Focus Techniques Discussion

RoyEP3 · Apr 19, 2017

Hi. I wasn't getting a lot of help in the Mavic Facebook groups. Seems like they're more interested in dressing up their Mavics and making silly poses. End rant.

Anyway, I was trying to create this moving shot where I start from a closeup and pull back. I want the car to be in focus at first, and then the landscape after it pulls back. How would you go about doing this? I found that if I did touch to focus, it "searches" for the focus and ruins the shot.

Here is the sample:

In this shot, I left the focus on the closeup and did not adjust focus as it pulled away. How would you accomplish this shot?

HFMan · Apr 19, 2017

Do it just like any cinematographer would do it- use manual focus... You might want to enable peak detection to tell when you have the landscape in focus.

RoyEP3 · Apr 19, 2017

I agree with manual focus being the right way, but it's so dumb how they have a virtual wheel on the screen with no marks to tell you how far or close you are to infinity. You have to just scroll and hope you land on a setting that's focused.

I wish it was a bar like phone cameras where you can see where the focus point is on that bar.

geigy · Apr 19, 2017

Yes, being able to lock on infinity, of all things, seems pretty basic. I can understand why they would not want to rely on a mechanical stop, but the software could provide the equivalent functionality. Also, they have the flower and infinity icons reversed! LOL.

Litchi appears to be not much better, though I have not checked that software out carefully.

If I had to do the shot, I would get a large tablet, and practice with manual focus until I could hit it spot on. Another idea would be to do it in post. Use a tilt-shift effect, a masked blur effect on the background and fade to the more in-focus image when you pull back.

RoyEP3 · Apr 20, 2017

I noticed the mislabeling of the Macro/Infinity too. Sad.. This is supposed to be a "pro" device.

I'll just take my chances with the manual mode. Thanks.