DSLR RIG REVIEW

by Sebastian WöberJanuary 23^rd, 2010

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Another downside of the Chrosziel base plate, is that it leaves less free space underneath the camera than for example, the Arri, or Redrock base plate, which is usually useful when you’re shooting on small lenses with a follow focus, that doesn’t have the gear on both sides.

The Chrosziel follow focus however can have the gear on both sides. Actually it is as easy to switch the gears from side to side, as on no other unit we tested. All you have to do is pull the gear out and put it back in on the other side. Wow, this rules!

What takes more time, is the dismounting of the reverse gear. The reverse gear is an additional small gear that reverses the rotation direction of your lenses’ focus wheel. They built in this feature because some still photo lenses’ focus wheel turns the “wrong” direction while most movie lenses turn the other way. It’s a camera assistant “thing”. This is a cool feature when you only have lenses that turn “wrong”, but when you have an awesome Zeiss lens (or Canon) and a Nikon (turns “wrong”) on the same job, you need to take it off for the Zeiss and put it back on for the Nikon. In order to achieve that, you’ll have to unscrew two tiny screws and store the whole thing somewhere. Not great, but also not a real problem because you’re also stuck with two different focus directions when you don’t have a reverse wheel at all.

The gears of this unit run smoother than on most other follow focus units we tested and it also feels quite sturdy but no, it cannot reach the ultimate smoothness and ruggedness off the Arri MFF-1.

As far as flexibility goes, the Chrosziel follow focus is quite limited in range. It can only move horizontally, but it sits at the right height at 85mm. That’s an industry standard so this unit should perfectly fit in most cases.

This limitation, also makes the unit quite fast to use, all you need to do is slide it on the rails, attach it to the lens gear, and tighten one single screw to lock both.

We would have wished it had a clip on design like the Arri, which can be mounted onto the rails without taking off anything that’s in front, or behind it. At this high price, we think the Chrosziel follow focus could have offered more.