Indie 2.0

Check out this video of an exclusive demo for the RED party during NAB 08 just a few weeks ago by BIRGER Engineer Erik Widding–giving a final rundown of his much anticipated 35mm canon mount for RED ONE. This mount will allow you to mount Canon EOS lenses onto Red (and perhaps more importantly, othere–even better–lenses that can mount onto a Canon EOS mount (via an adaptor).

What does the Birger Canon EOS mount do (from what I can gather on reduser.net): Replaces the PL mount on the RED body and allows Canon EOS lenses to be mounted and used with full control of aperture and focus electronically. This is important because there is no aperture ring on any of the Canon EF lenses and some won’t even focus without electronic control.

And (according to AquaVideoRed206 on reduser.net):

Let me add that the other key component of the Birger concept is that these Canon lenses typically have several thousand “steps” in focusing from near to far and therefore it is possible to overcome the most severe limitation of still lenses – that they don’t have much focus “throw” i.e. distance that you turn the focus ring to go from near to far, and thus are not as accurate as cine lenses. With the Birger those steps can be “mapped” to the knob so that it is more precise. In addition, either at the beginning or eventually – you should be able to program “stops” so that you could set it for focus point A to be at 10 feet and focus point B at 5 feet and smoothly move between them with out having to worry about overshooting – or just quickly go from point to point.

Also, once RED implements the Lens Data functions, you will get lens data i.e. focal length, focus point, iris setting, etc. which exists in all EF lenses but only exists in the most modern (and expensive) cine lenses.

And AquaVideoRed206 also has posted what seems to me to be the a good summary assessment of the Red 18-55mm Zoom lens: great optics, not great mechanics: an excellent value “Toyota” (compared to an Arri, Cooke or Zeiss “BMW”), i.e. a “Mid-Pro” lens.