5DmkII AF

Hi,

Can someone clear this up for me?

I want to shoot video of a hockey game (my childs in a tournament this weekend).

I was planning on using AF Quick mode. Will this track and keep the focus on the subject as they move around on the ice or do I have to keep refocusing manually at the same time?

I haven't used video yet with the camera - first time will be at the tourney.


Thanks

Autofocus doesn't really work for video use. AF quick works by lowering the mirror and using the AF sensor to focus, but this can't be done without interrupting the video. The other AF modes do work in LV but are slow and useless for moving subjects.

There isn't really much that can be done here, in real-world video recording focusing is performed manually and viewed on a monitor or viewfinder with peaking, and focus distances sometimes measured out in advance when the situation allows.

Real sports are shot on cameras that have much more depth of field, and the lenses have dual AF sensors that scan in both directions at once, allowing the focus to lock on instantly. The AF point is moved around by a joystick and is much more responsive than the one on Canon cameras.

^ oh how i wished for AF when working the broadcast cameras for the Horse Track. lol

Well seeing how I work in the "Real Sports" world, I'll just say this. There is no AF for professional sports video cameras. It's all done manually. I have friends that operate those large, 17X lens, sports cameras and can keep a baseball in focus all the way out of the park.

I was shooting stills of my son's basketball game tonight and at one point I turned the camera back to horizontal and shot a few minutes of video. I was using my super cheesy, but highly effective jar opener focus lever on my 24-70L from the baseline. I had no other supports or apparatus to shoot video. It didn't turn out too bad other than I was too busy messing with the camera to seriously watch and follow the game properly.

Overall, I think that maybe you could actually shoot sports with these cameras with the right set-up, but there are so many other better options to do this. I was shooting stills at ISO 2000 and kept it there to shoot the video so maybe it wasn't all that great, but even with the basic focus puller, I was able to keep things pretty well in focus and that was with no rig, monopod or any other support. I was also shooting at f2.8. So if you had lets say a youth soccer game on a sunny, Saturday morning you could easily shoot it at f11 or smaller and have some super deep DoF.
With a rig, my basketball effort could have looked a lot better. But I wasn't there to shoot video. So I switched it back to still mode and laid it over to shoot in vertical orientation and kept shooting stills.

Yeah, my son's team won the game pretty handily.

Well I admit I was stretching it a bit, as there are few field lenses that can actually AF, usually reserved for the 27~100x range. Fuji's recent PF line of compact (13x/22x) TV lenses have AF, but no less than $40k for any of them.

Other than that, as ChasWG says, use a higher ISO (not much more than 1250, IMO) and stop down some. Jar opener for focus is more effective than it sounds, and cheap too.