Best Budget step-up ring for Cine-Modding your vintage lenses

 You own multiple vintage lenses, but undoubtedly you have come across the issue that they don’t have the same filter thread and buying different sizes of filters can be quite expensive.

So it's better to buy a single large filter and just use step up rings. There are many kinds of step up rings, but my preferred choice is 80mm O.D. Rings, the O.D. stands  for outer diameter of the ring. And these 80mm O.D. rings can be found on Amazon for 18 bucks, links in the description below.

Each of these lenses of mine are fitted with an 80mm O.D. ring and it has 3 major benefits: The step up ring is a bit extended, so it protects the front of your lens from bumping into things. It not only unifies each lens to have the same 77mm filter thread but also the same 80mm outer diameter as normal step up rings don’t have a uniform outer diameter.

And you can get these 80mm metal caps to keep you lens safe as these caps are just a snug fit, they hold on to the step up rings quite well and don't pop off that easily compared to your standard clip on lens caps. 

Though there are also O.D. rings with larger outer diameters like 95mm and 114mm, which are the more standard sizes for matte boxes to clamp on. But will also make your lenses a lot wider and take up a lot more space in your lens case. While the 80 mm outer diameter step up rings still keep the lenses compact and allow you to fit much more lenses in one case.

To directly fit a matte box onto the 80 mm O.D. rings, I have 3D printed a matte box clamp ring that fits into the 95mm clamp of my Smallrig mini matte box and now I am able to quickly
move my matte box from one lens to the other without needing to screw on the standard clamp rings from Smallrig. Making my work a lot easier during lens swaps.

80mm O.D. Ring - https://amzn.to/4l9Upoq
Tilta Gear Ring - https://amzn.to/3FNmXEk
Smallrig Mini Matte Box - https://amzn.to/41UrXzG
3D Adapter ring - https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5366669