Panasonic G7 Video Help for Work!

Hi

I see from your last two posts you tried both the face focusing and manual focusing.

In my case, my subject tended to move around in their chair, often leaning in for a while then settling back.   Also they were very animated with their hands.  The only thing I noticed was the occasional slow to re-focus on bigger movements.   I'm not sure why it would seem to hunt for every little movement.   The question to me is, when you view the video, does he focus seem to distract or is it doing what it needs to do?

I've only done two shoots resulting in a total of 22 six or so minute videos so I'm sure there's more for me to learn and not all my questions are answered fully for myself yet.  I have only used Face detection, been happy with it and not tried manual focus.  I did do multi-camera and I've learned how to improve after both shoots.

I think there's a good and bad about manual focus in this interview scenario:

The Good:  If your depth of field is sufficient then for minor movement your subject should remain in focus.

The Bad:  You have to nail the focus and absolutely make sure that the tripod doesn't move and your subject does not shift their chair or position to move too far out of the plane of focus.  If they move too far you don't catch it the rest will be out of focus unless they move back into the plane of focus and DOF region.

Play around with this DOF Simulator site to get a feel for your lens and your distance from the subject to frame the shot to assure yourself that you will have enough DOF, especially if you are going to go with Manual focus.  If you have enough light you can stop down to get more DOF.

Here's what might be hard for you to balance which in turn brings you back to the DOF issue above

• The wider the focal length and the more distance you have
  • the greater the DOF   (good for what you want here)
  • the wider the shot which means more of the background (probably not good for what you want)

So the tighter the shot on your Subject the more you need to open up the Aperture to assure DOF.   If you are doing Manual focus then this is a critical set of choices.   If you are doing Face Detection then your DOF essentially travels with your subject (given this is a seated situation)

Mark