InfraRED laser to measure Focus distance

[Forrest Schultz]

with an infrared laser mounted on the front of the camera you could get a perfect focus of whatever the subject is that you are pointing at. The laser would be able to determine subject distance. Asumming you are doing automatic in camera focus.

The reason for infrared is that it is not visible to the human eye nor should it be to a sensor that has a IR filter over it. that way, the laser can always be on either to give you reference distances or to keep your subject in focus. You should also be able to conrtol the direction of the infrared dot. In a mointer or viewfinder, you would need a screen that shows you where the dot is by having an infrared sensor mounted with the camera. that way, it doesnt mess up your mysterium sensor capiblities.

ps, i cant afford RED right now, id love to, but leave me out of the 1000 thing. i just hope this might spark some ideas.

[CVB]

Forrest, They make an ultrasonic version that does that but its like $10K I think. We are currently working on a laser ranger system that takes a frame pulse from the camera and interlaces the laser between the imaging of the frames. So it basically flashes really fast, the camera operator can see it but the camera doesn't, kinda cool if you ask me :)

[taubkin]

There's a problem with this idea. It gives you distances to whatever the camera is pointed at. But if you're an AC, you want to know distances of thing the camera isn't poining at, so you can set marks and references. Mos of the time, you only do your focus marks after the framing is locked down, so that would be as useful as autofocus...

[CVB]

I guess I wasn't clear on what I meant... We're making a laser rangefinder that has a sensor that detects the orientation relative to the camera. So basically the AC points it at what he wants to focus to then hits a button to get the range and the system back calculates to find the distance from the focal plane of the camera to the target (AKA actor etc). The sensor doesn't necessarily have to be attached tot he camera. Did that make it more confusing? - I'm not much of a writer :)

[taubkin]

Oh, okay... I get it! I was reffering to the first post...

[Emanuel]

There is a lot of interesting suggestions around focus issue. Another possible winner I hope.