Focus issues

[deebee69]

I had a chance the other day of looking ,touching and feeling hands on with the new ex3.I was pleasantly pleased with the camera and thought it would be a good upgrade for our pana hvx200s.
But can any of you tell me what the focus control was doing when i looked at it.
I was inside a hotel room and had zoomed across to focus in on a tripod head about 20 feet away . I ajusted the focus a tiny bit to obtain focus on the tripod head and i mean just a slight amount.
The focus could be moved easily towards me going down the control arm of the tripod which was pointed towards me.
I couldnt believe the extra shallow depth of field i was achieving.this is all well and good but alot of the time I would need a bigger d.o.f. for our type of work.
Could users please tell me what the ex1/3 are like to manually control focus and iris etc as I didnt get much time to handle the camera as other people wanted to view.

[gabrielflorit]

Close the iris for less shallow DOF.

[deebee69]

Thanks .....but iwas in a dimmly lit hotel room and had the iris open and still had very narrow d.o.f.
do you think gain should of been applied and if so how do you find controlling d.o.f. with the ex1/ex3......easy or a nightmare?

[gabrielflorit]

Gain has nothing to do with DOF. Think of it as the video equivalent of ISO on your dSLR. If you have the lens open all the way, to f1.9, your DOF will be very shallow.

I'd say controlling DOF is fine if you take the time to set up a shot. For example, if it's dark, and you have to be open all the way, you'll get shallow DOF everytime. Bumping up the gain to +6dB will enable you to close up the iris, but then you introduce noise. So it's all a matter of what's more important to you, what variables you can play with.

[andynick]

Gain CAN affect Depth of Field.
If you apply enough gain to get the same exposure with a smaller iris setting, you will get increased depth of field. But the temptation is to increase the gain and keep the iris setting the same to get a brighter picture. It's the iris setting at a given focal length that controls Depth of Field.

And as gabrielflorit says, gain comes at a price (noise).
So it's a question of making the best of what you have, or lighting artificially (if you can).

I've used a number of video cameras over the years, and the EX1 has to be the best as far as control of focus is concerned.