My experience with the Preston Follow Focus System
Recently I have been at the Arri rental house learning a bunch of the equipment and one that is very interesting to me is the Preston Follow Focus. I haven’t used equipment like this before because it has never been in the budget but learning it and testing it out has been straight forward but also it took me a couple of tries to remember how to set up. You definitely have to keep in mind which cables to connect directly to the camera that are either for power, camera control or both.
Another thing to keep in mind is the motors that you attach to a zoom lens because when calibrating it, if not it’s not rigged nice and tight the torque of the gears can push back and offset the gears from the rings on the lens. This can be bad because you can strip the rings of the lens.
I didn’t get to use the follow focus on an actual shoot but I was testing it and it’s amazing how accurate it is to pull focus from a distance. Keep in mind that you can lose signal when walking around with walls in the way. There wasn’t any play with the focus wheel and you do have the option to zoom in slow or press one of the buttons to instantly do a snap zoom.
With the wireless remote you can pick your lens and it will know when to stop at infinity. You can also program it to stop focusing at a certain distance and it won’t go any further. The equipment is sturdy and robust which I like because anything can happen out in the field and having something flimsy made out of plastic is not ideal. This can also be updated through its firmware and has a second remote that you can use that will either override the iris or the focus. You can record from either remote and when I used it, it was on an Alexa Plus.
I really like this system, the quality is amazing and I highly recommend it. I hope this review has helped and I know it’s not the most detailed but maybe in the future I can rent it and do a full review on it.
