60D video lens

[Rosh]

Hi Folks
I own a 60D and am now wanting to use it for some video work. Any suggestion on a lens. I was thinking a 18-200 as I need too zoom ect. Is this ok any feedback will be appreciated.

[JudiN]

Sorry am not very good at video recording - I have a 24-70mm L series and a 550D which seems to work well.:xmas31:

[Cyza]

with video, it is often best to use a prime lens. If possible you want to avoid zooming in with the lens, it often creates noise (the mic is very close to the lens, unless you have a shot gun mic or something) but even than moving the camera along rails, or on a dolly will produce much smoother, better results and you'll find it easier to adjust focus.

if you bought an UWA lens such as the sigma 10-20 and a longer prime lens such as an 85 or longer prime, you'd have a pretty diverse and useful range of lenses for video purposes and wouldn't spend that much money.

A "ND" neutral density filter is a really valuable thing to have at your disposal whilst filming, as most often you will want to be filming at 50FPS and even at 100 ISO that forces you to use rather high apertures which is often un wanted whilst filming.

[Bennymiata]

I do a bit of video with my 60D, and to be frank, virtually every lens in my armoury from UWA'a to my 100-400L work fine.

The trick is to learn how to focus manually, as the auto focus when videoing is very poor, so to get the best out of it, you have to do a few dry runs to get the focussing just right.
If you are zooming while you're videoing, you'll need to be able to zoom and adjust focus at the same time, otherwise every time you zoom, you'll also have to adjust focus, unless you can use a very small lens opening to get lots of DOF.
Having said that, the quality of the videos is really superb, and better than my high-end Sony HD video camera, except the video camera auto-focusses really well.

I have read that many of the new Zeiss manual focus lenses are superb for doing videos.
They have fantastic colour and detail, and are very smooth to focus as the focussing ring has a long, smooth throw.
They're not cheap however, but very good.

[flame70]

135 prime is our preferred lens

[Rosh]

Thanks guys, i will play around with my 30mm f1.4 over xmas break and see how it goes.