Using manual focus in video...

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I am getting a Phantom 4 advanced this week. For years of flying with a GoPro 4 on a Phantom 2 for about 4 years, I’m having trouble understanding why I would want to ever use manual focus for video? (I can understand for still photos). With the GoPro having a fixed focus, I’ve never once felt like anything has ever looked out of focus....so I’m a little nervous to even mess with it during video on my new p4pro. Any thoughts on this?
 
When taking video it would be very annoying if the auto-focus would attempt to "hunt" for maximum focus. It is best to focus to some far-away object initially and keep it there. This lens has a hyper-focal point which is quite close not unlike your GoPro.
 
My bird has been set to manual focus for video and stills since the first time I flew at night with auto focus on. All my clips were out of focus because it could not see enough to focus correctly. So it was all way front focused and unusable! From that day on I went to Infinity backed off a tick from there and never touched it since. Everything has been tack sharp since! Even at infinity everything inside of 20ft is def in focus with this wide lens. Of course aperture will make a little diff too. But I am mostly shooting at F4 to F 5.6 so there is still a lot of DOF given the focal length of the lens. So I would never use Auto for anything tbo!
 
Does the P4P have an autofocus mode?
Yes! But I never ever use it at all. These lenses are so wide angle that even focused one tick off of infinity everything outside of 10 feet or so is in focus. Im not shooting close ups with my bird so I keep it on manual all the time. It's been flawless. At night if you use autofocus you'll not be happy. Mine always focused all the way to Macro so all my first night footage was way out of focus. LOL
 

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