Can Canon AF do real time tracking of objects (not just faces,eyes,cars,animals etc)?

Leigh A. Wax wrote:

Laqup wrote:

I gave you perfectly fine use cases where this methods can be handy and all you can do is ramble about landscapes and interpeting text so that fit your narrative? No comment at all to the examples shown in the video? Okay thanks for the discussion.

The OP's primary point of this thread was how favorable this method was for Landscape photography, and nothing else, which he stated more than once, and that's what the follow up discussion was based upon; not weather the method is useful for any other given situation, as it most likely is!

Maybe you don't realise this, but a discussion can branch out. In this branch of the discussion I explained the usefullness for OTHER use cases and even gave detailed examples and even demo videos and asked one of the other forum members to think outside the box. Why do you think we should still stick to LANDSCAPES in this branch of the discussion?

For sure we could open another thread, but as already stated this forum does not seem to be aimed at in-depth technological discussions, so I don't see any benefits to do this. Btw, R8 looks like a great backup camera, will probably buy one just for fun and do some testing myself. Unfortunately in the DPReviewTV video the tracking algo was drifting again, even with the latest option to focus only on detected subjects only, which is not a good sign (11:58 ). Canon still has to do a lot of catching up to do here. (maybe only in video mode? :-))

As a bonus a reminder to help you understand why I replied in the way I did:

Laqup wrote:

Try to think a bit outside the box. You are focusing very much on landscapes and "still lives".

The method the author describes is useful in general, without the focus on landscape.[...]

Just to give an example: Imagine a scene where you are shooting portraits. Your camera is not static / on a tripod but you are moving freely around. You have a thin DOF and snap away happily with subject/eye detection. Suddenly you see the opportunity to focus on a different detail in the scene (e.g. the person holding some flowers or some details in the outfit) and you want to quickly snap different compositions with the additional detail (that can't be detected by the subject/eye detection algorithms), maybe even while the face is still visible. With Nikon or Sony you just hit a button, "lock in" the other detail, freely move and snap happily away.

With Canon that is much harder to achieve in my experience. If the face is still visible you will have to deactive subject detection or use different focus methods. But when not being static, moving around and re-composing you will typically have to adjust the area you are focusing on. I do this by switching to single point AF, using the EVF and selecting the focus point via the touch screen ("touch and drag AF"). Depending on how fast and often you recompose this is serious work. And if you want to use subject/eye detection in between you will always have to cycle through the AF methods. With Nikon you can jump from subject detection to fully controllable "any object tracking mode" and back again with only one additional button press. It is quite a bit faster. To be honest, it is hard to explain and to get excited about if you have never used it. Here is an example video (should start at 6:42):

https://youtu.be/GbCTwetu_n8?t=402

He is using the joystick at the beginning to shift the position of the tracking focus field, this is of course not necessary (guess he is doing it because his camera is on a tripod and he wants to start with the figure in the center). And of course this is again a somewhat static setup, in realworld usage you will be moving yourself much more for e.g. weddings.

Here another very quick example on how to switch really fast between any object tracking and subject detection (3:41) (just watch the next 10 seconds):

https://youtu.be/Unc0k_H6KXQ?t=221

Another example, well explained (6:07):

https://youtu.be/Wy8iXtoxa24?t=367

Update: This is actually the best video, at 7:50 he demonstrates fast toggling between eye AF and tracking.

Maybe you can see the usefullness to have this mode and kind of tracking performance.