[123jippo]

I need to do some video shooting soon with my K5 and I have not even tried to take video yet. help me to choose best general zoom lens for video, i have no idea about this.

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Last edited by 123jippo; 01-24-2013 at 05:12 AM.

[Tanzer]

I suspect that having a lens with an aperture ring is preferable, more so for video than for stills. In the video forum, there is a description of how to set the aperture through the body on the K-7, but I won't get a chance to try this on the K-5 until later this week. In any case it sounds a little complicated to me. I understand there are some folks who remove the ball bearing under the aperture ring to allow smooth and silent aperture adjustment during video which is something I'd eventually like to try. But I can't recall if I read this about Pentax DSLR users or other brands -- I'm just assuming that a lens w/ aperture ring will allow video shooting on a Pentax body, when set off the A setting.

My experience with video cameras in general, and my personal preference, is to use something wider than what I normally use for stills. I have a video cam that only goes down to around 29 mm (in 35 mm equivalent terms), and it is not wide enough. So a 28 mm wide end on APS-C would definitely not be wide enough. That just my preference.

Since HD video is only 2 megapixels, I suspect that the quality of lens is not so important compared to lenses use for still images. I also suspect others may flame me for saying this.

I just barely started scratching the surface of video on DSLR, so take everyone else's comments over mine. This has to be my most dubious post to date but I wanted to join the conversation.

[Tanzer]

Wow, this is a popular thread.

Anyhow, I'm happy to say that the K-7 instructions from the video forum work for fixing the aperture and other settings on the K-5. I am also pleased to report that using a lens with an aperture ring makes things easier, as I had suspected. You can change the aperture on the fly during video recording and the ISO and/or shutter speed seem to compensate, unless you otherwise lock those settings with the AE-L button.

Setting it up is still a little bit of a hack, but works. Therefore, I would recommend a lens with an aperture ring. And I will eventually remove the ball bearing click-stop from one of my zooms to use it as a dedicated video lens.

[123jippo]

So better use lens with an aperture ring for video. tnx this do make lens selection so much more easy

[Tanzer]

I guess it depends on how much direct manual control you want over video, but yes, that is what I would suggest. I still intend to play around with this more.

[Tanzer]

I spoke too soon. When using a lens off the "A" setting, it looks like you can fix the exposure using the AE-L button, but you lose the display of the shutter speed. So you can't directly tell what shutter speed you have dialed in. The whole point of the lengthy procedure in the "sticky" note on the video forum, using the user mode and live view, is to set the aperture, shutter, and ISO to fixed values. This is kind of hard to explain if you haven't tried it.

So, having an aperture ring will let you change the aperture on the fly, but you lose the ability to nail a specific shutter speed.