From the course: Video Gear

Shooting with an optical adapter

From the course: Video Gear

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Shooting with an optical adapter

- Rob, you mentioned optical. When I hear optical, I think of glass. Additional glass inside of the adapter. And I've got one of these, this one was actually recommended by our mutual friend Rob Gary. He had picked one up, he told me about it. I just went and got it, too, because it turned out to be great. - Yeah, so what we're really referring to when we describe optical adapters are those going to be adapters that are not passive like this where there's no glass or anything like involved, but you can see on this, even though it's tad dirty, gotta clean this, Rich, even though it's a tad dirty-- - You were the last one to touch it. - (chuckles) There are some actual pieces of glass in here. Now this is an optical adapter that is passive. There's no electronic contacts on this. But metabones, as we mentioned before, like for example going from, I don't know, Canon EF to E-mount on a Sony system. - Yeah. - That can also pass electronic information. So that would be active optical adapter. - Yeah and so you can get optical adapters that are passive or optical adapters that active. And this particular one is Nikon to micro 4/3s. For me, I own a lot of old manual Nikon glass. I've been shooting Nikon for years. My dad shot Nikon, we had a lot of Nikon glass. Nikon has not changed their mount for several years so I can use that old glass on my more modern systems. - Now, Rich, you have a Black Magic Pocket cinema camera right here, right? This is micro 4/3s mount. - Mhmm. - Do you know what the crop factor on this camera is? - Oh, three point something? (chuckles) - Doesn't that make it difficult to shoot wide angles? - It does, yes, absolutely. - Okay. And, you know the other thing you'll find about you know some of these systems is that it gets really pricey to get really fast lenses in these types of mounts. Well that's one of the advantages that an optical adapter can do, now, I'm not going to get into the physics and math of this because it's still is like, "What?" - Yes. - But-- - People smarter than us (chuckling) who understand light and engineering figured out how to take pieces of glass and make a lens perform faster. - Right, so there's two benefits of some optical, I just want to be clear, not every optical adapter does this, for example-- - But if they're labeled like this one, turbo - [Rob and Rich] or speed booster. - That kind of thing, there are optical adapters that are literally just lens adapters in terms of, like, for example, going from Sony 8-mount to E-mount, those of kind of things. Where you want electronic control that you have a little glass in it, but things like the metabone speed booster, this guy, the lens turbo, they all do the same thing. They do crop reduction, so they can actually make your lens that your system was maybe a two times or three times crop, they can actually reduce that and then the other thing that they can do is to depending on the lens and the adapter that you get, they can actually make your lens faster. So can you think about how the cost savings on this. You could buy f/4 lens and then have it actually act a stop faster? - Yeah! - That's amazing! - No, that's just a great use here, I mean this particular lens is an older lens, it's a 2.8 but with this one stop boost, it's a 1.8. And if you've ever gone price shopping, the price difference between a 2.8 and 1.8 is pretty phenomenal. So let's go ahead and attach this here to the Olympus micro 4/3s, clicks in, I got it. So now I've taken a 2.8 lens. - Made it faster. - Turned it into almost a 1.8. - Reduced the crop factor. - Yup, got manual controls here and manual aperture. - So I think if you own a crop sensor body like a GH4 or a Black Magic Cinema camera or something like that, the optical speed boosting technology is going to be great. Just keep in mind, Rich, that these are a whole lot more expensive than a passive adapter. - Yes, alright, so to wrap things up and just give you a little bit of parting advice, be prepared to test, not all lenses and camera bodies are going to work together. I tried to put in this adapter onto my Black Magic. It wasn't a great fit even though it was micro 4/3s. Fits just fine here on the Olympus and I've used it with a GH4 so it's a matter of trial and error or reading those reviews on Amazon. But Rob, this is a great way to really extend your flexibility. - Absolutely! All around, whether it's a passive, whether it's active, whether it's optical, and don't forget there are some really, really, strange, unique adapters out there but there's also adapters that might only be useful for certain set of people. For example, we tested out the Wooden Camera PL mount adapter so I can actually use a PL, a positive lock camera system that's very popular in cinema work with PL mount lenses. Use one of those, really easy. So I could take a PL mount lens, adapt it to a regular camera, non-cinema type camera, and that worked great. So, just do a little searching out there for adapters and you'll find there's probably a fit for you and the glorious thing about this, Rich, is that once you find that good glass, never ever, ever, ever get rid of it because chances are there will come a system down the line that you can adapt that lens to. So, for Video Gear Weekly and Lynda.com, I'm Robbie Carman. - And I'm Rich Harrington. Thanks for watching.

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