Help for 60D newbie - focusing & refocusing video

Started by mike8712, November 05, 2013, 03:23:54 PM

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mike8712

Running 2.3 / 1.1.1 on 60D

I'm just now reading through all the documentation and experimenting with the video for my youth sports teams.  Here are a few things that are bothering me and I can't seem to find help.  I really want to learn and work with this as I've always enjoyed editing video for work and hobby but am just now getting started with shooting video.  Thank you in advance for your time, I sincerely appreciate it.

1)  The amount of time it takes to focus (get a green box) on the video.  Takes a few seconds and I wanted to ask if there is any settings that can be adjusted to be able to focus quicker.

2)  Once recording has started, I can't seem to focus any longer.  As an example, if I focus on a player far away from me, once they run towards me, it gets out of focus and I can't seem to adjust to keep it in focus the whole time.  I feel like I am missing something obvious.

Lastly, I get the dreaded "movie has stopped recording" message with solid LED light, which is awful as it always comes when I need it.  I take out the battery and then experience the same thing a few times in a row before it stops doing that.  I read about the bitrate and need for a fast card - I've got a Lexar Pro SDXC 64GB (133x speed) card and thought that would work.  Is there anything there I can do?

I started to try and uninstall and was going to reinstall and when I went to "format" on menu, it doesn't give me the option to remove magic lantern.  When I do that, it only says "format card but keep magic lantern".

dmilligan

Quote from: mike8712 on November 05, 2013, 03:23:54 PM
I feel like I am missing something obvious.
The obvious thing that you are missing is simply that this camera does not have the capabilities you desire. These issues are general hardware limitations of the camera, there is nothing that ML can do about them (directly). Focusing is just slow in LV, it's the nature of how the LV focus mechanism works. And continual AF while recording is also not possible, it has been attempted in the past by ML without much success. If you want continuous video AF you need to buy a 70D, which has the necessary dual-pixel AF to achieve fast reliable video AF (or some other cam that has video AF).

Basically in video mode you are going to have to start learning how to rely on manual focus and get good at it.  Almost every single piece of professional video you see, the camera operator is manually focusing (be it TV, movies, whatever). It's really not that hard, and you as an intelligent being can do better than a dumb algorithm ever could anyway. ML has lots of features to help you manual focus during video. Read about focus peaking and magic zoom in the user guide. In the latest nightlies there is even a digic peaking mode that uses the digic hardware to do the peaking so there is no cpu overhead.

When it comes to video, to achieve superior results you really have to do everything manually.