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Lens

Introduction

The goal is to setup a lens control in parallel of the camera control.

Use case:

  • when the camera cannot control the lens
  • the lens is not compatible (FX9 + cabrio lens) with the camera

When changing:

  • iris/zoom/focus, we will send it to the lens
  • shading, we will send it to the camera and it is transparent for the vision engineer on the RCP.

Lens compatibility

Specialty : B4 ENG

For specialty and robotic application, you can have a look at this guide

Cine/Photo lens

If you have a motorised cinema lens, you can follow this guide

Compatible with:

  • Canon : using 12P port (digital)
  • Fujinon : using 20P or 12P (digital)
  • CMotion : using 12P port (ditial)

If you have a Canon photo lens (18-80 mm), it is motorised, but has only the 20P analog port that only allows control of zoom/focus. If you want remote iris control, you need to use external motor (CMotion, Tilta, ARRI, etc.)

Prime lens/Non motorised lens or robotics

The same way we control the lens, we can control external motors:

  • CMotion : follow this guide
  • Tilta : follow this guide
note

On this picture, you see a Canon 17-120 mm, that is normally controllable using 12P digital connector. But this port was already used by the ARRI AGITO operator (for zoom/focus). So here, they used a tilta motor to get iris control from the RCP in the CCU room.

Cables

note

As lenses are critical, we recommend to use RIO-live instead of CI0.

CI0 is a slave device and if you remove the ethernet cable, the lens is not controlled anymore and will then "close" (iris).

While a RIO-live has all the protocols builtin and can control the lens on its own without any ethernet/RCP. It also allows to plug handles, USB accessories, etc.