How To Convert Photography Lenses into Cine Lenses

If you’ve been making the conversion from shooting stills to shooting DSLR video you probably have an array of lenses from the stills days.

If you are solely doing video, there may be a lot of sense to convert your stills lenses to cine lenses. Caleb Pike has a great tutorial on converting your DSLR lenses to easily accommodate a video workflow.

Caleb starts with a set of 3 Olympus OM lenses: 35-70 F4, 75-150 F4 and 50mm F1.8 at total of about $200 and  lists a few major differences between the way DSLR lenses are built and the way cine lenses are built, he also explains how to adjust the lens for cine use.

• Lens mount conversion – With the lenses being Olympus OM lenses, a set of $15 OM to Canon adapters are used to make them Canon fitted, of course, if you are running a different system, you need different adapters.
• De-clicking the Aperture ring – This is a big one, and it allows having the lens tuned to just the right amount of light and just the right amount of bokeh. IT is not trivial at all, so watch Caleb’s channel for a video on de-clicking which he will release soon.
• Adding standardized lens gears – Adding 0.8 pitch cinema lens gears allows you to use follow focus while you shooting.
• Matching the front-end filter size – Cinema lenses and adapters have 3 standard filter thread sizes: 80mm, 95mm and 114mm. The “mess” us photographers have with various lenses thread sizes makes it hard to use standard matte boxes and other accessories, Caleb recommends adding 80mm cine rings converters to all the lenses so they become a cine-standard.

The cost of the three lenses plus the conversion is about $431. That’s not bad for a set of lenses.

Make sure to read the entire tutorial over at DSLR Video Shooter at it packs much more useful info.

[Turn Your Photo Lenses Into a Cinema Lens Set via NoFilmSchool]