Davide DB

Guys I have the impression that this thread has reached a dead end. Everyone has had a chance to express their preferences on flashes and battery packs and in particular on the novelty introduced by Retra. We also had a direct feedback from Oskar. It is not often that we have the privilege of a manufacturer participating in the forum.... Long story short: now we all have an informed opinion and try to remember the old adage: agree to disagree 😉

As example this is a rare video showing as Canon R5 animal eye AF works on fish (but on photography) IDK What the result would be on a 30" clip... Here it works but on a single static animal

Yes, I'm at the window too 😉 Given that Sony AF is often considered as a reference I'm curious to read/see what's possible to achieve in a real scenario. Plenty of Sony/Canon uw shooters out there but it's not clear if they are really exploiting their camera AF capabilities or just working in a traditional way like me. As I wrote in another post, it is considered rude to ask a photographer/filmmaker what he/she shot with and how he/she did it 🙂 Discussing autofocus with some professional underwater filmmakers, their reaction was a mixture of disgust and wonder. They all work exclusively in manual focus. But cinema cameras often do not have evolved AF or you simply cannot rely on AF for important shots.

I am an old filmmaker who "still" uses a GH5M2 with CDAF. Never had problems in WA or medium close shots but I only use single AF configured on the AF-Lock button. I lock the focus on the subject or, on moving subjects, I lock the focus at an intermediate value and try to stay as hyperfocal as possible. In all mirrorless housings it is impossible to operate the manual focus ring to follow the subject: the gear is so tenfold that one turn moves the focus by very little. Only on cinema housings is there a more "humane" relationship between turns of the housing ring and the focus barrel on the lens. In practice the focus ring is dedicated exclusively to macro shooting and even there it is necessary to have a basic focus with AF and only then to work in manual for micro adjustments. I must say that in static macro conditions with good lighting I can also work only in Single AF by using a small area and moving it to the relevant point with the slider and then use Lock-AF. What is different with modern intelligent PDAF systems? Could we work in CAF by following the eye of a fish, a nudibranch or the eye of a hermit crab as it moves in macro? Could we reliably track the face of a diver swimming from the blue toward us?

The autofocus technology used in the latest generations of mirrorless cameras has made great strides. Established technologies such as PDAF (Phase Detect Auto Focus) have been joined by the ever-present A.I. (it's so cool today to have this acronym even on breakfast corn flakes) with algorithms that actually exploit huge amounts of data through machine learning. It is therefore possible to speed-up sensor's data analysis and recognize people, faces, eyes, dogs, cats, birds, cars, trains and who knows what else in the future. As for underwater photography, there are countless tutorials on the best autofocus settings for both WA and macro. Even here the topic has been addressed several times for the now very popular Sony A7Rs. As far as underwater video is concerned there is practically nothing on the Internet, and I do not think the photography tips are always directly applicable. I was discussing this on Youtube and was told that typically those who make videos are less technical (users are more casual), all on automatic or they know their camera well and don't need tutorials. Will this be true? Let's use this thread to tell how you use autofocus in video, what is your use case, camera and how do you find it.

Imagine if a smartphone manufacturer would take only the photo subsystem of a top of gamma smartphone and put it in an action camera...

However, action cam (and other) technology is years behind smartphones that already have PDAF long ago and beyond.

Exactly. I follow this crazy guy on YT. Always some out of the box content He made this video a while back and solved the focus problem with a diopter.

I see they have no extension (.jpg) so the forum is not able to render them.

Which kind of files are they?

The topic is interesting and complicated. I agree more with Dave. IMO big problems happen during charging. The battery packs have a circuit (Battery Management System) that precisely equalizes the differences between individual cells and also has a cut-off circuit that prevents the batteries from dropping below a certain threshold during discharge. I don't see any problems when using scattered batteries because after use they will be charged individually. Having a single pack is more a matter of convenience than anything else, and in any case we are not talking about huge battery packs like those in video lamps.

I have had several acrylic domes. IMO the big difference is in backlighting. Pointing the camera towards the sun, I have never liked the image rendering compared to glass.

Welcome aboard, we are glad to have you among us.

Do you have a feedback for their "macro" counterparts AOI UCL-03 and Inon sibling? Do they focus in a small distance range?

Welcome aboard then!

Hi Doublender, Welcome onboard! Nice photos indeed but tell us something about you and your trip 🙂

When filter hunting meets investigative journalism 😜

A quick search on FLB filter brought to this Tiffen filter: https://www.amazon.com/Tiffen-58FLB-58mm-FLB-Filter/dp/B001V5J3H4/?th=1 An "ancient" 2011 comment:

Did you mean 10mm?

These comments or reviews should of course be taken with a grain of salt. These are complex cameras that now do everything, and each use case has some features of the camera that are more important than others. Then underwater photography is perhaps the most extreme use case of all and within it we have further specializations that are worlds apart. Think of wide ange or underwater macro photography. For example days ago I was talking to our member @Giancarlo M. and although he also has a Canon R5, he finds that for macro-photography his R6 R7 (APSC) is unbeatable. In short, there is never a final verdict.

So it seems that the Magic has a lower filter on the green channel.

Humm difficult to understand with numbers and we are approaching "radius and entrance pupil" overthinking 🙂 As example this is the green channel, from the RGB value you wrote above. Unfiltered UR PRO MAGIC

Thanks Ben, Very interesting. Looking at the original unbalanced and white balanced histograms I see that the two filters are very different. Even it seems that the UR-Pro filter leaves a lot of green compared to the Magic Filter. You should photograph a color scale so you can better compare the two photos. Even something not accurate thst you can print by yourself: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Color_Checker.pdf

Great to have you with us. We hope you really enjoy the forum. As an old Wetpixeler, you'll see lots of familiar names here.

Thank you Andrei, now everything is clear. P.S. I have not seen a video from you in a while! Are you using th R5C only for photos?