alt Hacker NewsThis is only true for photography.
For some reason, cinema lenses are still - for the most part - purely mechanical. For film and TV, most camera operators still focus manually - often via gears attached externally to the lens.
Coming from modern photography, manual focusing is inconvenient and difficult to learn. But there's something very old-school cool about cine lenses. They feel great.
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Autofocus is very nice for photos, especially when it works.
Autofocus in moving pictures isn't so great. It might be nice when you're not filming, but while filming, a focus change should really be intentional; auto focus isn't that. Might depend on what you're filming though.
Indeed! I've had the privilege and honor of collimating a Cooke s4i. It's a thing of beauty, joy forever.
I think in cine it’s a lot more important to have smooth focus and to be able to control the focus speed, hence the MF lenses