 Hey welcome to the Crimson Engine, my name is Rubidium. Today we are looking at the choice that a lot of new digital cinema camera owners face. Should you buy a whole collection of cine primes or should you buy one or two fast zoom lenses? So in this corner we have the Rokonon EF mount cine range. We have a 16, a 35, a 50 and a 85. In this corner we have the Canon 24 to 70 f2.8. This one costs about $1600 new. These cost about $1800 for the set. The debate between zoom versus prime has been going on for a long time. Everyone can agree that primes are sharper, primes are cheaper, but zoom gives you much more flexibility. But with the advent of autofocus in digital cinema cameras the debate is now all thrown up in the air because these guys need to be manually focused. This guy will do the focusing for you. You can either touch the screen where you want to focus or you can do what I'm doing right now and track a face so that no matter where the person or the object moves the camera will keep focus for you. There is no clear-cut answer to this this question on this riddle. I went with a foot in both camps. I have the cine zooms. I also have this and a whole bunch of other stills glass like the 50mm 1.4 that's on the camera right now that's able to do autofocus for me. And really you know I use different lenses depending on the project. I'm shooting a lot of YouTube videos right now as you guys know that know. Add up using the autofocus zooms a lot more because I'm working as a one-man crew. I'm usually on sticks or talking to camera or just out there shooting things lightweight. The cine primes hands down undisputably have a more cinematic image. Yes you need to pull focus with them. Yes you do need someone to pull focus even if that's you so that means you need a rail system you need a follow focus and you need to get good at working out where the focus of the camera is or the focus the lens is. I would say certainly prime lenses the look of the prime lens which tends to be sharper which tends to have less distortion because I mean this lens has a lot more glass for the light to travel through than this lens. So by the time that the light gets to the sensor it's going to be a better representation of what is in front of the camera than with this one. Then again you know if the image isn't in focus it's not very cinematic so if you're just starting out if you're going to do work on lots of small productions if you're just running and gunning absolutely go with with an autofocus zoom lens if your camera can use the autofocus capability. If your idea is to shoot narrative is to shoot short films and eventually shoot a feature film it's really hard to go past these because as soon as you put them on the lens and we'll look at some few examples the image just looks that much better considering the fact that each one of these is only four or five hundred dollars whereas you're looking at sixteen hundred dollars for this you can you know you can go a really long way with just the 35 and the 16. A movie came out last year called call me by your name which won a lot of awards it was shot just with a 35 millimeter prime lens the whole movie which the director said he did because it made it look more like fill the view of the human eye he wanted a very observational movie another critical factor is that the scene primes are faster they are all except the 16 f 1.5 whereas the zoom is 2.8 that doesn't seem like much but that's actually four times more light into the sensor so you know you can shoot for another hour on these lenses after these ones have gone away you need you know a quarter as much a light to get an exposure from this as you do from this now the depth of field on a 1.5 is minuscule I don't think many people are shooting with an 85 mil wide open because the depth of field is you know one eye will be in focus and the other I won't be so go down to some footage I shot to compare between the different sort of lens lengths versus the sharpness and the clarity and the color you get at different stops so that's my wrap up of the choice between the stills autofocus zoom and the rocanon cine primes they both have their place they're both awesome they're both great tools over the past year I've probably shot a hundred and something days with the autofocus system and probably five days with cine primes but those five days the stuff looked way better because it was more cinematic it was more elevated it just looks a lot it's a really easy way to make your footage look a lot better look a lot like a real movie whatever that means at the end of the day it's not about what's on the camera it's what's in front of the camera you know tell the best story you can light it the best you can and you know get it there get experience learn for yourself what works for you thanks for much watching guys you can find the links to these guys below in the description I will see you next time