A new full-frame powerhouse has emerged: the Cooke S8/i Primes are a “lighter, faster, smarter” addition to Cooke’s lineup of highly-coveted cinema lenses, built for not just our present large-format era, but for the future of filmmaking as we know it. 

The S8/i’s are a best-of-all-worlds combination of Cooke’s spherical lenses so far. Small like the S4’s, fast like the S5’s, full-frame like the S7’s, and beautiful like all of them. Across the entire set, you will find a T1.4 maximum aperture, a gorgeous scratch resistant hard anodised finish, and a well-balanced weight-to-size ratio that makes these lenses a pleasure to operate with. 

Perhaps most importantly to Directors of Photography, though, the S8/i’s produce a truly stunning image; a new (but familiar) evolution of that ultra-pleasing, painterly quality that filmmakers have come to know as “The Cooke Look”. 

Under the Hood

Inside the lenses there are also some exciting developments with Cooke’s “i” technology. Through built-in contacts, users can now extract metadata on not just focus and iris position, but also high-precision distortion and shading measurements that update in real time, as well as “motion inertial data”. 

As of the time of writing very little is known for certain, but if our speculation is correct, this motion data will include real-time tilt, pan, roll, and XYZ positional measurements, which can be used both for traditional VFX workflows where camera movement is matched in post-production as well as for the exciting new frontier that is In-Camera VFX, where CG environments are displayed on an LED wall and camera movement is tracked in real time with software like Unreal Engine.