Can someone help me, please?

R

Ruby Tuesday

Active member
I'm editing footage from a film that was shot with the DVX-100A in 30fps. I don't know what the cameraman did, but the footage keeps going in-and-out of focus. It's perfectly focused for several seconds, then get slightly blurry for several seconds, back and forth like that. I've never seen anything like it. Does anyone know how to fix this in Vegas so it stays in focus?
 
If it is actually going out of focus, there isn't anything you can do in post to fix it. Are you really sure the focus is changing?
 
did they have autofocus on? - the autofocus really sucks, and I can easily se that being the problem. Was there alot of movement in the shots where the problem occurs, if there isnt, then that probably isnt the AF.
 
how do you intend to use the footage? If you're using it online at small sizes and the drop out in focus isn't huge, you can probably get away with it. But if it's for broadcast or bigger... you're basically faced with a reshoot :undecided
 
Sharpening effect can help you to a certain extend.
I had a similar problem, but the difference is that the footage I edited was out of focus for only couple of seconds. I applied a sharpening effect (not too much 'cause it looks very artificial) only on "out of focus" part of the clip and the result was satisfactory.
Hope this helps!
 
Thank you all for your responses.

Yes, I thought I might have to use the sharpening plug in, since it's not for just online viewing. It'll be painstaking work, focusing only the sections where it goes in-an-out, but I have to do it. I don't think it was the auto-focus because it happens even where there's no movement onscreen, so it must be something else.

One question for "khmuse" though. Why do you ask if the focus is really changing? What else could give it that pulsing fuzziness? Thank you.
 
If the focus does change, there's little you can do....

Did you recapture the footage, to verify if there was a problem with the capture?
 
It's in the original footage, I viewed it directly from the camera to my tv.

Do you think trying that sharpening techniqe for the places where it pulses out of focus, like "darmanb" suggested, would work, or would it look too unnatural?
 
In my opinion, trying to sharpen out of focus footage in hopes of matching clean footage.....it's going to look bad.

Capture an out of focus clip to your computer, and see if it's still bad.

You don't say if the footage is bad on the LCD, and if it occurs at exactly the same places every time, or varies in the time code.
 
Yes, it's the same on the monitor and in the exact places every time. Here's the really weird part. I've got the whole scene edited already, mainly because I didn't see the out-of-focus before (in the footage or the timeline.) But, now, it's clearly there. At first, I thought it might be something with Vegas (like a Preferences or Properties change I inadvertently made), but it's on the original footage too. I just saw it. I can't believe my vision got better since then, but it must have. Thing is, I showed the footage and the timeline to some other people and they never saw the focus problem then either. But it's there now. I'm baffled.
 
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