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]
10 thoughts on “Focus drill for fine video”
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Wow, this is really wonderful and clever.
Videos don’t work, I tried 3 different browsers.
Yeah, the actual video files seem to be embedded in the page, so I think it requires you to have an appropriate video player and codec installed your computer. It works for me on Ubuntu with Firefox and the Totem media player.
There are two quicktime videos. They have an M4V extension. If you have Firefox with flashblock, the videos are hiding behind a “about:blank” tag. The location of the videos are located directly:
http://web.me.com/slerman/DrillFocus/Media/DrillFocus_v1-desktop.m4v
http://web.me.com/slerman/DrillFocus/Media/FocusDrill_2-desktop.m4v
With a Mac, there are no codecs needed. iTunes and Quicktime work together on this.
With Windows and Internet Explorer, download iTunes even if you don’t have an iPod. It seems Quicktime is now embedded in iTunes and isn’t a separate download.
If you’re using Linux (or any other OS), VLC can be downloaded form here:
http://www.videolan.org
You will also need modules mp4, faad, avcodec, and libvlc (libvlc will be automatically installed with VLC). You may also need w32codec-all. If you’re running x64 kernel, you may also want to install all matching 32bit modules for compatability.
I was able to view the movies in Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Win7 with iTunes and VLC, and also with Ubuntu 9.10 and Opensuse 11.1 with VLC.
With the two movie links provided you should be able to download to your hard drive and be able to play them from there.
This guy is very creative.. hope to see more of his creativeness..