My follow focus arrived today, I got it from Alibaba. It's really nice and a steal for $150. Build quality quite good. And they give you a free lens air brush. The only other FF I've used is Red Rock, and this one compares to it.

So I forgive Vitaliy for forcing me to buy the GH1 eyecup that I hated and didn't work on my Gh2.

I got mine today. My first impressions are that it's OK and will be better in use than the Indifocus, etc.

The plastic parts are molded, not machined. I somehow expected everything to be machined, although it doesn't make much difference really. The blue area you see inside the knob is actually a soft plastic sticker. Not really sure what purpose it serves other than for looks.

A number of the descriptions mentioned "rubber" grip, but this seems to be "hard" rubber, like an LP record is made from, or it could simply be a plastic of some kind. Either way, it's molded and hollow, not solid and machined. Same for the white marking surface. It's a bit slick and my grease pencil doesn't really leave much of a mark on it. A dry erase marker is needed for this surface. Also, since the unit is hollow, any movement, touching, etc, makes that hollow plastic sound, which is a lot louder than you think on a quiet set..

The best part of the whole thing is the gearing. It's very precise. There is NO play in the gears, which are metal. The grease is a little thick and dampens the gears fairly heavily. It's not hard to turn but it's not easy either. The worst thing by far is the reversible gear setup. It's extremely loose and flops around. I had to bend the fingers of the shaft a little bit just to get it to stay inside the outer shaft. Even then, it has a huge amount of play, more so than the Huco gearbox of the Indifocus and it's cheap clones.

The rail mount assembly is very nicely machined and finished. It's not rough at all and the edges are rounded, unlike a number of the cheap-o follow focuses around.

So far, I'm impressed with the unit. It's not as grand as some of the reviews have led me to believe but it's a step ahead of what has been offered in it's price range before. If someone can address the floppiness of the shaft on the reversible gear assembly as well as the hollow noise that it makes, then this would make this the clear winner of all low priced follow focuses.

I have some thin self adhesive teflon so I might try to shim the shaft of the reversible gear to tighten it up. If this succeeds, I'll post the results here.

Hi,

i have this Followfocus but the rotational direction doesn't fit my needs.
Anyone know if it's possible to change this? an example:
if i spin the wheel counter-clock-wise the focus point is coming to me, but i want that the focus point is going away from me. hope you understand :)

greetings
Marcus

How well does the rod rig attach to a tripod (like the WF 717)?

@chip et al.
OK, so I just wrapped some blue tack (at least that's what we call it in UK/Ireland) around the crank to beef it up. Works great since blue track sticks as well.
But yeah, so much for standardisation!!

Can anyone who as the rod system do a review of it? Or do you know of anyone that has done a review? How does it compare to others?

Thanks ed_lee83!!

@brianluce

Moral - do not wait too long.

@brianluce

Yes, it's the same. That link is in the first post.

Has anyone tried to use a whip crank with it? I read that it doesn't have a standard sized mount, can anyone confirm that?

@Vitaliy

I'll leave that for Zacuto .... How about a 58 year old Grandfather that spends far too much money on camera gear?? :-)

@Rambo

Any chance to see video of the rig with beautiful girl holding it? Naked may be? :-)