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Author Topic: phocus impressions  (Read 3229 times)

robert zimmerman

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phocus impressions
« on: July 11, 2008, 07:07:53 am »

I would like to hear from Phocus users and their experience with the software.
The last tests I did with an H3D II 39, Phocus wasn't out, so I'd like to hear some experienced opinions before I test the camera and software next week.

I realise I will some of my questions will be self explanitory once I've treid the software, but it woud be helpul to have a good understanding and a little idea of the way it should work, to better judge its performance.

I'm mostly interested in how the software works while tethered to a Macbook Pro.

How fast and how large are the previews in phocus?

Is it possible to make extensive color and tonal presets that are applied to the files and shown in the previews? Can I tweak Phocus so that during the shoot my client sees something close to what the file will look like afterwards?

Can I process Tiffs and Jpegs while shooting, without loosing speed?

Are there interesting functions that will make life easier?

Renaming and cataloging functions? Curves? What about moire? Is there a moire tool that works effectively? How are the sharpening tools? Better to sharpen in Phocus or afterwards in PS3?

How fast is it setting up and getting connected?
How easy is it to set up, set ISO, colors, grey point, choose a destination folder and start shooting?

If the firewire cable is pulled out by accident, can I plug back in a keep shooting?

If I shoot to a CF card and then load the files onto my hard-drive, how easy and fast is it to load the files into Phocus, sort them, tag them, change names, do color corrections and save and process them?

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Kipling
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jecxz

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phocus impressions
« Reply #1 on: July 11, 2008, 11:44:56 am »

Hi Kipling,

I'm PC so I have not tried Phocus yet. Not to take any credit away from LL, but I have discovered a great Hasselblad forum and if you haven't already, I suggest joining because there are a lot of informed and helpful H users there--very glad I found it:

http://www.hasselbladdigitalforum.com

or at Yahoo: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Flexframe/

Join both, as both run separate topics and have good information for us. Be well.

Kind regards,
Derek
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vandevanterSH

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phocus impressions
« Reply #2 on: July 11, 2008, 03:23:40 pm »

I can only comment as a hobbyist using a CFV back.

1) The Phocus UI is much better than  Flexcolor
2)I was surprised that tethered function was OK with the Mac Book Pro
3) If you do most of your image processing using a previous gen Mac Pro, you will need to upgrade your GC.
4) I think most of your questions will be answered, in the positive, when you try it out next week.

Steve
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hubell

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phocus impressions
« Reply #3 on: July 11, 2008, 03:41:20 pm »

Not sure where your dealer is located, but is it not possible for the dealer to be there to set you up and make sure everything is functioning smoothly? Phocus has worked very well for my needs but my needs are quite different from yours. I do not work tethered, and I shoot perhaps 100 frames a day, not thousands with an AD looking over my shoulder.

robert zimmerman

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phocus impressions
« Reply #4 on: July 12, 2008, 06:07:35 am »

Quote
Not sure where your dealer is located, but is it not possible for the dealer to be there to set you up and make sure everything is functioning smoothly? Phocus has worked very well for my needs but my needs are quite different from yours. I do not work tethered, and I shoot perhaps 100 frames a day, not thousands with an AD looking over my shoulder.
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yes, I'll of course have my dearel set me up. I'm still interested in real experience though. Nothing like running a software through the hoopes under stress and with clients looking to discover any weak links in the chain...and I thought there might be one or two here that have done that and might have some usefull information.
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Bernd B.

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phocus impressions
« Reply #5 on: July 15, 2008, 04:00:03 pm »

I like the new color corrections tool. Helps me get the skintones away from that Hasselblad somewhere between carrot and purple tone to an acceptable natural skin tone without much effort.

I recently had a day shooting people with my H3D39 into a new MBP 2,4 4GB RAM. With the right shortcuts you can quickly switch to a full screen preview and from there on to a full screen 100 per cent preview. Both features are awesome and impressed my clients.

Processing speed isn´t very fast. After 300 or 400 pics the whole system slowed down painfully. I had to move the content of the scratchpad folder somewhere else to be able to continue. I lost the ability to have an overview of the whole shooting any time.

All in all I like Phocus. As I started only nine months ago with Hasselblad I never really invested much time in Flexcolor since I expected Phocus to be released.

Indeed Flexcolor was incredibly stable in the short time I used it. I was even able to shoot tethered into my old Powerbook 12inch 867 without problems. Two times I shot about 50 pictures and then waited for half an our after my portrait subject had already disappeared, until all pictures were loaded into the laptop. Flexcolor wouldn`t crash.

Bernd
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