Canon Vixia HF G20 Blurry Focus when Zooming

[amywe]

I filme outdoors in low and bright light so I've been using the Autofocus.  However when i zoom in and out the pic is blurry until I stop the zoom for the camere to refocus.  Any setting suggestions to make the zoom/focus a smooth transition? Thanks

[cwilson23]

Do you have any specific manual settings that I can start with? Primarily focused on taping soccer and lacrosse. Think part of the issue was I was having depth of field issues. I was shooting on a artificial turf field, it was sunny (unfortunately I had to shoot into the sun rather than having to sun to my back), there was a parking lot on the back side of the game with cars going back and forth. Again, unfortunately I was not able to shoot from an elevated position and was filming from the ground at mid-field.

[IamintheUK]

Given that you are not shooting from an elevated position using manual focus might be better for you. The reason being, in auto mode if a player passes close to you the camera will re-focus on them and then back to the field. In good light you should be ok with the focus set on roughly the middle of the field. If you zoom in you will have to adjust the focus. There is a setting in the manual focus settings that allows you to touch an object on the screen and it will adjust the focus for that object.

In bright light I would use the Wide Dynamic Range setting in the Looks menu. Shooting into the sun will not help with the exposure so if you can avoid it it will help. If you are not using a tripod make sure that Stabilization is turned on.

The best thing you can do is spend time going through the manual and experimenting with the different auto and manual settings, and then set up the user configurable buttons on the camera to the functions you use the most. The full manual can be downloaded from the Canon website.