Experimenting with shooting video on a DSLR (Canon 600d), I constantly encountered focusing errors. As you know, in DSLRs there is no normal autofocus for video. It is impossible to use the “focus by image” mode because it is torture (you press the shutter release and the lens starts buzzing back and forth for a long and tedious time until it gives up without focusing).Well, I’m trying to master manual focus. But not everything is simple here either. Everything looks great on the small screen of the camera, but when I get home and download the files to my computer, I immediately see that I constantly missed focusing. Even using the 5-10x auxiliary zoom to focus doesn’t help much.To be honest, all this is terribly depressing and the thought arises that one should not take a steam bath and shoot a video on a soap box (there is an infinite depth of field and everything is ok with autofocus). But it’s too early to give up, besides, today I found in the settings one more option for focusing video and LiveView – fast.It works like this – when the shutter is pressed halfway, the mirror drops for a moment (the screen goes out), the camera focuses really quickly, the mirror rises back (again we see the picture on the display). It will not work to use this focusing method directly during recording (the braked focusing on the image is activated). But before pressing the Rec fast button, the method is really fast.And in order not to be tormented by doubts on which point out of nine your Japanese friend decided to focus on, you need to turn on only the central focus point in the settings.How to do this is described in detail in the following video:Of course, this is far from ideal. Such focusing is suitable for shooting “quickly”, on the go (for example, when traveling). But for serious video shooting, it seems to me (I have not tried it), it will be much more convenient to attach a large screen (at least 8 inches) to the DSLR and focus on it manually (turn the lens focus ring with your fingers or a special wheel).
And the ingenious device in the first photo in this article will help you quickly shift the focus from one given position to another. But this is also suitable only for staged filming, not for reporting.
