I’ve often found the use of video on my Kodak Z880 to be rather annoying. It doesn’t focus correctly often, and when ti does, it often does jump cuts every couple seconds. This happens at night or day, though night is much worse to shoot in. Here is a series of videos with differente examples of the issue. Being video, I don’t have any options to control the focus as I do when shooting stills. Got any advice? You can watch some or all vids for a good idea of the situation. They’ll be left up at least 2 weeks, though they’ll be pulled after that.
To me when it comes to night shots, all bets are off. I have a Sony HD camcorder that has a special night shot, but have yet to shot anything at night, but my twilight shots seem to come out great. The best advice I can give you is use a tri-pod, they can greatly improve night shooting.
Many of the videos were done with a tripod, when possible (and it is mandatory for stills at night). I know that was a bunch of video clips and that people likely only bothered to watch certain ones, but I wanted to show all the different attemps I was making to fix the mess, but it just doesn’t seem to go well mostly. In fact, at night, I often have trouble with the stills initially, but I can get it to stop moving focus when I release the shudder, so I try to do so just as it comes into focus, and then I set it to manual focus. Too bad it won’t let me do that with video. I think I even posted a couple day vids to show that the weird focus stuff happens then. I can’t imagine why.
I suspect that you’re asking your camera to do something it wasn’t designed to do.
Odds are it uses light to adjust the focus - and you’re not giving it any on those night shots.
Shooting through the windshield might be confusing it as well, especially if you’re getting reflections.
Can you shoot some of those images with available light in still mode? If not, there’s probably no hope in video mode. I suspect you’d need an ISO in the 1600 range, with a fairly long shutter - something your video mode probably won’t do.
This was shot with my Canon video camera, in still mode, with the zoom racked all the way out. It was foggy, but I still got a reasonably sharp autofocused picture:
If it looks familiar, I posted it on the Diner a week ago.
Auto focus functions by lining up straight lines. When you shoot in the dark it cannot see any lines, so it won’t work. Many cameras can project an infrared grid on the subject, but the range is very limited.
If you are going to shoot in the dark, you will need to focus manually. If your camera is incapable of that then you need a different camera or to just shoot in daylight.
Well, I can use tricks to get the still pretty much focused, but it does sound like I’m screwed, unless I can use my headlights right to flood the area, and that would only allow focusing closeby. The train would still be somewhat out of focus. I ask about the video issue, because my previous camera, Kodak Z760 did not have this issue at all (night or day), but the Z880 does (night and day, as shown in the vids). It’s as if they added new technology that didn’t quite get all the bugs worked out. I guess I’ll try to stick to the stills, unless I can light things up. Thanks, anyhow.
