PERFECT Focus When Shooting on a Gimbal!

Nailing focus when shooting on a gimbal can sometimes be quite difficult, especially for certain shots and even more so when shooting solo. So in this video, I'm going to show you four different techniques to achieve perfect focus when shooting solo on a gimbal. I'll be sharing my Sony camera settings, but even if you're shooting on a different brand, chances are you'll find similar settings on your camera. Autofocus systems on modern cameras are so good that you can achieve complex gimbal movements The trick is to understand which focus modes to use and when to use them. For the majority of my shots, I have the focus area set to wide. And wide area focus with eye autofocus enabled will work fantastic about 90% of the time because the camera will always hit critical focus on one of the eyes. However, not all shots are this straightforward. The difficulty with wide mode is that the camera doesn't always know which area to prioritize, resulting in shots like this one, where the camera jumps between subjects. In my previous video, a lot of you wondered how the camera was able to maintain focus on the character when I moved past this wooden beam. Naturally, you would expect the autofocus to jump to the wooden beam, and with the wrong autofocus settings, the camera will do exactly that and the shot gets ruined. To avoid these focus jumps in your shots, we have to adjust the subject shift sensitivity in the camera's autofocus settings. Subject shift sensitivity is the speed at which the camera decides to switch focus from one subject to another. For this type of shot, we want to set the sensitivity to 1. This will allow us to maintain focus on our subject either by eye autofocus locking on or in this case by touch tracking. I simply tap on my subject and with this low sensitivity setting, even a brief obstruction such as the wooden beam won't throw the focus off because the camera is not sensitive to lock onto a new subject. And I've used the same settings in this shot. Here there are a lot of foreground elements passing the camera as I orbit around the subject. But because the camera prioritizes the subject's eye and because the subject shift sensitivity is set to low, the autofocus will remain locked onto the subject. Another tricky thing to get right when filming solo on a gimbal is smooth looking focus pulls. In a shot like this one, we want the focus to smoothly transition from the background or the environment to the character as he walks into frame. Ideally you would have a second operator pulling focus and that will get you a very fluid focus transition. However, we can also achieve this by changing the focus transition speed. This setting allows you to adjust if the camera will focus on a subject more quickly or more smoothly. So for shots like these where the camera has to switch focus between different subjects, I set the focus area to wide, the subject shift sensitivity a bit higher like 4 or 3 and the focus transition speed anywhere between 3 and 1. There are certain shots where you would ideally set a fast focus transition speed. A good example is when shooting slow motion shots at 100 frames per second. When the focus transition speed is at a lower setting, the focus pull will feel too slow because the footage is slowed down. By setting the focus transition speed to the fastest setting, so something like 7, we will get a more natural looking focus pull when playing back our shot in slow motion. We've already seen that eye autofocus does a great job of staying locked onto a subject. But what if you don't have eyes in your frame? Like here, where the camera is following the subject's shoes. This is where touch tracking comes in handy. When you have touch operation enabled on your camera, a little box will pop up on the back of your LCD screen that looks like this. You can now simply tap on your screen to lock onto a subject and the camera will keep it in focus regardless of how it moves in your frame. There are however two things to keep in mind to get the best tracking results. First, I've noticed that tracking works best when the camera's autofocus area is set to wide. And second, I recommend setting the subject shift sensitivity at a lower setting to make sure the tracker stays on the subject and ignores any other elements in the frame. With these things in mind, I believe touch tracking is one of the most powerful autofocus features on your camera. Lastly, let's look at focus area spot and zone. Both of these basically work the same. When the camera is set to these modes, it will keep focus in the area where you move the spot. If you have eye autofocus enabled, it will take priority within the area of the spot. I don't use these modes very often, but they do work well if you know your subject is going to stay in one and the same spot or when you can't count on eye autofocus because perhaps your subject will turn around or look away. The spot will keep focusing on the subject without potentially jumping to something in the foreground or on the sides of the frame. Zone does the exact same thing, only the area is larger than the largest spot and you can't move it. So you can use this for example when your subject is larger in your frame. A final piece of advice when you're shooting solo on a gimbal is to play around with these different modes and settings and see what works best for the shot that you're trying to get. Anyway, I hope you're able to learn something from this video and if you have any questions, feel free to leave them down in the comments. As always, thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!