Auto Focus Modes for a Canon XH A1

Video Transcript

"Now I'm going to start talking about focus and, to start things off, I'll talk about auto focus. I recommend never using auto focus because it's your camera automatically trying to get a focus, and the camera's capable of getting that focus, but it looks real mechanical and just not too natural. You can always tell when someone has auto focus on. You zoom into something or pan and all of a sudden the focus just swings back and forth real fast. That's your auto focus working against you. Let's go ahead and talk about auto focus a little bit. What you're seeing right now is from our XH A1 in focus, but let me just put it out of focus and, yeah! That's what auto focus looks like, you can see it trying to work and trying to fix it and it looks kind of weird. Definitely not smooth at all. But, if you do choose to use auto focus, let me show you a couple of the, you have a couple of options, and those are in your menu. If we look at our menu, our camera menu, we just want to go down to our second option which is camera setup. Then our 'AF' mode is our auto focus mode and it's right here, third one down. We'll just go in. We just have the options of normal and instant. Instant being incredibly fast, just going as quickly as it can to focus. Normal is just a little bit slower. Maybe it looks a little bit more natural, but usually auto focus never looks natural. We put it on instant and let's take a look at what that looks like now. I'll throw it out of focus again and, it almost looks the exact same, let's try that one more time. There! That was a lot faster; you can definitely see it there. The camera is really trying to adjust as quick as it can and get that focused. If you chose to use auto focus you do have those two options, normal AF and instant AF. Play a little bit with both and see which one you like."