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ARRI Zeiss Master Prime: Optical Mastery of Super 35mm
ARRI, Zeiss, & Cine Visuals Present: ARRI Zeiss Master Primes
Cinematic Heritage
At the turn of the millennia the world of filmmaking was experiencing a major shift. Visual Effects and the Digital Intermediate aka VFX and DI. However, it was incredibly difficult and time consuming for VFX artists in those days to work with the imperfections of lenses. Lenses with many characteristics and aberrations or nonlinear bends such as anamorphics were terrors – and expensive to the studios. Now more than ever, technical perfection in glass was needed in order to achieve the necessary look. Huge blockbuster movies such as “The Lord of the Rings Trilogy” utilized traditionally sharp lenses such as the ARRI Zeiss Ultra Primes due to the heavy usage of VFX (for its time).
By 2004, ARRI and Zeiss came together once more to improve even further on their designs. In 2005 at the NAB convention, they released the ARRI Zeiss Master Primes. These lenses would come to be known as the most technically perfect lenses ever crafted. Aberrations, distortions, and flaring were minimized and contained. Focus was made to be perfect. But optical perfection in a technical sense was not their only ambition – they wanted the lens to be a fast T1.3 across the entire set, something that an entire set of lenses designed for motion picture specifically had never achieved.
Image Fidelity & Focus
One of the key features of the ARRI Zeiss Master Primes is their careful attention to focus. Breathing is imperceptible. Focus is smooth and constant from one end of the focal plane to the other. Master Primes find that balance between sharp and resolute vs soft and organic. This is evident when capturing people. Skin tones feel smooth and gentle, yet clear and focused. Zeiss lenses typically lean cooler in their tonality. Master Primes follow suit with this by keeping shadows cooler while rendering skin tones neutral with a slight warm bent in mid-tones. Color is rendered evenly across the image plane, giving an even and excellent appearance for the image. A beautiful balance designed for modern workflows with VFX and DI so that images can really be precisely crafted in the color grade. Smart and thinking ahead, making them suitable for use with show-LUTs. Going further, these lenses have incredible control over chromatic aberration. From edge-to-edge of the frame, focus is sharp and even. The slightest focus falloff from the center to the edges adds a touch of cinematic character while making every part of the frame usable for placing subjects that need to be sharp.
Handling & Adaptability
The Master Primes vary in their weights but range from 4.80 lbs to 8.80 lbs with an average of a little over 5 lbs across the set. Fourteen of the sixteen lenses in the series have the same exact length of exactly 6”. The other four are the 12mm, 14mm, 135mm, and 150mm with lengths of 7.80”, 6.80”, 6.80”, and 8.30”. In essence, across a sixteen lens set there are only four lengths, with fourteen primes sharing a length of 6”, two sharing a length of 6.80”, and then one 7.80” as well as one 8.30”. Additionally, these outliers are at the edges of the set in the most extreme wide and telephoto ends. As far as front diameter, every focal length boasts a convenient size of 114mm with the 12mm as an exception with 156mm. Size alone, the achievement of this uniformity would be something worth awe. However, that is only one aspect of these ergonomic and efficient lenses. In order to increase efficiency, focus rings are positioned in the same places for easy and quick camera adjustments. With buttery smooth movement, most focal lengths have a focus rotation of 270º with some lenses having even longer rotations such as the 40mm with a 340º rotation. Focus pulling will be smooth and precise as a result.
Image Circle
Designed for an area when most serious motion picture films shot on film with just the very beginning of digital cinema emerging, S35mm remained the standard of the day and thus these lenses were designed with this in mind. In order to cover traditional S35mm film, a minimum diagonal image circle needed is 31.1mm. Each of the ARRI Zeiss Master Primes have an image circle of 31.14mm, which is a perfect fit for S35mm image planes. These lenses, though designed for traditional motion picture film, pair excellently with the ARRI Alexa35, ARRI Alexa Mini, RED Helium amongst other S35mm digital sensors. When the original ARRI Alexa (now nicknamed the Alexa Classic) came out, the Master Primes and the Alexa Classic were used in tandem extensively. In cropped sensor modes, these lenses still work excellently with Full Frame sensors such as the Sony Venice. As it was set out to be, the Master Primes are designed to be the technical perfection of optics for S35mm image plane sizes.
Flare & Bokeh
Flares are simple, refined, and elegant. Large, angelic halation emanates from the light source. Gentle falloff from the light source echoes down through the frame. Aberrations are minimal with only the slightest and most contained harsh flares. When it comes to bokeh, the ARRI Zeiss Master Primes have some of the most immaculate amongst glass. Large, bubbly, and translucent. When the bokeh stacks on each other the overlap increases the opaque nature in that area, creating a beautiful effect. Sometimes, modern sharp lenses have clinical bokeh, but the Master Primes have the most gentle swirl in the image. Bokeh has subtle crescenting that gives the image character without drawing any attention to itself, keeping the comatic aberration in a controlled but artistic state.
These lenses are available for rent at Cine Visuals. For inquiries or testing appointments email info@cinevisuals.com or call (323) 244-2552.