auto focus

[Chunter]

Short and sharp question. do you guys focus every flight or set focus on a far away distance and leave it be forever?
I ask because i forgot to click the screen today to focus ( was not completely focused so had last flights focus) and for the life of me never remember having to do it on my mavic 2 pro, or i set it and forgot it.

 

[CanadaDrone]

You never really want to use autofocus on a drone. Just set manual focus once and never touch it again.

With few exceptions, everything from about 3ft to infinity will be in focus due to the tiny image sensors and typical subject distances associated with drone photography. If you add autofocus to that equation, there are no advantages, only downsides.

Autofocus is just going to ruin your footage if/when it hunts for focus mid-shot. Contrast-based autofocus (the type the most drones use) is literally a guess & check algorithm, which is why you see the hunting behavior as it determines ideal focus by looking for the highest possible contrast.

On my M2P for example, I haven't touched the focus since the day I bought it in 2018 and I have no reason to ever change that. Same deal for the Mini 3 Pro. You'll save yourself lots of headaches by just using focus peaking to set MF and leaving it alone.

 

[pointy]

You never really want to use autofocus on a drone. Just set manual focus once and never touch it again.

With few exceptions, everything from about 3ft to infinity will be in focus due to the tiny image sensors and typical subject distances associated with drone photography. If you add autofocus to that equation, there are no advantages, only downsides.

Autofocus is just going to ruin your footage if/when it hunts for focus mid-shot. Contrast-based autofocus (the type the most drones use) is literally a guess & check algorithm, which is why you see the hunting behavior as it determines ideal focus by looking for the highest possible contrast.

On my M2P for example, I haven't touched the focus since the day I bought it in 2018 and I have no reason to ever change that. Same deal for the Mini 3 Pro. You'll save yourself lots of headaches by just using focus peaking to set MF and leaving it alone.

Is there a link to a write-up of using focus peaking to set manual focus procedure, that you could share?

 

[MS Coast]

You never really want to use autofocus on a drone. Just set manual focus once and never touch it again.

With few exceptions, everything from about 3ft to infinity will be in focus due to the tiny image sensors and typical subject distances associated with drone photography. If you add autofocus to that equation, there are no advantages, only downsides.

Autofocus is just going to ruin your footage if/when it hunts for focus mid-shot. Contrast-based autofocus (the type the most drones use) is literally a guess & check algorithm, which is why you see the hunting behavior as it determines ideal focus by looking for the highest possible contrast.

On my M2P for example, I haven't touched the focus since the day I bought it in 2018 and I have no reason to ever change that. Same deal for the Mini 3 Pro. You'll save yourself lots of headaches by just using focus peaking to set MF and leaving it alone.

I agree about manual focus being preferred. What's the advantage of enabling focus peaking if you're not adjusting focus? It certainly clutters up the screen.

 

[CanadaDrone]

I agree about manual focus being preferred. What's the advantage of enabling focus peaking if you're not adjusting focus? It certainly clutters up the screen.

It's just to set and confirm the initial focus, sorry that probably wasn't clear from what I originally wrote. I imagine most people turn it off after that - I certainly do. It also helps people who may not trust this method who may be new to photography/videography to get comfort that literally everything is going to be in focus 99% of the time.

 

[CanadaDrone]

Is there a link to a write-up of using focus peaking to set manual focus procedure, that you could share?

There isn't much to do - on the M3P, enable focus peaking in the menu, and tap the "AF" symbol on the screen to change it to "MF". Point the drone at something in the distance and adjust if necessary, but you'll probably find that already everything is in focus (denoted by red lines around all the edges of detail in the image unless you have changed your peaking color to something else). You'll probably want to disable focus peaking after as it can be distracting, but that is of course up to you.

Same process on other drones too like the M2P.

Really, focus peaking is of limited use on drones because it's so easy to get everything in focus anyway, but it can help briefly in some scenarios. In other areas of 'traditional' photography, focus peaking can be extremely useful. For example if you were using a manual focus lens on a modern camera for portraiture, or doing something with very shallow depth of field such as macro photography, and you want to have very precise control over the plane of focus. At 300ft in the air it's just going to confirm for you that everything in the frame is in fact in focus.

 

[Chunter]

Noice. thx. Gonna have to play with manual focus then. Will be a while lol, i'm getting the " you've got that bloody expensive drone and now you want more money for batteries and filter" vibe from the wife

 

[Bussty]

I have been caught a couple of times now with the drone on the ground and focus peaking showing things 15-20m away being in focus and thinking "great" but when I have gone up and taken pics retaining that ground "focused" state the drone hasn't been sharp. Now religiously I keep the drone in AF mode and just before I take a picture I tap the screen to focus then switch to Manual Focus which effectively locks in that focus point. Never have any issues when I use that method. I think a few people have taken images with focus not correctly set and mentioned on forums as being a poor quality lens but I think it's not bad.

 

[Chunter]

Sorry to "revive" this thread i just want to get focus peaking clear in my head and see if i understand it.

If, lets say, im going to film a house with focus peaking on high and the building edges are red that means the house is in focus? Then if i swap to a landscape focus on the horizon (giving a red line) then that's basically infinity focus?
If i then swap to af after setting infinity will the camera stay focus permanently?

Even though i've had mp1 and mp2 i've never ever dabbled with manual focus but i fear i'm going to have to on this m3p as the auto focus is pretty meh.


Just basically trying to understand get more info about it.

cheers.