The latest crop of high-end DSLR cameras are capable of shooting beautiful video, however they can be difficult to use because they cannot autofocus while in movie mode. It turns out that film movie cameras work the same way, and the solution is to have really accurate manual controls that you can use to make sure that the camera is always focused to the correct position. Of course, really accurate manual controls also means expensive, so it’s nice to see this hack by Mac user slerman, a follow and rack focus rig. He used the gears from an old hand drill to make a focus lever for his Canon camera, which allows him to change camera focus by turning an easy-to-use crank. [via Gizmodo]
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