Controlling Depth of Field

D

drose

Member
My learning curve using FCE and HMC40 is steep but coming along nicely. The artistic freedom I have with Photography is not translating well into video at this point.

It's very easy with a camera to control depth of field with the aperture and shutter settings. Wider aperture and quicker shutter speed equals greatly reduced DOF. This logic is not translating well into video unfortunately. I'm interested in creating a very narrow DOF for web based product videos. Any suggestions on how to set up the HMC40 for this purpose? Thanks.
 
The imaging chip in the HMC40 is too small to achieve shallow DOF. This is simply a weak point with consumer/prosumer cameras (any camera with 1/3" chips or smaller). The best thing you can do is to light so that you shoot with your aperture as open as possible, then move the camera back and zoom in.

Even professional cameras with 1/2" chips struggle with DOF. The bigger the chips, the more control over DOF.
 
Yeah, drose, your understanding of the process is right, but it just can't be done with a tiny-chip camera. And the HMC40's chips are 1/4". The smaller the chips, the wider-angle the lens must be, and wider-angle lenses have deeper DOF.

CMcMahon's link is the way to go if you need hyper-shallow DOF on something like an HMC40. A DOF adapter will let you get paper-thin DOF if that's what you want.
 
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