Only manual or also auto-focus?

[Emanuel A.]

* From a Steve's (Gibby) quote about the new concept introduced by RED.

 

[Gene Crucean]

This thing absolutely must have auto focus as an option. And if they are going to call it professional, it's got to be great autofocus.


IMO of course.

 

[brandon herman]

Of course you should be able to go "all manual" at times, but a good auto-focus can be a real help at times. Often I'll shoot my DVX in manual mode, but tap the 'auto' switch for a second just to lock on to something or confirm focus.

I'd like 'auto' as an option, but I'm not going to worry if the camera is manual only; that's the way I would have used it 95% of the time anyway.

I assume there will be a way to do 1:1 viewing, magic focus, etc....

Image stabilization is far more important for me. Shooting handheld doc work would really benefit from it. (Also, I'll be using Scarlet on a homemade skateboard dolly, and the ability to smooth out some imperfections in the track would be welcome.)

 

[divergent]

I say manual focus only - smaller, simpler, less moving parts. I agree on the image stabilization issue though. Interesting thought, with windowed 2k on the mysterium you'd think there'd be plenty of room for significant electronic stabilization capabilities - although I think heat, power and cost issues will prevent that sensor from appearing in scarlet.

 

[Fence sitter]

Why cost for the mysterium? When you look at how chips are manufactured you could make a 2k S16 far cheaper. Chip production is exacting and they are manuafctured as wafers of which are then cut to the final in camera chip size. With a S35 it is far harder to get a clean portion for extracting a chip and working around the faulty ones. With S16 (aprox four times smaller in area) you can not only get four more chips per S35 buty also work around the faulty areas far more easily. Looking at that you are looking at a price advantage of at least 1/4 the size of the S35 mystirium. This is why handicams have tiny chips....

Fence

 

[divergent]

Why cost for the mysterium? When you look at how chips are manufactured you could make a 2k S16 far cheaper.

Right, but I'm talking about using a 2k window on a 4k chip to provide a significant amount of space to do electronic stabilization - which means no cost savings like you're describing. I really don't think it's a likely scenario - it was just a random thought I had.

 

[divergent]

Actually, while I'm throwing out crazy ideas (and getting back to the topic of focus) - how about moving focus off the camera and into software, so it becomes part of the post process? Place a microlens array on the sensor to create a plenoptic camera - this would not only move focus & depth of field decisions to post processes, but would also allow true stereo images to be extracted in post from a small camera with a single lens. Of course it would also probably mean a max res of 320x240, but hey, you can't have everything (and you could make amazing youtube videos)!