Chinese Follow Focus with hard stops

maranfilms said:
Man, can you imagine the feeling Letus must have to see the company they pay to do rnd turn around and make exact copies of all their products. Thats like your best friend sleeping with your wife. lol
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Chinese R&D at it's finest (receive and duplicate).

These are probably made during a ghost shift at the facility Letus outsourced the manufacturing to. It's nothing new or out of the ordinary, just ask the fashion industry. Guess that's the price you pay for trying to take advantage of a cheap largely unregulated foreign labor market, lol.
 
Nice thread. Does anyone know if it would be possible to add hard stops to a lens gear if a follow focus doesn't have something? I was toying with the idea of trying to make something that would work. I inherited a Cavision follow focus which is pretty decent. The baseplate and the shoulder rig were complete crap though...
 
Mine has a backlash of 3-4mm. The hard stop is a lazy implementation. It's OK on concept, but it is poorly implementation. The sound from it is unbearable. I guess it's OK for the price. But well, what do you expect from Hu Jintao :-)
 
35master said:
Mine has a backlash of 3-4mm. The hard stop is a lazy implementation. It's OK on concept, but it is poorly implementation. The sound from it is unbearable. I guess it's OK for the price. But well, what do you expect from Hu Jintao :-)
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100% disagree with the post.

I received my TrusMT T2 today, and i must say it was a great purchase! I have used RedRock, Genus, Cinevate, and a DFocus. This thing is as smooth as an RedRock, about the same weight, but is height adjustable. `this thing is machined very well, and well built. I also received an extra gear, and there is a knob holding the gear in place. Not sure if they just updated the screw to a knob. Its exactly like the Genus gear knob!
As for my ''Rig" i need an Arri style height adjustment follow focus, literally i had to squeeze the follow focus in place to make it fit. Thats how snug my rig is. But i like it that way. It suites my rig perfectly!
 
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Well there is one simple solution, make a video of your follow focus to show it in operation. Maybe there is some quality control issues? One persons perfect engineered solution can be another persons nightmare! :) But in seriousness, I bet a lot of people would benefit from seeing some hands on with these, along with sample footage from shooting with them.
 
Rick Burnett said:
Well there is one simple solution, make a video of your follow focus to show it in operation. Maybe there is some quality control issues? One persons perfect engineered solution can be another persons nightmare! :) But in seriousness, I bet a lot of people would benefit from seeing some hands on with these, along with sample footage from shooting with them.
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I will be putting it to the test tomorrow, video shoot, and shooting and documenting the zombie walk. When i return i will post a video of the footage and a run through of the follow focus itself.
 
I also bought the T2 based on what I read here. Extremely fast shipping-ordered on 5/11 and received it the morning of 5/14. Anyway I have used it for a couple of days now and I find that it works superbly well. I am totally pleased. Couldn't be happier. Any communication that I had with John Lee (owner?) was answered promptly and all questions were answered thoroughly to my satisfaction. No complaints from me.
 
I could see some focus knob "play" , approximately 3~4mm (from the test video) . Would not take a risk purchasing this unit.
 
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Today I got a the T2 Follow Focus from Trusmt ,it was shipped very fast and it is great .
Highly recommended.
 
I originally posted this in the general hardware forum, but things seem more active here (despite the trolls). Can any users of the TRUSMT tell me about the size and shape of the drive gear? I'd like to use a significantly smaller drive gear at 0.8 pitch, but TRUSMT doesn't offer them, and I can't tell which gears would fit. (If you don't understand why I'm asking, think about riding your bike uphill and shifting your front gear (pedal crank gear) into the smaller ring: you can pedal more turns and go less distance.)

I believe the TRUSMT 0.8 gear has 52 teeth. With a ratio of 1:1 and using stills zooms for video, I would like something close to 1/2 that.

With a little bit of research I discovered:
vocas has a 36 tooth drive gear option
cavision has a 28, 34 & 44
oconnor has a 35 & 43
&
Chrosziel has a 30 for series 201 & 204
& a 24 for series 206

But I can't begin to tell which might be compatible with the TRUSMT.

I'm gonna guess it's cavision, but that would only be a $20 + $400 mistake.

Would anyone who has a TRUSMT FF be willing to shoot a few pics of the drive gear and throw in a measurement or 2? From the other thread we couldn' t tell much. The cavision seemed to be the closest to the redrock model. & I know most normal folks don't have micrometers, but if you have a small drill bit set, could you tell us the largest size which will fit into the Trusmt gear hole?


thanks-djangosan
 
Don't know if this helps but a 1/64" Drill fits perfectly into the gear hole and as best I could measure the diameter of gear 1 1/2" seems pretty close.
 
Just re-read your post and saw your # of teeth at 52.......I just counted 47 teeth three times.......hope any of this info helps you.
 
Thank you, fchris. That actually helps a lot.

I'm gonna send off a few emails to the mfrs this week about spindle size, etc. BTW how does the drive gear lock onto the spindle? Is there a little set-screw or allen screw that locks it onto the spindle, or is it something else?

FWIW, if you're wondering why I want to switch the drive gear out to a smaller one, (I'm so tired right now I can't remember where we were in this thread) it's to make the FF work better with SLR zooms. Most if not all of the FF mfrs are copying cine style follow focuses for their inspiration. (It's like they'd rather look pro than work pro.) Here's the problem: most cine lenses have focus rotations of more than 240 degrees, but modern SLR zooms have a ridiculously shorter focus rotation, often less than 60 degrees--only one quarter as far. So if you want your FF to work with SLR zooms like it does with cine lenses, you need a drive gear with 1/4 the teeth!

I don't personally feel I need all that precision. But half as much would be a huge benefit. So for me with a 1:1 FF and an SLR zoom, I think 24 teeth might be a kind of a sweet spot.*

*I also did the math from the other direction, in terms of number of teeth turned. But I'm kind of tired tonight from a long shoot day, so PM me if you want to discuss that. It's fascinatingly mundane and pretty much comes to the same conclusion.

-djangosan
 
The FF is working so well that I don't want to take it apart until I have to, however the extra screws are all Allen and kit comes with two different size Allen wrenches so I assume that's how the drive gear locks onto the spindle. Hope this helps too.
 
35master said:
Mine has a backlash of 3-4mm. The hard stop is a lazy implementation. It's OK on concept, but it is poorly implementation. The sound from it is unbearable. I guess it's OK for the price. But well, what do you expect from Hu Jintao :-)
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Rick Burnett said:
Well there is one simple solution, make a video of your follow focus to show it in operation. Maybe there is some quality control issues? One persons perfect engineered solution can be another persons nightmare! :) But in seriousness, I bet a lot of people would benefit from seeing some hands on with these, along with sample footage from shooting with them.
Click to expand...

I think we're still waiting for a video from 35master. I would be interested to see why it is unbearable.
 
a friend of mine got this FF . got a chance to compare it with shoot35. Shoot35 is professional quality device and puts this c$ap into shame no matter how many hard stops it has.
 
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