AutoFocus or Infinity?

Chris Light

Chris Light

Veteran
I have run into the obvious problems with autofocus, but then i would dial up Infinity focus, and i'm running into troubles with soft, almost out-of-focus footage.

What i'm getting at, is there are times when i want to walk around my subject/s and have everything be in focus, deep DOF, whatever the case. Since i haven't experimented with any other shooting mode besides Manual, should I be? The other modes make me feel, well, not in control haha, but I'm willing to try.

hopefully this doesn't come off as a lazy question. I'm an experienced A1 user, and I prefer to stay in Manual mode. Any insight would go a long way for me. Thanks for your time.

Chris:Drogar-Smoke(DBG):
 
Try normal auto-focus, it' s a Thru The Lens autofocus, slower than IAF. Some people use it with wide angle lens + steadicam to maintain focus while moving.
 
The infinity mark is used to focus on images very far in the distance. I would imagine setting your camera to infinity and recording subjects near you would result in terribly out of focus shots.

If I'm tracking subjects with a steadicam, which is similiar to what you are doing, I use normal auto focus, Like jleo said above, or set my focus to a fixed distance, say 6 feet, and try to maintain that distance throughout my shot. I think the auto focus on the A1 is quite good in most situations.
 
Sacksnack said:
The infinity mark is used to focus on images very far in the distance. I would imagine setting your camera to infinity and recording subjects near you would result in terribly out of focus shots.

If I'm tracking subjects with a steadicam, which is similiar to what you are doing, I use normal auto focus, Like jleo said above, or set my focus to a fixed distance, say 6 feet, and try to maintain that distance throughout my shot. I think the auto focus on the A1 is quite good in most situations.
Click to expand...


that's exactly the advice i was looking for...i was getting very soft results with Infinity (yet, i was thinking that Infinity would bring everything in focus, as the name would suggest) i guess that was a very amateur assumption, and since the IAF was hyped as a bit of a miracle in the A1, it was an easy assumption to make. thanks for your input. while i like the idea of maintaining a relatively fixed distance from my subject while handheld/steadicam, it's just not practical to me, since i'm run-n-gun, so i'll be employing Normal AF hoping my shots stay sharp within reason.

appreciated!

Chris
 
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