The Sony Camera Autofocus (AF) System for Video

1. Course Intro & Project Overview: For decades, the autofocus feature on cameras has been exclusively for photographers. You'd be left offset if you switched your video camera autofocus. But the autofocus system on the most recent Sony Alpha cameras is a total game changer for video production. The face and eye detection and these new Sony mirrorless cameras is so reliable and precise. You can now free yourself up to only think about your framing and your subjects performance, not the focus on larger productions. You'll no longer need to hire focus pullers are first ACEs, saving yourself some series cash. But with all these new features, it can take a few weeks of experimenting with your camera's settings before you truly grasp everything you need to that or you can take this one. Our course will cover all the in-depth camera settings, such as the AF transition speed, AF subject shifts sensitivity, the seven different focus areas, focus points, circulation, focus peaking, and how to register faces within the camera and give them ordered focus priority. Will even discuss a hybrid AF MF approach and cover customizable buttons that allow your camera to quickly capture the most cinematic content possible in any situation. So real quick before we dive in, I just want to go over how this class is structured. So right up front I'm including a too long didn't read just give me all the necessary settings right up front because I need to grab this camera and go out and shoot something today. So there's a quick video that just kinda covers all the high-level things that you need to know. And then from there we'll go into the 24 different menu options that pertain to auto-focus in the Sony cameras, we'll go over what each setting is, what it means as well, awesome footage to help illustrate how to best use these techniques. And then after we cover the menu, we'll go into a little bit of technique like how to best hold your focus and what settings are best when you're using slow motion will also go over the custom buttons and function menu as well. So the project for this course is pretty simple. I want you to upload a freeze frame from a video that you've taken and let me know what transition speed you used and what shifts sensitivity you used. Then explain why you chose the settings that you did. Does it have to do with the scenario is they're heavy foreground? Does it have to do with the internal speed of your lens? Does it have to do with shooting in slow motion? And that's it. I'm excited to see what you guys come up with. 2. Cinematic Setting Quick Set: So this lesson is just a quick, too long. Didn't read, gives me this whole class in three minutes, tell me the absolute best settings to use and the only ones that I need to know about. So this is just the crucial menu settings that you need to know. And I'm gonna do it in a logical order instead of in a numerical order. Before we do anything at all, we need to make sure that autofocus is switched on on the barrel of our lens. It's also worth saying that you're going to have the best results if you have an E mount lens, not an adapter with a Canon or Nikon or something else. So first things first, we need to have the touchscreen on. So when our menu, instead of going to the autofocus manual focus menu option, will scroll all the way down to the setup menus. And instead of menus would go to touch operation. Now, touch operation, what we wanna do is we want to turn touch operation on that allows the screen to work with touch operation. We also add the touch operation menu setting. We want to scroll down to touch function in shooting. And now that we want to go ahead and set to touch tracking, that allows us to track subjects as they move about the frame. Now that we have our touch operation on, we want to go to our autofocus menu setting. Now I want to scroll down to the third one, phase II autofocus. This is one of the most important menus in this whole camera. And this is really the reason to upgrade to these new Sony cameras. So we want to go to Phase II priority and autofocus, and we want to turn that on. That allows us to have an eyeball be tax sharp, and that is the main purpose of the audit focus. Let's go ahead and scroll down to face iframe display and turn that on as well, just so we know which eyes in focus at all times. From here, we'll step back and go to the focus area menu. Now on focus area, it's important to know these different focus areas are. So starting off, we have wide than zone, center fix spot and expanded spot for me, I use wide anytime I'm filming with a single subject. So if there's just one person in frame, you want your focus area to be wide. If there's multiple people or the camera is moving and it's a little bit more of a dynamic, interesting shot. You either want to use spot focusing or zone focusing. Spot is just a little bit more narrow and zone is a little wider. And what this does, instead of using the whole frame to find the focus your cameras using just these little sections and whatever's within that section to find the focus, it's a great idea to set focus area as a custom button or in the function menu. So you can quickly find this and adjusted on the fly, because chances are you might be filming one shot with a single-subject, but then the very next shot might have two or three people in it. And lastly, let's go to the autofocus manual focus setting menu. It's important to know what all four of these different features do. Let's start from the bottom with auto-focus assist. Now, autofocus Assist allows you to use the focus ring on your lens to have a hybrid manual autofocus experience. So if you have auto-focus assist on, it'll give you much greater control in a lot of different situations. Going up. Next, we have the subject shifts sensitivity. Now this is basically how long it takes for your camera to understand that it needs to be shifting focus. This is not how quickly the rack focus happens, but just how long the camera takes to understand the rack focus needs to happen. So if you set this to a one, you can have a bunch of foreground elements and people walking in front of your subject and the camera will hold focus on your subject. However, if you set this to a five, as soon as someone walks in front of your subject, the camera will try to refocus on that new person. So think of the situations in which you film in the most, if they're really busy situations, documentary situations where you never know how the environment is going to look or what the situation is going to be. Maybe you want this a little slower, maybe you want this at a two or something like that. However, if you fill them in much more controlled environments, you do a lot of talking heads or scenes between two actors. Maybe you want this a lot faster. Maybe you want this at a four. Personally, I like to set this at about a four. Again, this is also a great thing to put in a menu or custom button, because depending on who you are and what you're shooting, you could be changing this setting a whole lot. Moving up, we have the transition speed. And the transition speed is how fast this rack focus is happening on the H174. This is on a scale from one to seven. Personally, I like to put this at a four. In my mind. It's a nice cinematic, slow transition that still moves fast enough. If you put this at a seven, it's really quick snap transition. If you put this at a one, it is a very, very slow transition. Think about the genre that you're filming, the tone and mood of what you're filming. If it's a bright, happy comedy, maybe you want to accentuate a laugh by a snap focus. Maybe you want it to be a six or seven. If it's a sad, slow drama, maybe you want the rack focus to slowly be happening. Maybe you want this at a one or two. Also keep in mind slow motion. If you know your clip is going to be at 40% speed. Maybe you want this rack focus to be a lot faster. So when you slow it down, it'll feel a lot more natural and post. And then finally, you have focused mode. In InVideo, you have autofocus continuous or you have manual focus. Now, I keep my camera and autofocus continuous a whole lot. However, if you want that hybrid manual focus autofocus combination, you can set this to manual focus. But as long as you have auto-focus clicked on, on your lens and you have the autofocus assist on. Then you can have a nice hybrid between manual and autofocus, or you and the camera are working together to find the best focus. And then the very last thing I will include, because I do think it's important in some situations, is if you go back to the face and I autofocus menu setting. And then at the very bottom you have registered faces priority. You can actually take pictures of people and register them in the camera. And this allows the camera to prioritize their focus over others. If you're filming a short film or something that has six or seven actors in one scene. And you really want the focus to be on your hero. You can actually prioritize their focus over all the other extras. And that way the camera won't be hunting and pecking and trying to find focus on the foreground actors, the background actors. It'll know who the hero of your story is and it will prioritize their focus over the rest. So if you don't have time to go through all the settings, those are the most important autofocus settings in this camera. The auto-focus in these new Sony's is really revolutionary. It is cause for upgrading. It's a total game changer when it comes to video production. 3. Focus Mode: So let's go ahead and start by diving into our autofocus menu settings. Now, on these later Sony cameras, they've done a really good job of organizing all your settings very well. And they now even have their own autofocus page. So this is for the A7 III, the A7, S3, the A7 for A7, R4, fx, three, sixty-six hundred A7, and the Alpha-1. Many of these menu settings are available in other Sony models as well, but these are the ones that really nicely organized the autofocus menu in these menus may be available on other Sony cameras with firmware updates. So as you can see, our options, we have auto-focus slash, manual focus, Focus Area, face and I autofocus focus assistant and peaking display. So we'll go ahead and start with the autofocus slash manual focus menu setting. From here our options are focused mode, autofocus transition speed, autofocus subject shifts, sensitivity, and auto-focus assists. Now, before we completely dive in, I think it's worth noting that you should definitely make sure that you have the autofocus switched on, on your camera's lens. It's also worth saying that the autofocus system works best with native e mount lenses. So if you've been holding out on getting a Sony lens, this autofocus really is a game changer and it really does make you want to buy the Sony lenses. Certain lenses with certain lens adapters will work, but they are a little finicky and they don't work as well as the native ie mountain lenses. So if you see that certain menu settings aren't available, if you do have a lens adapter mount than some of these settings just won't work for you until you go out and get an e-mail lens. So now that you have your autofocus switched on on the lens, Let's go ahead and dive into the focus mode setting. Now from here, you can switch it to either continuous autofocus or manual focus. And it is worth noting that these are video settings. If you go into the stills mode in the camera, you will have a few other focus mode options as well. But for video, you just have the continuous autofocus or manual focus. Now let's go ahead and start just by putting it in continuous autofocus. The manual focus setting does allow us to create some sort of manual autofocus hybrid, and we'll learn about that a little later on. But just for now, let's go ahead and put it in continuous autofocus. So do keep in mind the focus mode does not work if you have tracking on so tracking will override the focus mode. 4. Transition Speed: The next menu item is the auto-focus transition speed. Now this refers to just how fast the rack focus actually is from one subject to another. And it's on a scale from one to seven. Personally, I like to place it at about a four. And my mind, That's a nice smooth transition. Some people prefer it a little faster. Some people prefer it a little slower. It does kinda come down to the feel, mood, and genre that you're filming. If you're doing a bright, happy comedy, you probably want the transition speed to be really fast, to really accentuate any sort of joke. And if you're doing some sort of Moody drama, maybe you want the transition speed to be a little bit slower. It's also worth noting that you do want to compensate for any kind of slow motion. So if you know that your clip is going to be at a 50% speed, maybe you want this transition speed to be at a six or seven, something really fast so that when you slow it down, it actually feels a little bit more natural. Because if you use a really slow setting and then you slow your footage down even more, the rack is probably going to be a little bit too slow for you. And it's also worth saying like most of these settings, you can place the autofocus transition speed as a custom button or in the function menu so that you'll be able to change it on the fly. So real quick, I just want to show you guys sample of what these different speeds could do. So I've gone ahead and put the transition speed onto a seven, just so you can see exactly how fast it is based on. When I use the touchpad here, I'm using my iPad. And you'll see the touch in 321. Here it is back to the other face. That is a seven. As you can see, a seven is just adjusting focus as fast as possible. Now if I go and adjust the focus to one, we're now on a one. So here's transition on the focus with a one. We'll go ahead and start on the far phase. And here's the touch. As you can tell, a one is very slow. And I'm not quite sure what situation you would use this in. Other than like a very sad, dramatic, Moby kind of drama. So like I said, I like to place mine on four and I'm adjusting it to for right now. So now here is four. We're gonna go ahead and start on the far face. And then here's the touch on the front face with a transition speed of four. So it's nice. It's, it's a little on the slower end of acceptable. Some people do like the five. But I believe either the four or five might be good for you. 5. Shift Sensitivity: Our next menu setting is the auto-focus subject shifts sensitivity. And that's on a scale from one to five. And what the shifts sensitivity is, is it's the speed in which your camera actually recognizes that it needs to shift the focus. So there's a little bit of a difference here that, that's important to understand. This is not the speed of the rack focus. This is how long it takes your camera to realize that it needs to rack focus. If you put it at a one, something that is not sensitive at all, That's really good for anytime you have a subject where there's a lot of foreground elements and maybe there's people walking in front of your subject. If you set it at a one, the camera will keep focus much, much better and not think that it needs to be shifting its focus really quickly. And on the other hand, if you do want a rack focus really quickly and you want your camera to understand that really quickly. Maybe you want to set this to a five. So as you pan from one subject to the next, it will quickly realize that and adjust focus accordingly. Personally, I like to set this at about a four, but I don't do a lot of filming that has a lot of heavy foreground elements or sports or anything running in front of the subject very quickly. And so if that is the kind of content that you capture, maybe you do want this to be at a lower number. You really want to be thinking of the scenario in which you find yourself the most and set the number accordingly. And again, this is something that you can program as a custom button or in a custom menu. And you can be changing on the fly very quickly. If you do find yourself in a situation you don't normally find yourself in. Right now, I set the transition speed to the highest of seven. So this is going to rack as fast as possible once it captures the subject that it wants to put focus on. But I've gone ahead and put these shifts sensitivity to one. So this is the slowest that this camera will recognize that something else is in focus. I'm using the Spot focus area, which we'll get to in a second. But once the little box that's around the forehead right now, once that box is over the front face, then we'll see how long it takes for this camera to realize it needs to shift focus. So that's the speed of a one. We can go back to the other way. So again, this is great for a lot of foreground and people walking in front of the subject you want to keep in focus. The camera is not trying to constantly refocus. Going into the menu. Let's set these shifts sensitivity speed all the way up to a five, just so you guys can see what that is. Okay, so we've now set the shifts sensitivity speed to five, That's the fastest at it registers. So right now we're currently focused on the far phase. And let's see how fast we can refocus on the second phase. Now remember, the rack focus is at the highest speed possible. So it's very immediate. This might be good again, on a bright happy comedy, you're trying to accentuate a joke or something like that with the snap focus. But again, if you have anything that moves in front of your subject, the camera will constantly be trying to refocus. Now we've set the shifts sensitivity to three, that's right in the middle. So again, this is the time it takes for the camera to understand that it needs to rack focus. Is that a three? So in my mind, it's a little bit of a delay. And again, this just depends on what situation you're filming in. Let me switch to my perfect settings real quick. So my perfect settings or four on both. And you'll be able to see what that looks like here. Feels like a smooth, natural transition that someone is actually physically doing the rack focus on. So our brains are accustomed to this speed because it just feels natural. I could maybe set the shifts sensitivity a little higher. But this typically works in most situations I use. 6. AF Assist: Let's talk about autofocus assist. Now, autofocus assist actually lets you use the focus ring on your lens to adjust the focus as well. So when you turn auto focus assist on, this is that mode that I was talking about about having a hybrid manual autofocus mode. So if you're racking focus from one subject to another, camera will recognize that and help you find focus. So if you do want more control over what you're doing and you know that there will be constant rack focuses is probably a good idea to keep your autofocus assist on. So for this to work, you have to have a few things. First, on your physical lens, the switch has to be in autofocus, not manual. Second, autofocus assist here in the menu must be turned on. And third, internally, the camera's focus needs to be set to manual, not continuous autofocus. Now we'll get into a little bit of a technique and how to best use this later. But for now, I just want to show you where this option is found in the menu. 7. Focus Area: That's it for our autofocus manual focus menu setting. Let's go ahead and come down to our second menu within the focus menu. And that is the focus area. And in the focus area menu we can adjust the focus area. The focus area limit the focus area, colour, the circulation of focus point, and the autofocus frame move amount. Let's go ahead and start with the focus area. So starting out, you can adjust your focus area in a few different ways. You can have wide zone center fix spot or expanded spot. Now, why is actually a really great option if you have a single subject. So the wide focus area will use your camera's entire frame to find the focus. If you just have one subject and you have your face and eye detection on which we'll get into a little later. If you have your face and eye detection on and you use a wide focus area than the camera will easily be able to stay focused on your single-subject. Now maybe you don't have a single subject, maybe have two or more people there, and you want a specific person in focus, but you're not concerned about the focus of the other people. Well, you can set your focus area to zone. Now, zone is about a quarter of the screen and you can actually adjust using the little knob on the back of the camera. You can adjust where that focus zone is within the frame. It defaults to the center and it's pretty wide. So if you have someone in the left of frame, you can shift your zone over until the person is within that zone. And then the camera will know that they're trying to find the person within the zone. Now after zone, we have center fix. And that is just having the focus set in the center of frame. This is the old school way to do focus, where you find the focus in the center and then you re-frame accordingly. So if you're used to that format, then this might be something you're comfortable with. Next we have our spot focus and you can shift between small, medium or large spot focus. And this allows you a great deal of control within the frame. So if you have a busy frame with a lot of different things that your camera could be focusing on. If you use the Spot focus to put over your subject, it'll really isolate the subject and only stay focused on them. And like zone, you can use the knob on the back of the camera to do this, or you can simply touch your subject and the spot focus will move accordingly. That being said, the touchscreen is a very powerful tool on the Sony cameras. And so we will get into that a little bit later. But know that with these zones, you can either use the knob to adjust or you can touch on the screen. And after spot focus we have expanded spot. And that's basically if your camera cannot find the focus within the specified focus spot, it allows the camera to go outside of that focus spot and then find something else that it wants to put in focus. This might work if you have a moving subject who kind of goes in and out of your spot a little bit. However, it's probably a better idea if you do have a moving subject to put on the tracking feature and we'll get into that a little bit later as well. Out of all these, for me, either use the wide or the zone just depending on how many subjects I have in frame. I know a lot of people will do the wide and spot for a little bit finer control, but this is all a matter of preference. So you just go ahead and find out what works for you. What works in the situations that you find yourself filming in the most, if it's single talking head interviews wide is totally fine. 8. Focus Area Limit: The next menu is the focus area limit. And this just helps you save a little bit of time when adjusting your focus area. So you can go through and actually set which of these focus areas you want to pop up when you're scrolling through the focus area. So if you know that you just use wide spot and zone, you can go ahead and deselect center and expanded spot and have yourself less options on that screen when you're scrolling through. The nice thing about these Sony cameras is that they are so customizable. If you do have the focus area on a custom button or function menu, and set this focus area limit how you want. Then you're able to quickly adjust the focus area on the fly and really help yourself out if you're in a limited time situation. 9. Focus Area Color: After our focus area limit, we can adjust our focus area color. And that's just, would we rather have the square that we see is our focus area? Would we rather have that in white or red? And again, this is completely user preference. 10. Circ of Focus Point: After the color, we can adjust if the focus points circulates or does not circulate. And what that means is if you have something like the spot focus on and you're using the knob on the back of the camera to adjust it to the right, to the right to the right. Once it hits the right wall, do you want it to pop to the left of the screen or do you want it to stay there on the right not being able to move personally, I prefer it not to circulate. But again, this is totally user preference. If you think it'll help you in a pinch, go ahead and turn circulate on. 11. AF Frame Move Amt: And lastly on this menu, we have the autofocus frame move amount. Now this one I actually do think is important, especially if you're using the knob on the back of the camera and not the touchscreen as much. But you can either set it from standard or you can have it at large. Basically what large does it allows the focus zone or the spot focus to move in larger amounts to the other parts of the screen. What this does is it helps prevent your camera from wanting to focus halfway between two subjects. If you're moving that focus zone across the screen, again, the touch focus settings are so much better. But if you are using the knob on the back to adjust the focus zones, I definitely recommend having the frame move amounts set to large. 12. Face Eye Priority in AF: Now let's go back to our main menus and the focus menu here. After focus area, we have the Phase II autofocus. Now this is one of the most important focus menus in these Sony cameras. This is the reason why these cameras are game changers, is this face and eye detection for video. So let's go ahead and jump into that menu now, the first one is the face I priority in autofocus. This is something that I recommend turning on, turning on, turning on, turning on. If you do a bunch of landscape video, then maybe you want to have this off because you're not filling people. But this definitely is something that you probably want to set and as one of your custom keys or in the function menu, if you do find yourself filming without people a decent amount as well, because you do want to be switching this on and off. For me most everything I do has people in it. So I basically keep this on at all times. 13. Face Eye Subject: The next menu setting in the face and I'm menu is the subject. And do you want to film a human and animal or a bird? For me, I only film humans. So I'm just going to keep this as human, but it's super cool that Sony cameras are now so smart, it can find the focus on an animal or a bird as well. 14. Subject Select Setting: Next we have the subject select setting. It allows us to have the human, animal, or bird on that previous menu. I'm not really sure why this is included. I don't think it saves a ton of time to go from not scrolling between three items to scrolling between two items. But again, it's nice that Sony allows you to customize things to such a great degree. 15. Face Eye Frame Display: The next setting is the frame I display. And you can either have that on or off. I think it's really nice to have on even though it's just kind of a visual thing on the monitor, it allows me, as I'm filming, to know that my camera is in charge. It knows where it wants to put the focus, and that's where I want the focus to. So I like seeing this is also nice having on because it reminds me if the wrong i is in focus, then I can change it from auto to left or right. So having this on really keeps me honest with the previous menu setting as well. So that's why I have it on all the time. 16. Right Left Eye Select: The next menu item on the face and I autofocus is right and left eye selection. Now, this is actually a very important thing to know and this will really help you get better shots. Now, for 80 per cent of the time, I keep this on Auto. And it basically keeps the eye that's closest to the camera in focus. And this is what you typically want when you're filming someone and the lighting situation is fairly neutral and balanced. However, if you're shooting something that's very dramatic, the more cinematic way to do that is that the further side of the face will actually be in brighter focus than the closer side. And because of that, because of that light contrast, the viewer's eye is actually drawn toward the further side of the face, not the shadow. And so because of that, when I film a more dramatic scene, I definitely want to keep in mind to keep the further I in focus. And so because of that, I'll shift away from auto and I'll shift to right or left, whichever one is right for that setting. So this is something that I don't do all the time, but I do and high-contrast situations. And just knowing that the camera has this ability is something that is really important and is new to a lot of video. So I really love this setting. It's something that I'm using constantly. 17. Registered Faces Priority: Finally, you can set registered faces to have a priority. Now this is something that is pretty cool. If I'm filming a project and there's a main character, I can take a picture of this person and have them registered in my Sony camera. So if I'm in a situation where the main character is surrounded by ten different people, the camera doesn't know who to put in focus. But if I have the person registered, if I have their face registered in the camera, then they're going to focus on my hero and they're not going to focus on the background actors. So if you're doing some more narrative work with a bunch of actors, it's a good idea to go ahead and get pictures of all your main actors, register them in the Sony camera. It's also worth noting that to register a face, it's actually not quite as straightforward as you would think. To this whole time we've been operating in video mode. To create a face registration, you actually have to switch the camera to photo mode. And that's on the H174, that's turning a little knob on top of the camera. So let's switch to camera mode real quick. And now when we go into our menu, will see that instead of the video options right here, it's all about images and stills. So when we go down to the autofocus manual focus setting here, we can scroll to face I autofocus and we can come down to face memory. So let's open up face memory, new registration. And now we want our subject who we want to register to fill the frame. And let's hit the shutter button at the top of the camera. We can now register the face. The face is registered, okay? And we can now do the register faces priority, so we probably need to switch back to video. And once we have registered our face, we can turn that on. Now it looks like if we go back to the photo menu real quick, face memory, we can actually change the order of faces. Yeah, So that's super cool. If you're filming something and you have your main hero, but you have a couple of side characters as well. You can put the characters in order of how the camera will focus on them. That's pretty cool. 18. Focus Map: Okay, so let's zoom out a little bit and we're now done with the face I settings. Let's go into the focus assistant settings. It might be worth saying that the focus assistant and the peaking display menu settings are kinda legacy settings. They are things that have always been on these cameras. And when auto-focus wasn't such a precise thing, having the focus assistant and peaking display was very important. We'll go ahead and learn about them. But just know that with auto-focus, these two things are not quite as important as the first three menu settings. And from here we have four options. We have a focus map, focus magnifier, folks magnification time and additional focus magnification. So starting off on the focus map, and this is a new feature in these Sony cameras. It's just a different way of allowing you to see what is in focus. And what you'll notice is what's in focus is a natural color. What's closer to the camera is a warmer color, and what's further from the camera is a cooler color. So this might be something that helps some people. This will be something obviously you're setting up before or after your shot. You're not filling while this setting is on. But it's a nice way to kind of visualize what's in focus and what's not in focus. I don't know how often I'll be using this, but I think some people really enjoy it. 19. Focus Magnifier: Next we have the focus magnifier. And when we turn this on, it just punches in and allows us to make sure everything's in focus. This was really helpful. And older models of this camera, when the autofocus wasn't so amazing. I don't know how often I'll be using the focus magnifier because I trust the auto-focus so well on this camera, but it is good to know where it is in the menu and it is nice to sometimes put as a custom button so you can quickly punch in, punch out, make sure your focus is where you want it to be. 20. Focus Magnification Time: Next we have the focus magnification time. And that just says how long do you want the focus magnifier to be onscreen before your camera goes back to how it's supposed to be. Now, I like putting this at five seconds because it allows me, it gives me time to properly see what's in focus, what's not in focus. And when it's done, it punches back out. When I was younger, I've had situations where I didn't I didn't realize the focus magnifier was on and I was framing for how I thought I should because I didn't know the focus magnifier was on. But then when I pull the camera, when I pull the footage into post, I realized that I'm much wider than I actually want to be. So that's just a product of having no limit on and being a little green and naive and not understanding that my magnifier was on. So because of those experiences, I definitely like this 5 second 1 because it keeps me honest and it automatically adjust back to how you're supposed to be seeing the footage. 21. Initial Focus Magnification: And then we have the initial focus magnification. I like to keep this at four because otherwise if you started at one, you start with the focus magnifier at how you're seeing everything already. You push the button again. 22. Peaking Display: That's the focus assistant menu. Finally, we have the peaking display menu. On the peaking display menu, we have Picking Display, peaking level and peaking color. Now, peaking is a camera feature that has been around a long, long time. And again, with a lot of these advances in the autofocus technology, I'll assume that I'll be using peaking less and less. But regardless, we'll go ahead and go through these settings. So first off, peeking display on or off. Now when you have peaking on, it puts everything that's in-focus. It gives it a little red lines around the subject to let you know that the camera is showing you. This is in-focus. Again, pre autofocus. This was a godsend. Now I don't use it too much, but it is nice to have as a custom key or part of the function menu where you can just quickly access it on the fly and double-check that things are in focus. But again, having the little box around the person's eye, that's a little bit better than having peaking on. 23. Peaking Level: After peaking display, we have the peaking level. We can have it high, medium, or low. And that's just the cameras sensitivity to the peaking. If it's on high, you'll see a lot of red lines showing you things that are crisply in-focus and then things that are mostly in-focus. If you have it set to low, you'll only get red lines over the things that are tack sharp. And then if you put a medium, it's a nice little middle ground between the two. Sometimes, depending on your lighting situation, you might not see these peaking levels at all. And so you have to adjust from low to high. 24. Peaking Color: And then finally, you can adjust the peaking color. Do you want these little lines to be red, yellow, blue, or white? Traditionally, they've always been read, but now you're able to change the color. 25. Touch Operation: So those were all our autofocus settings. However, some of the most important settings are not even in the autofocus menu, and that's because they're a little bit more broad. So this does seem a little confusing when you're looking for this and it's not in the autofocus settings, but it doesn't make sense logically. So instead of being in the autofocus menu setting, Let's go ahead and go down all the way to our setup menu. And then in our setup menu, Let's scroll down to number five, touch operation. And within touch operation we have touch operation, touch panel slash pad, touchpad settings, and touch function in shooting. Let's start off with touch operation. Touch operation for autofocus is so important. It's much easier and much more practical than the little knob on the back of the camera. So because of this, I go ahead and suggest to keep touch operation on at all times. Now in a different situation, if we're not talking about autofocus, you're concerned about touching the screen, bumping into the screen or something like that. And you only want touch operation on in playback. It has a setting for that as well. If you only want touch operation in playback. So touch operation can be on, just playback or off. Again. I leave mine on at all times. 26. Touch Focus vs. Touch Tracking: The other two menu settings are for the touchpad when you're using the EVF. And again, that doesn't really apply to focus. But the final setting down there is the touch function in shooting. And you can switch between touch focus or touch tracking. Now, to be honest, I think touch tracking is excellent. That is, if your subject is moving around the screen, maybe they're moving in and out of your focus area. The focus is purely on them. However, if you set it to just normal touch focus, and then they leave the focus area, we're not tracking them as they go. So for me, I think touch tracking is great. It's revolutionary, it's incredible how accurate it is. For me, touch tracking is always on. 27. S&Q Rack Focus Speeds: Let's go over some slow motion speed changes just so you can see how the transition speed is affected in slow motion. So this is 24 P, 100% shifts sensitivity, five, transition, seven, very fast. Okay, great. So now we're going to go into some slow motion. So now I believe we are shooting at 80%. That is slow motion at 30 frames with a base frame rate of 24. So that's 80% there. So this is 60 frames, 24, whatever that is. And this is 120 frames. So those were all shot with the shifts, sensitivity and transition all the way up at different frame rates. 28. Hold Focus: Something that comes as second nature to photographers, but not necessarily video people, is the fact that you can hold your focus by pushing down on the shutter halfway. And so when I do that, let's go ahead and just put something else in focus right here. When I hold it halfway, I get a little green square on the screen. Now that means that that is in focus. So if I move the camera, the plane of focus stays there and now my fingers halfway holding the shutter button down so the focus is locked. When I let go, we go back to the focus that it wants. And so there's a few different ways to hold the focus on this camera. You can do the half pressing the shutter. You can do the focus hold button. You can shift from autofocus to manual focus and then not touch the ring. So there's a few different ways to do it. So whatever comes as second nature to you, that's probably the one you want to go for if you're a photographer. This pushing down the button halfway is probably what you want. 29. "Manual Autofocus": An approach to AF assist that I really like is using it in concert with some of the custom buttons. Once you learn how to set custom buttons, what I'd like to do to use the AF assist is instead of switching back and forth between continuous autofocus and manual focus, you can set one of your custom buttons to AF MF selector hold. And what that'll do is that it will temporarily while you're holding down this button, switch between continuous focus and manual focus. Basically switching between whichever one you have set as a default to the opposite one. I like to set the top custom buttons c2e to this AF MF selector hold, and then to use autofocus assist. Basically what I'm doing is when I hold down C2, the camera now switches to manual focus. From there, I use my lens to manually adjust the focus. And then when I let go of C2, we switch back to autofocus. And this really allows you to have great precision in the timing of your focus racks. So if you're out in the field, you're running gun and you don't have time to adjust the transition speed or the shifts sensitivity. You can hold down your custom button after you've set it, and then rack with the speed that you want to. So again, there's a lot going on there and you may have to watch some of these lessons and then come back to this once you fully understand how to use those custom buttons. But basically for this setup, you need to make sure that on your lens the physical button is switched from MF to AF. And then from there internally on the camera, it has to be manual focus. That's either you adjusting the menu setting or having some sort of temporary custom button like I do. 30. Custom Buttons & Fn Menu: So now that we have a basic understanding of the menu functions, Let's go ahead and dive into the custom buttons. That's one of the great things about the Sony cameras, is that they are so customizable and you actually have a few more features in the custom buttons, then you actually do in the menus themselves. So we go to our menu here, and we're gonna go ahead and scroll all the way down to our setup menu. From our setup menu, we're going to go to number three, operation customize. And then from here, make sure you select the one with the video icon, not the photo icon, the custom key dial set with the video icon. From there, we now have a list of all of our custom buttons. And this is what I kinda like to have it set at. I like to have all my focus and framing on these rear one. I like to have rear to be a little bit more ISO white balance, things of that nature. And we'll get into all these here in a second. But let's just go over the focus ones. The first one I have is the switch right to left eye. And again, I find this very important because if I'm shooting something that has dramatic lighting, instead of having the closest eyeball in frame because that eyeballs probably gonna be a little darker. I want the bright eyeball to be in focus. So this allows me to just switch between the right and left eye. And that really helps me out when I'm shooting something that's more dramatic. Now this switch focus area is also a very good one. It allows you to just with one tap, rotate between wide the spot, the zone, all the focus areas that you want to use. So what I would recommend is if you go in your menu to the focus settings. And in focus area, that focus area limit, you can actually go ahead and select only the ones that you actually think that you'll use in the field. And so for me, I just have wide zone and spot large set. And then once I have that set where I want it, when I go back to the custom menu here, this switch focus area will only rotate between those that I've selected. So this is super useful, just one tap on the fly, it rotates through. Now I also like to have the AF MF selector hold on the top of my camera here. Now this is something that is not in the menus themselves is a setting just that you can customize. And basically the autofocus manual focus selector hold will switch between continuous autofocus and manual focus as you hold down that. But when you release the button, it'll go back to your default. Now, the reason that I prefer hold over toggle is that there's nothing on screen that tells you that you've switched between auto and manual focus when you hit the toggle button. So sometimes if I accidentally bumped that button, I switch to manual focus and I think I want to be on autofocus. And there are so many buttons on this camera that sometimes you forget exactly which button you've customized to what. And so because of that, the selector toggle is a little obnoxious. And so I prefer the selector hold because if I bumped this button, the focus still stays how I want it to. And this helps me in situations where it's a really busy frame, where there might be people passing in front of my subject. And if I want to go from autofocus to manual focus, I can just hold this down. It also helps me in a situation where if I want to grab focus on one certain subject and then reframe, I can do that as well. Now, moving on, another button that I do find very important is the focus hold button. I like to have the custom button on my lens B that focus hold. And again, this is exactly what it sounds like. When you press this button. The focus stays in one part. And those really are the focus buttons that I use. Just to show you guys a couple of the other things that you can set as custom buttons. If you'd like a different setup, then I have, you can switch the focus mode. You can do the autofocus manual focus selector, hold and toggle. And we talked about that. You can do the focus standard and basically focused standard if you have the spot or zone set in a corner of your frame, when you hit the focus standard, it resets your focus area to the default. So now the focus will be in the center of your screen. You can also put the transition speed or the subject shifts sensitivity as a custom button. I prefer to have it living on my function, my customizable function menu, and we'll get to that in a second. But I do think that is important to have somewhere that you can easily access it. Then you also have autofocus on and then hiding on the second page of the AF MF is the focus hold focus area. You can change the focus area. You can do the switch focus area, which is what I like. And you can do the switch autofocus, frame, move, hold. And this is basically setting your spot focus between small, medium and large. Then you have the phase II autofocus face high priority select I pretty much always have this on. I believe this might be in my function menu just so I can access it a little bit easier. I autofocus, face, I subject select, that's the human dog or a bird. Switch, right and left eye, which I really enjoy. And the face iframe display select. I always have this on, so I don't have a need to be accessing it quickly. And then in your focus assistant, the focus map display select or the focus magnifier. And then a peaking, just like your menu, picking, select peaking level or peaking color. So as you can see in these customizable buttons, you do have a few other options that are not in the menu items themselves. So now that we've set our custom buttons, Let's go ahead and go to our function menu settings. And now we can see in our video mode what we have for the function menu. So I do like having the AF subject shifts sensitivity and the AF transition speed right here. Easily changeable. Also have the focus mode and focus area, right easily available. The focus mode, I won't really be adjusting the focus mode too much, but I have it on there. Why not? And then same thing with the face I priority and auto-focus. I go ahead and have this on this menu. I don't access it a ton, but I know it's here if I needed. So as far as my focus, my customizable focus settings, this is pretty much what I've done. The things that I actually find myself needing in the field often are switching between widen zone or widened spot. I also find myself putting the left eye, right eye in focus depending on the lighting. I don't change the transition speed a ton, but if I'm doing slow motion, I do need to adjust that. And then knowing how to hold the focus is important as well. 31. Focus Breathing Compensation: Let's talk about focus, breathing. Certain lenses when you change the focus, will make it appear almost like the camera is zooming in a little bit or zooming out a little bit. The lens that I currently have is pretty good with focus breathing. It doesn't really look like there's too much zooming when it does the focus change. And it is a compatible email lens. If you go into the menu, on the shooting menu, on image quality. If you go all the way down here under movie settings as in queue settings, there's lens compensation. Now in Linz compensation, you can adjust a few things with the lens. But regarding focus, that breathing compensation is something you want to adjust. The lens that I have currently is not valid even though it is an email lens. But as you saw, there's really not a lot of focus breathing on this lens. Your lens does have focused breathing. Go ahead and go to the breathing compensation and see if you can adjust it so it helps you out. 32. Camera Support: One thing that a lot of people have recommended with this camera, because so many features are on the touchscreen, especially with focusing, is that if you can get a rig that has a handle on the left side for your left hand. Or you can still reach to the screen with your thumb. That way you can actually stabilize the camera, hold the weight of the camera, and focus at the same time. That's a great thing to have.