EOS R1 Eye Control AF unreliable for sports or tracking birds in flight

[ercmicwil]

disappointed with eye controlled Autofocus on the Canon R1

I am curious how others are using eye controlled auto focus (EC AF) or if most people just don't bother with it at all. 

I use back button autofocus, and I find it annoying that it may initially focus on where the eye controller is placed, but then it will jump to wherever I last placed a focus point using the smart controller.  

Maybe I am wrong to use the Smart Controller to activate AF?

I'm also conflicted by how close my eye needs to be. I have a tendency to try to get really close to the view finder to prevent stray light from interfering, but maybe this is the wrong approach. 

I have two different profiles set up, with or without glasses, and I always calibrate before shooting. At least I try, it always seems to fail when I'm out in bright light. 

So far, it seems that EC AF is least reliable exactly where I had the highest hopes for it, which is fast paced action in sports, or out tracking birds in flight. 

Where do you use EC AF? Are you happy with your success rate? Does it not like blue eyes? I just don't get it. Unfortunately it was a major selling point for me and I'm just not that stoked on it at the moment. 

I have confirmed that I have whole area tracking Servo AF turned on. 

[ercmicwil · Accepted solution]

I'm going to answer my own question to a small extent. I found that you need to set the AF area to whole area AF. If you don't use that, rather stupidly the eye control AF is kind of meaningless. While you can have the eye tracker flying all over the EVF it's not going to change the AF area from any other smaller AF area you have s/elected, you'd have to move the AF point over to where the eye tracker is floating but what would be the value in that? 

I wish that Canon would just make it default to whole area AF when you select eye control AF. That way I could switch seamlessly between smaller AF zones that I manually move, to eye controlled AF for fast action. I don't think I would use the whole area AF setting for anything other than eye controlled AF. But maybe I better test that!