ACTi KCM-5311E: Tweaking Autofocus?

[PeteCress 0]

I'm about to move my new 5311 into "Production", looking out over a bay from somebody's second-story lanai.

 

The current view is as in the righthand window in this screen snap: http://tinyurl.com/8skawhu

 

I intend to zoom the new cam so that the green flag is on the right side of the frame and the hotel in the distance is still on the left.

 

The problem I'm expecting is that those two phone poles are going to confuse AutoFocus.

 

The Question:

 

Should I look for some way to map the area AutoFocus works with - like one can map motion sensing? Or should I just turn AutoFocus off, focus the thing, and leave it?

[buellwinkle 0]

Didn't even know you can manually focus that camera. I know on the 5211E and 5611 I never saw a way to manually focus. You can try and old school way of autofocusing by having it focus in a different direction on a point that's comperable to what you want and then swing the camera back. It should re-focus unless you change the focal length.

[Razer_SE 0]

Depends on what it does for your shot, I have a couple of the 5211e cameras that I've had to resort to manual focus as they could never quite get focused correctly. Test it and just know that you can set focus if you have to easily.

 

The manual focus is in the PTZ menu, I focused with the default 5 point steps to get it close and then focused using the 1 point steps to get it perfect. Some of my cameras seemed to refocus during big light changes and this fixed that too.