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Carl Zeiss Cinema Sales Manager Snehal Patel, talks about products at the Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks,Tuesday, Mar 26, 2019. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Carl Zeiss Cinema Sales Manager Snehal Patel, talks about products at the Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks,Tuesday, Mar 26, 2019. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Optics on display at the Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks,Tuesday, Mar 26, 2019. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Optics on display at the Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks,Tuesday, Mar 26, 2019. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Optics on display at the Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks,Tuesday, Mar 26, 2019. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Optics on display at the Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks,Tuesday, Mar 26, 2019. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Optics on display at the Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks,Tuesday, Mar 26, 2019. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Optics on display at the Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks,Tuesday, Mar 26, 2019. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Optics on display at the Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks,Tuesday, Mar 26, 2019. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Carl Zeiss Cinema Sales Manager Snehal Patel, talks about products at the Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks,Tuesday, Mar 26, 2019. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Carl Zeiss Cinema Sales Manager Snehal Patel, talks about products at the Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks,Tuesday, Mar 26, 2019. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Carl Zeiss Cinema Sales Manager Snehal Patel, talks about products at the Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks,Tuesday, Mar 26, 2019. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Cinematographers and camerapeople the world over speak lovingly of Zeiss lenses. Starting April 1, local film folks can see the high tech optical wonders and a lot of what they can do at the new Zeiss Cinema Lens Demo Center in Sherman Oaks.
“As you can see, it’s in a high-rise,” Snehal Patel, cinema sales manager for the German optics manufacturer, said as he led a tour Tuesday of the clean, roomy, efficiently designed and well-stocked eighth floor space at the corner of Sepulveda and Ventura boulevards. “It’s not ground-floor level, and the reason is we want this office to be both a museum of sorts, educational and then, also, a very practical space.”
It’s also built to attract cinematographers who will be influencers for sales, equipment rental houses and investors.
“When they come in the office, the first thing that they see is history,” Patel noted. “You see history of cinema, of filmmaking, and you see history of Zeiss at the same time.”
Founded by Carl Zeiss in the German city of Jena in 1846, the company began by making innovative microscopes.
One of those old devices is displayed in a glass box at the entrance to the Demo Center. So are binoculars that used the company’s optics and an old, 16 mm camera Zeiss itself manufactured. In the main room, a century-old, boxy film camera with a Zeiss lens on it proudly tilts on a tripod.
Zeiss makes optics for everything from telescopes — the Griffith Observatory’s is one — to hunting rifle scopes, still and cell phone camera lenses and just about anything else that needs to see.
Although its cinema division represents a fraction of the company’s overall business, directors of photography adore Zeiss lenses. That’s evident by the framed on-set stills and posters of movies that were shot through Zeisses that line the Demo Center’s walls: “Raging Bull,” “GoodFellas,” “Children of Men,” “The Shape of Water,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “Straight Outta Compton,” “Ida,” “Doctor Strange” . . .
Before it became famous in the movie business for the lenses it made for German film equipment manufacturer Arri, Zeiss worked with a number of French and German film camera makers.
Long glass cases display both earlier lenses Zeiss sold through Arri for 81 years and the latest, digitally complex wonders it markets under its own name now.
“We still sell three lenses through the Arri name and they’re all for Super 35 filmmaking,” Patel said of the Prime line. “Now we have our own Zeiss Cinema Primes for the high-end and the Supreme Primes; we introduced those lenses last year.”
There are Master Prime, Supreme Prime and Ultra Prime lines. Zooms, anamorphics (widescreen) and more conventional lenses are designed to match the different-sized censors of today’s high-definition digital cameras from all of the major manufacturers.
“Zeiss is a company that’s been around in the neighborhood of 100 years,” observed James Mathers, a cinematographer and founder of the Digtal Cinema Society, a nonprofit group that helps filmmakers keep up with new technology. “That’s a lot of experience to apply towards optics. There aren’t too many companies out there that have that kind of background.”
“Why is it that people like using Zeiss lenses?” Patel asked rhetorically. “It’s because we have a certain look. We’re very neutral, meaning that we don’t fall very warm or very cool. We’re precise, because we come from an optics company that deals in microscopes and interstellar telescopes. But, in cinema, you can’t just have precision, you have to have character. You don’t want it to be clinical like a microscope that’s super-clean and gives you no color or rendition or anything like that. So we make sure that, in all of our lens lines, we have character.”
The latest Zeiss lenses can also provide instant and future-available shading, distortion characteristics and other adjustment data that can be used while shooting — and for matching with later reshoots — as well as for creating post-production visual effects.
“This is the most advanced in the development of lens meta-data,” Mathers said of Zeiss’ capability.
All of this and much more technology can be demonstrated and tested on computers, monitors and other equipment at the Demo Center. It boasts a nine-seat projection theater, a full 4K-rated editing suite and a blackout-able lens projection room.
“Another thing this space is good for is education,” Patel said. “We’re going to have workshops here, we’re going to have meet-ups and social events, so people can come in and ask us. If you can come here, you can see all the different Zeiss choices and you can try everything out yourself. You can effort shoot some test footage.”
You’ll have to make an appointment to do that, however. Demo Center does not sell lenses, although its staff will be happy to tell interested parties how much they cost (range appears to be be roughly between $5,000 and $25,000).
There’s an open house Thursday, March 29 from 1 to 7 p.m. It’s filling up fast but you may still be able to register at (818) 582-4910 or by emailing snehal.patel@zeiss.com. A lot of cinematography pros are already on the list.
“We certainly are focused on the high-end cinematography and feature filmmaking community,” Tony Wisniewski, marketing manager for Zeiss Photo and Cinema Lenses, confirmed.
“But everybody starts somewhere, and certainly this is a great place for somebody to get their hands dirty and get into learning about the different optical opportunities they’ve got in the lenses. We really offer this as a playground for people who are creating motion pictures.”
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