I've been using the HVX a couple of times now and I think its auto focus is, compared to the DVX, really slow and sometimes even innacurate - is this a fact, or is our HVX broken maybe and we should get it repaired?
I know auto focus is not the most professional feature, but lacking a real focus weel and a pro viewfinder, I sometimes find the auto focus pretty helpful.
I was doing this shot where the talent was like 15 meters away from me, walking towards me talking into her microphone. What I wanted to do was follow her movement with a slow zoom so she'd be half-close in the beginning as well as in the end of her movement. In my opinion it'd be near impossible to focus that manually with a HVX or DVX while maintaining a steady, slow zoom.
Now, the HVX even had problems finding focus before the movement started. It was bright daylight, the talent was like 15 meters away, zoomed in to half-close, right in the middle of the frame - the auto focus needed like 10 seconds to decide that the distance wasn't 45 meters... and then, as soon as my talent started to walk out of the focussed range, it needed another at least 2 seconds to follow-focus.
On a shoot today I found that in low-light surroundings the auto focus of the HVX doesn't seem to work at all - for anything more than 2 meters away it just sets itself to infinite - pretty bad when you're working with an open iris. I was in a 15x30 meters bar that was supposed to look like a western saloon. So, not much light, my settings were: iris open, 9dB gain plus a 50W camera lamp with and without 216 WD, depending on if I was close or making a wide shot.
I'm not sure but I think the DVX auto focus even works under these circumstances.
I didn't need the auto focus for most of it, but once or twice where I wanted to pan from a very close object into the room it really sucked.
I know auto focus is not the most professional feature, but lacking a real focus weel and a pro viewfinder, I sometimes find the auto focus pretty helpful.
I was doing this shot where the talent was like 15 meters away from me, walking towards me talking into her microphone. What I wanted to do was follow her movement with a slow zoom so she'd be half-close in the beginning as well as in the end of her movement. In my opinion it'd be near impossible to focus that manually with a HVX or DVX while maintaining a steady, slow zoom.
Now, the HVX even had problems finding focus before the movement started. It was bright daylight, the talent was like 15 meters away, zoomed in to half-close, right in the middle of the frame - the auto focus needed like 10 seconds to decide that the distance wasn't 45 meters... and then, as soon as my talent started to walk out of the focussed range, it needed another at least 2 seconds to follow-focus.
On a shoot today I found that in low-light surroundings the auto focus of the HVX doesn't seem to work at all - for anything more than 2 meters away it just sets itself to infinite - pretty bad when you're working with an open iris. I was in a 15x30 meters bar that was supposed to look like a western saloon. So, not much light, my settings were: iris open, 9dB gain plus a 50W camera lamp with and without 216 WD, depending on if I was close or making a wide shot.
I'm not sure but I think the DVX auto focus even works under these circumstances.
I didn't need the auto focus for most of it, but once or twice where I wanted to pan from a very close object into the room it really sucked.
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