Aiming Device for Tracking Fast Moving Objects

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Denniscasey

Well-known member
Thank you for past thoughts regarding how to do fast follow pans of 180 degrees with HMC40 mounted on tripod. I am still thinking about this. As "beginning" videographer I am getting a Manfrotto 502HD to get smoother (less shaky) pans of scenery and as discussed before to try to remove shake from hand held fast follows of racing cars (the 180 degree angle fast pans). Often filming in bright sun. For fast follow racing cars have used existing tripod with old head to experiment : using small HMC40 LCD with Hoodman sunshield is not good (hard to see monitor in sunlight even with Hoodman). With eye to EVF (like I do for handheld) I can't really follow fast moving objects over wide angles while "walking" around tripod. So still wondering about followingL

1. In bright sun would a bigger LCD mounted on camera--IndiPro Tools Pro 5 looks like a good deal--with a sunshade do the job or would bright sun still "wash out" screen so I couldn't see what I want to follow?

2. Are there other "aiming" devices (not sure what) that I am not aware of to do this job?

May be impossible task given I want to keep using the HMC40 (like its small form factor vs shoulder mount cameras), but wondered if forums experience has found a solution. Thank you.
 
I don't recall the earlier thread, but here are a few thoughts:

When fast panning, you have to consider the stobbing effect in progressive. There are worked out formulas for the rate you can pan without strobbing, and it changes with frame rate. The faster the frame rate, the faster you can pan without strobing. So your option for fast panning is 720/60, but even at this frame rate, if you do a 180 pan quickly, your footage will still strobe. In bright sun, you may want to increase shutter speed to around 1/120sec, but this something you'll need to play with to get the right balance. Note that on the hmc40, you never want your aperture to close down below f/8 at the max, and f/4 is better. Somewhere in one of the Barry Green books, there is a table from the the ASC which gives the pan rates over time which will avoid strobbing, and they are pretty slow indeed. Having said that, if you are panning on a car and the background strobes, that isn't always a deal killer, but going a full 180 with strobing, multiple times, is going to make anyone dizzy. You might want to consider backing off your subject a ways so you can better control this.

Panning is a skill which requires practice to be good at it. An external monitor will help you a lot with a HMC40 because the on cam flip out sucks, but for panning it won't make much difference if you have a sunshield on since you'll still need to rotate with the cam to see it. Have you thought about a shoulder rig? If you did that and used a evf like a small dp4, that could work quite well.

Grant
 
Thanks Grant and I have read about issues with fast panning. Actually have not noticed an issue in several auto racing events I have filmed, but with all the other action going on the background strobing may be washed out--I usually do get pretty tight on shots of cars also. I have thought about a shoulder rig and that is another good option--not as stable as tripod but better by far than handheld. Dennis
 
it is easy, just buy a cheap bullet camera and lcd, mount it on your camera.
Then at full zoom, center some target on both screen and mark a cross on the cheap lcd (plus eventally the frame size)
Now you get two picture, one at wide and one on tele.
 
nosys70 said:
it is easy, just buy a cheap bullet camera and lcd, mount it on your camera.
Then at full zoom, center some target on both screen and mark a cross on the cheap lcd (plus eventally the frame size)
Now you get two picture, one at wide and one on tele.
Click to expand...

Thank you for input--good novel thought to use security (bullet) camera as aiming device--have to think about that one. Dennis
 
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