Rack Focus???

G

GrindedDown

Member
Hello everybody.

I was wondering if anyone can share their experience performing a rack focus with practical application and how they did it with the HVX.

The large depth-of-field makes it a lot harder than shooting with 16mm cameras.

I am very new to the HVX so any help or tips would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance
 
Last edited:
Hi GrindedDown,

Um, rackfocus takes a bit of practice till you are fimiliar with your camera's focus ring (I don't have a follow focus device). But let's start here. on your LCD you have a focus distance displaying, so a sure way of doing it, is to take a tape measure and measure out the distance from the camera to focus point 1 and point 2. That way you can know exactly how much to turn the focus ring, cause you're watching the focus distance on the LCD.

Rehearse it once or twice till you get it right and then "ACTION", record your shot.

Cheers,
Derrick
 
There are some hardware options that can help with this; BeBob makes the "FOXI" an electronic, repeatable follow-focus device with marker areas, Zacuto makes 2-types of focus rings that can be used with either the Petroff or Chroziel FF controls and Varizoom makes the ROCK PZFI which also has a manual focus knob on the controller, but it's not the repeatable, follow-focus type.
 
http://stream1.innfo.tv/webvideo/flashfilms/aopen.html

there are 2 rackfocus in the first 40 seconds.
one to then blue skier, one through a fence. not what you expect for a typical rackfocus, but same procedure. I had about 4 seconds for each, before the action happened.
The tip with the metering is spot on. I use focus assist on both spots and concentrate on the distance. the problem with the HVX is the long range the focus-ring needs to travel. you can hardly do it with one movement, because it goes almost all around. But it can be done ;-)
 
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