I had the opportunity to use my cinegears follow focus on a job yesterday, and I wanted to pass on the feed back from my camera assistant.
Overall, he liked the unit. He found it accurate, repeatable and reliable. He did have a few pieces of constructive criticism though. They are –
The fact that just pressing the button on the motor reverses direction of the motor rotation concerned him. Often on film sets, when shooting handheld, the camera is handed off to grips between takes. It would be very easy for someone to accidentaly bump the button on the motor reversing the direction. That would lead to a blown take when the camera goes back up on the operators shoulder. I see several potential solutions to this problem. 1 put a physical guard around the button to make it difficult to bump, or 2 require that the button be pressed for 3 seconds to activate the direction reverse. Or 3, remap this function to the handset rather than the motor.
The magnetic marking rings are nice, but it would be better if they could only go on one way. This would avoid confusion when swapping lenses, and avoid the possibility of having a focus ring mounted incorrectly or being dislodged between takes. Simple fixes to this problem would be either an indexing pin on the handset, or a simpler solution which would not require retooling would be to reverse the polarity of 2 out of the 3 magnets on the focus disc and handset so that it would only go on one way.
I continue to be impressed by this unit, and hope to see it mature into a truly professional product. Let me know when the new handset and motor are available.
Thanks,