A film lens, also known as a cine lens or cinema lens, is a high-end camera lens for cinema cameras or video camcorders that filmmakers, cinematographers and videographers use to make film and digital projects. Like DSLRs and other still photography lenses, a film lens contains a series of glass plates that bring exterior light through the camera’s viewfinder to a film strip or digital sensor.
3 Characteristics of a Film Lens
All lenses filter and focus light so that it hits the sensor or film strip correctly, but there are other factors that determine the look and quality of an image captured by a film lens including:
Focal length: focal length is the distance, measured in millimeters, between the camera lens and the camera’s digital sensor, or film plane, which records the image. Cine lenses with smaller focal lengths have wider angles of view, which is how the human eye perceives the size of the objects in the scene, while larger focal lengths have a narrower angle of view and show less of the scene.
T-stops: The amount of light that passes through the cine lens is measured in increments called transmission stops, or t-stops, which is a more accurate unit of measurement than the f-stop (the camera setting that specifies the aperture of the lens) used for still lenses.
Aperture: The aperture or size of the opening in the lens, or iris, also affects the image that the cine lens can capture. As with focal length, large apertures create a shallow depth of field, which is the amount of focus in the image, while smaller apertures result in greater depth of field and more focus. The widest aperture setting on a lens is called maximum aperture and is ideal for low light situations.
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