Technical Photography/Video Questions

Howdy folks. Need some depth of field advice. I'm videoing small flying insects in slow mo, aperture around f8-f11. Depth of field is, obviously, my biggest challenge. Using a longer lens expands the plane of focus a little but that requires moving away from the subject and losing clarity of detail. Is there anything I'm missing in how to get a larger depth of field doing macro video of stuff that moves very fast? I've z-stacked macro images before but video is a different kettle of fish. Aware I'm probably just fighting against the laws of physics here.

Can you add more light?

Thanks. Yeah, I could centainly add more light, but if I stop up too much aperture diffraction becomes an issue.

Accidentally formatted a card that has a few photos on I hadn’t imported into lightroom. Any way to recover them at home or do I need specialist help? I formatted the card on the camera, a Fuji X100F if that makes any difference

The sandisk software as long as you haven't wrote anything else over the card Ive had success with before.

Ditto this. Forget the exact name Recovery pro, maybe? Got me out of a right mess a few times the past 20 years or so. Even with stuff written over the cards it can get some data back.

Laowa periscope lens?

Thanks I’ll give it a go

Laowa periscope lens?

Interesting, thank you. Does this expand the depth of field? Have read a few bits but be interested if there are any technical reviews out there.

Yes I believe it’s some kind of optical sorcery, they use it on a lot of food and drink TVC’s no idea if they go beyond 1:1 to true macro though.
probably best to hire one and give it a try.

Thanks for this. Any idea if regular Laowa 60mm macro uses similar optical sorcery to increase depth of field?

Also, and I know this is a super niche question, anyone know if a back illuminated sensor would in any way improve the effect of lens diffraction at high f.stops?

In theory a larger pixel size should make it worse but I wasn’t sure if a BIS could somehow mitigate as the pixels would have 100% fill factor.

No Idea but i doubt it, you can probably hire one to test.

Might be a goer. Cheers.

Help. I'm not good with computers but need to urgently edit some large video files (10GB) into a bunch of little clips. They're .avi format and Lightroom refuses to recognise them, what is the simplest bit of editing software I should be looking at please, please pretty please? On a Mac.

Imovie.
Lightroom is not a video editor.

Thank you but iMovie doesn't appear to support the .avi format. I guess I could convert to mp4 somehow but the chap who gave me the footage said that will cause a loss of quality. At this point, I'm close to beyond caring!

Davinci Resolve is free to download but a steep learning curve. Final Cut would be ideal and you would be skimming clips in minutes but you have to pay for it.

Do you have adobe media encoder? You can trim and export/transcode files on that in a very rudimentary way.

Thank you for your replies, really appreciated. Sadly Final Cut is too expensive for this one off, and I do not have the Media Encoder, again the only option is to up my Adobe subscription by quite a chunk.
I just used VLC to convert an avi to m4v and now it's lost the sound, I get the feeling it's going to be a late night.

Could you grab a free trial of something? Premiere Pro, etc?

I'd try using Shutter Encoder to convert to something iMovie will recognise (mpeg4 probably)

https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/

Are you shooting for broadcast or working in slow motion?
MP4 does cause a loss of quality, but for most uses it's hardly a problem.

Handbrake is a free, easy way to convert on a mac.

It's old camcorder footage from the 80s and 90s which has been converted by the owner from the source tapes. I need to edit out the sensitive/boring stuff before handing it over to a proper media team for a release campaign so quality is kind of important. It really makes me appreciate how far the world has come on with image stabilisation!

Thanks for all the free suggestions, I'll have a play.

.avi isn’t a format that plays nice with much. Your best bet is to transcode it using handbrake, turn it into a h.264 file, which is easier to work with and will be viewed by iMovie.
Make sure you get info on the file so you can keep the same information when converting/transcoding, so the file may be 1920x1080, 25fps, and with .aac audio, or something like that handbrake will let you match those values and just change the file format or codec..
Drop me a pm if you need to discuss more and we can chat over the phone..