Ditto. What Grazie said.
Tom

I know it's only a consumer cam, but my Panny TM700 allows me to touch the focus point on the LCD and it will maintain focus on that point - even if it moves.

...Jerry

I tend to use it when setting up the shot since it's probably more discriminating than my eye can be looking at the LCD viewfinder. But, once it's found the right focus i shut it off. Of course this doesn't work in all situations. In lots of cases, especially low light, the autofocus can't find the subject i want to focus on.

My home camcorder has auto focus but no camera I've ever worked with professionally has ever had it so I've learned to do without it.

Mike

Ditto too.

Learned my lesson a while ago so now it's either auto & then manual or manual all the way. I think the only way I do 100% auto is if I'm doing something where I am not behind the camera.

Auto --- anything always on is usually avoided by most of us.

My pan handle controller has an autofocus button and I do press
it these days because of my aging eyes.

White balance -- yep but still like using profiles.

Was he in the middle of the frame?
How much of the frame did he fill?

Most things "auto" in cameras are either averaged over the frame and / or have some centre weighting.

I've never used auto anything on our EX1, very rarely used anything manual on our HC5.

Bob.

The FX1 seemed to me to like finding things it really could focus on. Such as a wall paper pattern behind the subject. Never trusted auto again after that first test. On the EX1 I have a loupe on the LCD which is fine for manual focusing. Of course zoom in for setting focus. I also use peaking. So the combined power of loupe, magnified focus view, peaking and zooming one has to be careless to get focus wrong; yes, nothing prevents carelessness!

My pan handle controller has an autofocus button and I do press

That's the ticket! bought one of those a long time ago...

Was he in the middle of the frame?

Bob,

He was in the middel of the frame and filled aprox 40%.

When I had a choir afterwards all was ok (they filled 80 % of the frame and I was zoomed more out) on auto again, and when there were 2 guys in the frame and I had zoomed out some more it was ok too.

So I guess it has something to do with that too...

My TM700 is always on auto too :)

Thanks for all input, guys :)

/Ulf

I've seen that before. I received footage from a three day conference, about 6-7 hours a day, not a single clip in focus. Well, not a single speaker in focus, the stage bagkground were focused beautifully.

My brother, the bass player, asked me to "fix" this video that someone recorded of a charity gig he played last year. The video camera was left unattended, I guess, with the focus set to auto. All the foreground activity caused the focus to hunt. I'm not sure any valid subject was ever in sharp focus.
The same is true of the sound. Loud noises close to the camera caused the AGC to breathe. Whoever shot the video didn't have access or didn't bother to get a feed from the PA.
There wasn’t much I could do to help it after the fact.
[/amateur rant]

Hi John, just be a bit careful in relying on what comes out of the PAs front-of-house desk... you may end up with worse than your camera mic! Give you an example... extreme, but illustrates a point. When Aussie rocker (bless his soul) Billy Thorpe played guitar, even in a huge venue, he was soooooo loud that there was almost no need to have his guitar volume turned up in the PA. There was ample volume coming directly off stage. However, when you play back a recording "straight off the desk" later, Billy's guitar was absent, making the resultant mix very odd to say the least. Many ways to address this from my experience, but this is a thread about auto-focus which I will now stop doing! :-) Cheers, China.

The video camera was left unattended, I guess, with the focus set to auto. All the foreground activity caused the focus to hunt.

And ... the low light had the lens wide open (most likely) causing the focus shifts to be even more noticeable.

MANUAL setting is your friend!

I have the HMC150, and it does have a habit of locking focus onto the background.

I have to use auto focus because I am too slow to manual focus and otherwise have to use glasses to fine tune the focus. I can't manual focus a parade, way too slow and I will miss 75% of the action.
JJK

@JJKizak,

With my current housing, I'm stuck with autofocus on my scuba footage.

My camera also hunts around for the correct focus in low light or murky conditions. One workaround I have found for my setting is to use the "preset" for Sunset & Moonlight if it's overcast and I'm not inside a wreck. This pushes the focus out a bit, which is good for wide angle shots. But I lose the ability to take a macro shot if I need it, and the footage inside is no good even with the lights all the way up : (

You might try the Beach & Ski setting (or whatever it's called on your camera) and see if that eliminates the hunt problem.