I will do some tests, but I may take the gears to a friend who is an industrial designer and get him to re-create them out of aluminum on the flo-jet, that will mean they perfectly match up and then I reckon I have a great follow focus. The gears on the follow focus ( you get two replacement gears in the kit as well, which is nice) don’t exactly match up perfectly with the ring on the lens, and this seems to result in the movement not being as smooth as I perhaps would like, don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely no play, and for focusing it is awesome, I just think that for doing pull focuses mid shot, it may be a little steppy, that being said it is still better than doing it without the unit, and it is way better than doing it on a video camera by hand as well. So how does it work, well, lets just say I am not 100% happy, but I am not un-impressed either. It has an area around the dial for marking focus points and you get a whip and bar depending on your preferred way of using the follow focus.
Step 3: Follow Focus – Adding this to the rails only takes a second as well, line it up with the gear on the lens and lock it in place and your done. I don’t think I will leave these on the lenses for day to day use as they look kinda naff, and when using the camera for still shooting, I can see things getting caught on them, they only take a second to add anyway. Step 2: Mounting the lens with the follow focus gear – The first lens I tried was my 80 – 200mm, which has a tripod mount already on it, which meant not only did I have a bit of trouble getting it onto the camera (I had to rotate it to the top) but it also meant I couldn’t just slide the gear over the lens, I ended up undoing the gear completely and then after it was placed correctly, I re-threaded the tension screw and all was OK. They give you all the tools you need to adjust the level with shims, which is pretty much done with several hex screws. The build quality is very high, with most of it metal and only the locking mechanisms being made of plastic.
Attaching it to the tripod took seconds, and I only had to pull it off once when I figured out I had attached the quick release plate to my camera at the wrong spacing (unfortunately Nikon’s only have the one screw for tripod plates, they don’t have the whole for the guide pin that video cameras have, so you will need to be careful thatthe plate is exactly straight, I wasn’t and when I added the Matte Box I knew it).
#Pro aim follow focus series#
You get a series of shims to raise or lower the plate depending on the height of your camera.
Step 1: Rails – The rails come pre-installed with a quick release plate that has screw threads for all the normal sizes, interestingly they give you two of each so if you ever lose one your OK, also, I discovered the plate is identical in size as the Manfrotto quick release plate I already had on my Miller which was nice but as an added bonus the tension screw can be adjusted if it gets stuck near your camera (the Manfrotto cant do this). Quite surprisingly the packing was excellent, they come in a custom molded set of foam, that you could probably pop straight into a Pelican case (and in fact I probably will) the instructions while sparse and peppered with awesome lines such as ‘The Matte box is mounted with foam so you dont have to worry about your lens during the bumps and grinds of capturing exciting footage’, it does have plenty of pictures and I only had one piece that I looked at and thought, where does this go (I figured it out after a good ten minutes 🙂 So I figured I would step you through the process. Additionally, things like rails are kinda hard to mess up, I mean they are two metal rods! So I pressed the go button on the order and what do you know, about a week and a half later they arrived. Now I’m not an idiot, I can see that a device that is roughly 1 fifth the cost of the real deal is not going to be exactly the same in terms of quality, but I figured worst case scenario the parts will be a good place to start to customizing it to fit my needs with new gears etc. I ordered the combo kit which consists of a set of rails, a quick release plate, follow focus with gears for different sized lenses and a matte box all for a little under $1000 Australian. They sell gear designed specifically for DV and DSLR cameras.
So with that in mind and the knowledge that I would NEED a set of rails for my new D300s, I went online and found a kit from DV Accessory’s called the PROAIM. So it goes with my DSLR, I really cant stomach the cost of buying a nice set of Follow Focus Gears, Rails and Matte Box, I would easily be up for around the 3 to 5 grand mark. OK so I am the first person to say ‘buy quality’ but there are some situations where even if you would like to buy the very best, you just cant.
0 kommentar(er)
