N900 Videos

Mark Guim of thenokiablog.com demonstrates focusing on the N900’s video camera. The camera autofocuses on the center of the picture when you push the camera button half-way. Filming starts when you push the camera button fully down, but there’s no way to change the focus during a shot, so you can’t pan from a close-up to a distant view in a single shot without one or the other being out of focus.

Mark illustrates this with two sequences.

First he films his badge at close range. It’s in good focus. As he moves the badge further from the camera, the image goes out of focus, and when he pans the camera to a soccer game in the distance, the image is very blurred.

Going the other way, Mark starts filming the soccer game in sharp focus, but when he pans to his name badge it’s out of focus.

If you want to film close and distant subjects, you will need to capture two separate videos and stitch them together afterwards.

Presumably the autofocus is disabled during filming to prevent the sound of the autofocus motor from being captured by the microphones, but it would be nice if refocusing was possible on demand, for example by tapping the viewfinder.