Last year, DJI joined the L mount alliance. This ever-growing list is a shared commitment to collaboration and a degree of interoperability between some products from each of the seven brands, with each bringing their unique vision and talents.
DJI’s vision and talent in this band of cohorts appear to be LiDAR autofocus systems. The company, along with Panasonic, has announced a new collaboration to add support for DJI’s LiDAR system in Panasonic mirrorless cameras.
The announcement was made at Photo & Imaging Shanghai in China. Initially, there wasn’t a massive amount of information making its way to the outside world. PetaPixel, however, has received some clarification from Panasonic about the news.
Expanded direct gimbal communication
It seems there are two parts to the announcement. The first involves DJI’s gimbals and Active Track when used with Panasonic mirrorless cameras. This is DJI’s system that uses the view that your camera sees in order to track a subject.
Traditionally, when using DJI’s system, you’d use the RavenEye HDMI transmitter that beams the camera’s view to the gimbal wirelessly. The gimbal would know what it’s tracking and instruct itself to turn accordingly. The RavenEye is typically required for this.
With Panasonic cameras, however, the situation is a little different. Many of Panasonic’s cameras allow connection to the DJI RS 2 (buy here), RSC 2 (buy here) and RS 3 (buy here) gimbals over USB. This means you don’t need to buy more hardware.
The news now is that the Panasonic S5 II (buy here) and S5 IIX (buy here) have been listed to that list of cameras. This brings the total list for full-frame L mount cameras up to seven, if we include the Panasonic Lumix BS1H (buy here). For Micro Four Thirds, four cameras are currently supported, including the GH6 (buy here), GH5 II (buy here), GH5S (buy here) and G9 (buy here).
It seems that this compatibility is becoming something of a trend between the two companies that provides obvious benefits for both DJI and Panasonic customers.
DJI LiDAR autofocus coming to Panasonic Mirrorless
Now, this one’s very interesting. DJI’s LiDAR system was introduced in 2020 and it caused quite a bit of a stir. For a refresher of how it works and why it was such a big deal, here’s a video that was released at the time by MAKE. ART. NOW.
It’s a pretty killer system, in principle. However, it’s not perfect. It doesn’t work with focus-by-wire lenses that change focus speed depending on the rotational speed of the ring. And it doesn’t work even linear focus lenses that don’t have a hard stop. This means it doesn’t work with 99% of autofocus lenses on the market today.
DJI and Panasonic look like they’re planning to put an end to that, though. At least, for Panasonic customers they are. The DJI LiDAR autofocus system will communicate directly with Panasonic cameras instead of the mechanical follow focus motor.
This means it can get the focus distance from the DJI LiDAR system and then tell the lens to focus to that distance natively, as if you’d half-pressed the shutter. It would simply be bypassing Panasonic’s Depth-from-Defocus (DfD) autofocus system, as well as the phase-detect autofocus system in the two cameras that currently have it.
Despite the increased compatibility, though, LiDAR focus will be a tough sell for many videographers and filmmakers. You can’t really see what you’re focusing on all that easily because it’s separate from the sensor. You also can’t move the autofocus point around to different parts of the frame, which limits composition.
But, if some filmmakers don’t take up the tech in its early, low-demand days, then it’ll never develop into the tech that becomes the next-generation’s must-have feature.
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