For the longest time, I've been filming on Sony cameras, and I never really knew what
this button did on their higher end lenses.
Right now you're looking at the 24-70 2.8 and it has this button on here.
And once you figure out what it does, man, it can be quite the game changer.
If you're new here. My name's Javier Mercedes. I like doing video tech tutorials and gear
views on this channel. And in this video, I'm going to be talking about the Sony button
if you're into that kind of stuff. Hit the subscribe button with the notification bell.
Let's dive right into it. By default, this button on your lens is customized to be a
focus hold button. So let me show you what that means.
If you were to be taking pictures.
Right now, my camera's in autofocus. And to show you the specific one, I am
in flexible spot autofocus. So what this means is wherever that gray square is on screen,
if I have depress the shutter button, it will pull focus to whatever is in that
square. Same thing happens if I hit the back button focused right here from on the
flower.
I can pull focus to just the flower.
And then if I wanted to, I could go all the way over here to Mr. Penguin in
the background and then back to the flower.
Mr. Penguin Flower.
Now what holding your focus in this instance might be is if I were to pull
focus to some spot, click and hold the hold focus button.
Now, if I half depress my shutter, it will not pull focus to
Mr. Penguin. Also, if I press the back button focus, it won't pull focus to
Mr. Penguin.
But if I let go and repull focus, it will
do that.
No problem. Where this comes in really handy is with video.
Since I'm in continuous auto focus right now.
Notice that the camera's automatically pulling focus to wherever the square is.
And I'm not touching anything. It just wants to pull focus wherever that gray square is
on screen because that's what it's supposed to be doing.
But let's say I wanted to do a camera slide where I reveal Mr. Penguin from behind
the flowers, but I don't want to take the time to have the thing
pull focus like this. I just already want to have Mr. Penguin in focus.
So what I can do is pull focus really quick to Mr. Penguin.
Hit the hold focus button on the lens.
Set up my shot and do my pan like such and be like, Hey there, Mr.
Penguin.
Oh, hi there Javier.
Hit that thumbs up button. If you also use puppet voices while you're filming, the other
way that you can utilize this technique is if you were doing a push or a pull.
So if I wanted to do a push in to this flower and not have it try and seek focus the
whole time. Normally, if this isn't an adamant object, what you could do to cheat this is
just pull focus really quick on camera.
Hit record and then back up and then reverse that when you get in post.
But sometimes you can't do that with certain actions, like if you were to reverse
somebody pouring water.
It doesn't work because the water is going upwards instead of downwards.
So what can come in handy is focus holding.
So what I could do is pull the focus really quick where I wanted it to be.
Hit the focus hold button.
Back up a little bit, some autofocus, and then make my movement where I push in to the
spot where I want it to. boom.
Another cool technique here would be to go through the flowers.
So if you always have the same focal distance, you could just kind of go through.
And it pulls focus to where it needs to.
Or you could back up out of the flowers.
But wait, there's more. Let's say you didn't want this button to be a focus hold button.
Let's say you wanted to customize it to be like any of your other customizable buttons on
the back of your Sony camera.
Turns out you can. This is a completely customizable custom button.
If that makes sense. Let me show you where it is in the menu.
So when we go to the menu button, we're going to scroll all the way to camera options.
Number two and page eight.
Then underneath the first custom key operation, we click that in
scroll over to page three.
And lo and behold, there is our focus hold button.
And now you have available to you twenty two different pages
of customizable things that you could put on this custom
button on your lens. From the little bit of research, it looks like most people like to
do Eye AF if you take a lot of portraits.
But for me, since I do a lot of video, I actually kind of like to keep it with focus
hold. What are you going to customize this button to on your Sony camera?
Let me know in the comments down below. Is it going to be a focus hold or something
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Until next video. I hope you're out there living a life of abundance bye.