Cine versus Regular Lens

Hi all. I'm a movie maker (beginner) and I have a question about lenses. I have a rokinon cine lens and in need of a wide lens for close ups. Should I buy another cine lens to maintain picture quality or go for a cheaper regular lens? Is there a difference in picture quality people would notice? Thank you very much for any help you can offer.

It's more about handling. Real cine lenses have less breathing and more focus throw, while the image quality can be similar.
But, Rokinon lenses are just rehoused still lenses anyway.

Before I made a final decision to use real Cine lenses, I was looking at the Rokinon Cine lenses. They’re really stretching the truth with that branding. The thing that turned me off was the completely haphazard design of the housing. Yes, their Cine lenses have some gears in the same place, but they have a variety of physical lengths and filter threads and outside diameters. I just gave up getting a headache on how to manage the mess easily.

Rokinon did introduce the 114mm Xeen range that are still the same lens designs for the most part but with improved coatings and she standard housings.

But by then I was smitten by the 95mm SLR Magic APO primes that are true Cine lenses including the all spherical lens elements (no photo asymmetrical lenses) like vintage lenses with not only a common physical housing but sharing the same centre of gravity. Very easy to manage with both screw-on 82 mm filters or traditional 4x5.6” rectangular filters. No adjustments needed when changing lenses and a fairly creamy look.




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Wow, I thought Rokinon was a good brand. Students in my film school salivated to use them. I'm gonna do some more research on my own!

Yes, once you get your hands on a “real” cine PL mount lens, there is no going back! Anything else does not have the same quality IQ look or workflow, as Rick pointed out. In addition to the SLR APOs, Tokina is making some nice Cine Primes, and used Zeiss CP Primes can be had for a good price, which I prefer over the Xeens.
Cheers

As has been stated, many popular cine lenses are rehoused still lenses. Given that, you won't necessarily see a picture quality difference by buying a still vs. a cine lens. Also, I think there is a lot of subjectivity in lens quality. You have to shoot some and see if the quality is to your liking.

The main thing you need to be concerned about is using your lens in a movie production environment. Inevitably, in a MOVie, you are going to have to pull focus. If you are using a still lens, how will this be accomplished? Most still lenses won't have outside gearing for a follow focus. So, will someone be touching the barrel of the lens as they pull focus? You can imagine the impact on focus of a heavy touch. How will you do this when you go handheld and are moving around? More importantly, when your actor moves from 6 feet to 12 feet, how much of a turn on the lens will be required to follow their movement? On a still lens that could be an imperceptibly small turn, hard to do accurately and hard to repeat accurately.

I would highly recommend a cine lens over a still lens if your purpose is making movies. It will be more expensive, but then what will be the cost of out of focus shots in your movies?

Most still lenses won't have outside gearing for a follow focus. So, will someone be touching the barrel of the lens as they pull focus?

While this is true, it's worth pointing out that some follow-focus systems include friction gears for DSLR lenses. Wooden Camera's follow-focus systems come with one of these along with a standard .8 Mod gear for cinema lenses. The friction gear is essentially a rubber "tire" instead of a toothed gear. There's probably a fair risk of slipping, but I haven't tested it yet myself to see how well it works.

For a good primer on this topic, read through the SALT posts here
http://www.reduser.net/forum/forumdispl ... Lens-Tests

Especially look at Part 1, which talks about optical quality and build quality considerations.

Thanks everyone for the informative responses.