The Must-Have Lens Filters for Filmmaking

Lens filters in filmmaking are critical when you’re chasing a truly cinematic aesthetic, and when you’re trying to protect your equipment. Even if you’re an expert colourist and savvy with post-production, getting things right in front of the lens is what matters most in traditional filmmaking. Lens filters can help to avoid clipped highlights, reduce unwanted digital noise, and overall, save you time in post-production.

Lens filters serve a range of practical and creative functions that can improve the quality and the mood of your footage even before you begin editing. UV, ND, CPL, IR — you may have seen some of these strange abbreviations. But what do they stand for?

While there are endless options out there, below are what we consider the fundamental must-have lens filters for filmmaking.

Neutral Density (ND) filters are a staple for any videographer. Essentially, ND filters are made of tinted glass. When placed over the front of your lens, the image will darken. This allows you to have greater control over your exposure without having to make any compensations to shutter speed, aperture or ISO.

One hallmark of cinematography is a shallow depth of field, but this can be hard to achieve in bright conditions. An ND filter is like a set of sunglasses, bringing the overall exposure down and allowing you to shoot a scene with a wide aperture setting as a priority. Or in other terms, allowing you to shoot longer exposures in bright light.

Take control with long exposure and motion blur techniques with ND filters. Find yours here.

UV camera filters are a basic but crucial addition to your filmmaking gear. These handy filters reduce the haze of excess UV light and its bluish colour cast to produce clearer and sharper footage. As an aspiring filmmaker, it’s good practice to have a UV filter on at all times. You may not require all the bells and whistles of other creative filters, but this small investment will protect the glass surface of your much greater investment, the lens, from scratches or other marks.

Urth UV filters are available in 37 to 95mm diameters here.

When filmmaking outdoors, you’re at the mercy of the sun. Polarizing filters work similarly to ND filters to reduce glare but they don’t darken the entire image. Instead, polarizing filters will recover detail in the blown-out, highlight-prone parts of your image. They work particularly well when working in broad daylight or harsh morning or afternoon conditions, boosting vividness and increasing contrast. Polarizing filters also work really well to cut reflections, the same way polarized sunglasses help you see through the glare of the water’s surface.

Check out Urth CPLs here.

There are a number of reasons why a filmmaker should buy a diffusion filter. Firstly, camera technology is so advanced these days that your footage can appear overly sharp. That digital edge is easily cut with a diffusion filter, which softens the pixels and gives the light in your shot a nice and subtle glow. This ethereal finish renders your footage closer to the golden age of cinema of film photography with an overall dream-like effect.

Urth diffusion filters come in strengths of ¼ and 1/8 . See the range here.

These are just four of many lens filters for filmmaking. As a filmmaker, it’s important to experiment with different filters to see what you can achieve in camera before taking your footage into post-production. Like anything, practice makes perfect. Understanding what each lens filter does and how it can aid your creative process and results is the only way to improve your filmmaking from both a functional and aesthetic standpoint.