Small secondary LCD monitor for Focus

Z

zimagold

Member
Here's another idea for assisting the 1st AC for focus. It becomes that much more important when working with 35mm lenses, where often the depth of field can be an inch or less.

Have a small monitor on the opposite side of the main LCD. It can be low resolution - say 320x240, but it must show the native pixels of whatever resolution you are shooting at (cropped to 320x240). A joystick or some sort of control will let you pan around the full image to select which area you want to view to achieve critical focus.

A small, low-resolution screen should be cheap to implement. If it is integrated into the camera, it avoids another mess of wire and power requirements. Freeing the camera from wires always helps with setup time for each shot. A built-in wireless video transmitter would be great as well. Sell the receivers as optional components. But I guess that's another thread...
 
although this overdose of inputs where all the unknown members also have ideas now, yours it seems to me fair.. my support
 
The thing is, a small low resolution screen will give you just that, a small low resolution image.

Red will require something much more beastly for focus pulling. Even my Marshall "7 HD monitor won't suffice.
 
Mr. Blonde,

I don't think you understand my proposal. The small, low resolution monitor would be showing a selected area of the 4k/2k image at its native resolution. Think of it as if you are looking at a small section of a giant HD monitor. The problem with pulling focus on your 7" Marshall is that it is trying to display the entire HD image on a 7" screen. For focusing, you only need to pick a small object on the plane of focus (usually the actor's eyes).

Sure, it would be great to have a 4k monitor for focusing. But it is not realistic cost-wise, and it would also have to be pretty big (40+"?) for it to be effective.

While the other high-tech ideas involving lasers/sonar to achieve autofocus are forward-thinking, I believe we're not quite ready to ditch the focus puller. When your DOF is very narrow and you have to choose between focusing on the left or the right eye (with the actor at an angle to the camera), a computer can't make that decision for you.

Cheers
 
I remember reading that the flip out monitor on the Red with the yet undisclosed proprietary focus ability will be able to be removed and mounted anywhere you want so it seems that an ac will have the ablity to place it where they want and I'm sure the operater can attach any monitor low res or high just for framing connected to one of the supplied outputs.
 
Mr. Blonde said:
Well in that case Zima, the remedy to your problem is a focus-assist feature.
Click to expand...

But as Zimagold suggests, the area being focussed on has to be easily selectable, not fixed at the centre of frame to be really useful.
 
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