds of glass,
but you'll change color.
A lot of times, you'll,
you'll end up with a cooler color.
We wanted to keep the warm color
that really pops skin tone nicely.
That tends to be more expensive lens.
I think I mentioned last time,
some of the glass in these lenses is more expensive
by weight than gold,
and we've maintained that, but it's just,
there's a lot more glass.
So the chromatic aberration is close.
There, there are some differences,
but it's still so minimal
that you probably won't notice it.
- There's two coming out this year and two coming out next?
- Early 2021, you'll see this in the 45 to 135.
We're shooting with both of those today, prototypes,
but there'll be released in early 2021,
and then probably hopefully summer
for the other two.
- [Interviewer] And same LPL mount?
- Same LPL mount, yeah.
Cause that's the mount
that's gonna be on all the future cameras,
including the one that's coming out next year,
which is super 35.
But you know, once again we designed these lenses
to be used on everything.
I've seen images from Signature Primes on a 9K camera
and they held up really well.
I'm expecting probably about the same image quality
out of this.
- Oh man, how beautiful are those lenses, huh?
It sounds like you're able to get
that Arri Signature Prime lens look
in a more convenient zoom lens option.
Thanks again to Arri for inviting me on set,
allowing me to film some behind the scenes.
And if you're curious to watch the film,
which was shot by the director of photography,
Logan Schneider, then I will link that below.
You can go check out their short film shot
on the Signature Zoom.
So that's all I got for this video.
Thanks for tuning in and cut.
I said cut.
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