Canon Lens With Mc 11 Only Continuous Focus 3fps

Unused stuff in stock: A700, 24-105, 28-135, Sony A100, beercan, 100-200, Sony 70-200f2.8 + teleconverter

Sometimes adapters have limitations on frame rate. It may not work on Cont. Hi, try Cont. Lo or Mid.

The a9, for example, drops down to 10 FPS with adapters for continuous versus 20 FPS native.

I don't know the a7R3's limits yet, but the A7R2 could only do it in Cont Lo.

Not even native lenses focus continuously in Cont Hi+ (10fps). I keep my A7R3 in Cont Hi (8fps) for this reason.

QuietOC wrote:

Adapted lenses will only C-AF at 3 FPS on non-A9's. The higher rates (>3) are only on the A9 with an LA-EA3 with updated firmware.

It would be nice if Sony extended this to other bodies.

That's what I have read and that has certainly been my experience with the Sigma 120-300. However, I have series of shots with the following set up where the C-AF is definitely working set at 8fps. I do not understand it but it happened.

Canon 400/4 DO II + Canon 1.4x TC III + MC-11 adaptor

I can think of nothing unusual about my settings except that I set tracking sensitivity at 5 with AF priority (but that is not really unusual).

The only thing I can think of is that I was not effectively shooting faster than 3fps, even though set at a higher frame rate ( I prefer short, timed bursts as it allows you to shoot a long time with the A7RIII before things slow down). Looking at the timings, only a maximum of 4 shots have the same time to the second.

I'll have to have another look at this. Certainly there is nothing to stop you shooting at 8 fps with a converted lens, but there may be no advantage to it if you have to keep your shooting within 3fps to make tracking work - may as well set 3fps from the beginning.... well in theory, because in practice this combination shoots in two frame bursts set at Lo - making it difficult to achieve the 3fps rating. So it may be that a Med setting with restraint will give optimum results.

Something to try!

I've taken about 2000 shots with A7R3 and Canon 400/4 DO II using MC-11 in the last 8 days, all in high, medium or low burst speed. As mentioned above, the first half of these were not taken with this in mind, but the results do provide more data to compare - and I am a very slow learner so I need as much data as possible. It goes without saying that this was not intended to be scientific and I only mention things like settings because someone else might want to make sense of it.

                                                                                            The main reasons I took so many shots though were (I) it was fun, especially comparing performance with the Sony 100-400 (ii) I wanted to test to breaking point because I didn't want to discover any problems in a couple of weeks when I'll be out in the wilderness (iii) It seems results with adapters really vary by lens and by person.

I shot on a solid tripod with gimbal (loose to allow unhindered movement) on concrete.
All shooting done wide open
Most shooting at 1/1500s with ISO set to Auto
Set to tracking sensitivity 5 to make things more challenging for me (actually if I had been doing a proper test I should have tried 2, which based on Sony recommendations would have been right for this case).
My subjects were people on the many boats (moving at many speeds, from tug boats to jet skis) on a busy stretch of river near my house - big, wide river one side and smaller channel the other. However, no eye AF or face detect as that would have been too easy. Handily most of the boats have a lot of lettering on, so that was useful for checking variations in focus in cases where it was less obvious from faces.

I haven't bothered to process many shots yet (may do if I have time - there is some interesting stuff) but just to give you a visual idea of the range of things I was shooting, here are a couple.

Put-putting on the wide river

Speeding down the channel

My (tentative) conclusions are:
1. Tracking definitely works in mid/5fps mode but it is not wholly reliable. However, I found that in many cases focus was switching to the background. This is actually good news because it is happening due to use of flexible spot (med). This does not happen in the preferred focus mode choice of expand flexible spot and a more locked on setting of 2. Obviously at relatively high speed it is not possible to keep the focus point right on your subject all the time, unless the subject is quite large in the frame, so the "expand flexible spot is great at reaching out to grab the subject when you do momentarily take the focus point off. That focus mode is not available with MC-11 and 400/4 (Neither is Zone, which I much prefer to Wide for well isolated subjects that are moving too fast or erratically to track purely by hand).
2. Tracking is pretty reliable at 3fps, but of course it does depend on skill, given the loss of the two most useful (to me) focus modes for tracking. Maybe I should try Wide more, but I unfairly view it as "spray and pray mode" and never use it. Zone is as far as I go.
3. Tracking with a 1.4x Canon TC was not noticeably less reliable than tracking without. Performance in general was not slowed down significantly (i.e. it didn't feel any different to me).

So, I will definitely use this combo, especially at it gives me an extra 20-30 minutes shooting at the beginning and end of each day compared to either the 100-400 (because of max aperture) or the Canon 5D3 (because of high ISO performance). It's tempting to use it more but it's clearly safer to use the lens on the 5D3 for tracking action, despite the better buffer and speed performance of the A7R3.

When I do use it in the future I think I will set it to 5fps, but try to use frequent, short bursts. If I don't need speed, will keep it at 3fps.

Oh and getting initial focus can be murderous. From a blur, it cannot acquire focus at all. You need to help it by manually turning the focus ring. Once it "understands" what kind of range you want it to operate in, everything is dandy and it can instantly switch focus from e.g 10m to 50m. I think there may be some kind of "calibration" going on at first, as this problem seems to be less maddening after shooting for a while.

Also noted:
Close focus is just so much better with the native lens. Reliability of the adapted lens dropped with closer subjects although it was still fine with relatively stationary ones. This is generally fine though, for what I would be using it for.

The whole thing froze once in a total of 4 hours. That was camera off, battery out, scary, "Did I brick the camera?" froze though. Otherwise, moments of madness were fleeting. Apart from the freeze and initial acquisition, I don't think there were any instances of strange behavior yesterday at all.

IQ was good - up to expectations - but the 100-400 files seemed just as nice at 400mm, which is a slight surprise. However, I was shooting 5.6 or 8 on the 100-400 vs 4 or 5.6 on the 400. Also was in fairly high humidity, over water, so none of the shots from either lens were lab-standard.

Finally, in bright light the flicker of the screen using high frame rates intensively for some time was actually a surprising annoyance and hindrance.
Wasn't that bad but since I had hardly even noticed it before I was really surprised to see it could hinder tracking slightly when panning fast action on a gimbal and pushing the performance limits. I wonder if the refresh rate of the viewfinder drops at all when the buffer approaches full.

I hadn't actually meant to include that much information but now I have said so much, I should probably add that I noticed no difference with stabilization on or off in these circumstances but they were not optimal anyway. I actually did this the first time to test panning at high shutter speeds because I'd had slightly disappointing sharpness with the 24-105 but my conclusion after all this is that this was down to poor panning technique (lazy basically) and higher shutter speeds definitely help too - even on the tripod and with slower boats there was a small but noticeable difference between 1/800s and 1/1600s. I'd still turn stabilization off if I remember though (definitely panning at slower speeds, turn off or set to the appropriate mode on the lens, if any). I don't see how it can be doing any good here. After surprisingly good results with the 400/4 first time around, stabilization wasn't my focus the second time though and I left it on always so as not to have another variable.

I suppose I need to go out again, away from water and humidity, and make sure.

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Source: https://www.dyxum.com/dforum/a7r3-cont-shooting-w-continuous-af_topic130754.html

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