VA Digital Hire is now one of the first rental houses in Australia to purchase a complete set of FUJIFILM’s FUIJINON Premista 19-45mm T2.9, 28-100mm T2.9 and 80-250mm T2.9-3.5 full-frame, wide-angle zoom lenses. The lenses have been used locally on the feature films ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’, shot by John Seale AM ACS ASC on ARRI Alexa Large Format cameras, and ‘Poker Face’, and a 7-Eleven television commercial.
Commenting on purchasing the Premista lenses VA’s Preparation Manager Mike Vlack said, “VA Purchased these lenses because we needed to expand our rental inventory of full-frame cinema lenses. We have many sets of full-frame prime lenses, but there are very few high quality full-frame cine lenses, such as the Premista, currently available. The Premista lenses stand out.”
For VA the fact that the Premistas cover full frame and are a true cinema-style lens, not a lens designed for shooting stills, was a critical and key requirement. Cinema lenses are built to maintain focus on moving subjects, or smoothly switch focus from one subject to the other. Moving subjects in a movie scene are kept in focus by slowly rotating the focus ring and following the subject.
Unlike regular still lenses, a cine lens has a focus ring with clearly visible markings and hard stops at the start and finish, making it easier to achieve consistent, smooth focus pulls. Cinema lenses are also parfocal lenses that are able to keep their focus locked on subjects even when the user zooms in on a particular scene.
Mike said, “The Premista zooms are sharp and detailed across the full frame, but not harsh. A nice round 13 blade iris renders out of focus areas smoothly and pleasingly, and the minimum focus is close. They have very low distortion, minimal focus breathing and the lenses are not too big and heavy, with a convenient 114mm front outside diameter. This allows standard clamp-on matte boxes to be used, without resorting to larger matte boxes which slow down production.
“The Premistas also support the Zeiss eXtended Data System, which is becoming very useful for virtual production utilising LED volumetric walls. The lenses are very sturdy with high quality control of manufacture, making them very reliable. They cover a very wide focal length range with look and colour matching across all three lenses – well suited to modern production.” www.fujifilm.com.au
