Emanuel

That Kubrick story is a fine example because it puts the whole thing in very practical terms. It is not about fetishising focal lengths, or saying one lens is more “cinematic” than another. It is about the fact that the moment you decide whether to move the camera or change the lens, you are already making a directing choice, not just a technical one. Much as with the recent example I gave from Leonel Vieira’s A NOITE, which was based around specific focal lengths, the 75mm and 100mm lenses I mentioned. That is not just a preference for a certain look. It is about camera distance, pressure, and the way actors are observed inside the frame. Different names, different contexts, but the same practical truth: once the choice is made consciously, focal length stops being just a number on the lens and becomes part of the mise-en-scène.

Interesting to see this thread again in 2026. Back then the idea sounded a bit futuristic, but now it feels like we are finally getting there from a few different directions. The iPhone LiDAR side is still interesting, especially with things like LidarAC, but what really caught my attention more recently is that we now have dedicated systems actually trying to turn manual lenses into something much closer to AF behavior. DJI Focus Pro is probably the most serious example so far. PDMOVIE is trying something similar too, though it seems a bit more compromised in how it decides what to lock onto. So in a way the original idea in this thread was right, just early. It was never only about using the iPhone as a clever measuring tape. The bigger idea was using LiDAR / distance mapping / external motors to bring some level of autofocus logic to manual lenses and cine setups, and that definitely seems real now. We are still not quite at “perfect native AF for any manual lens”, but compared to where this discussion started, it is no longer science fiction either. Has anyone here actually used one of these newer systems on a real shoot rather than just testing it at home?

I think @kye’s point still stands, and maybe it becomes even clearer once you move away from the usual zooms vs primes argument. It always comes down to how much convenience a zoom actually buys you, especially when time becomes critical. On a controlled set, changing lenses can break rhythm, slow down the crew, cost minutes, and sometimes cost the shot. In uncontrolled environments, it can be even more decisive, because you may simply not have the time, the space, or the chance to change lenses before the moment is gone. So yes, a zoom can solve a very practical problem: time, reaction and continuity. That should not be underestimated. If the situation is changing in front of you, the practical convenience of a zoom can become creatively important too. But I don’t think this cancels the OP’s deeper point. There is also another kind of convenience in truly understanding a given focal length. It teaches you where to stand, how close to be, how to move, how much space to leave, and how the scene changes once your own position changes. A zoom may save the moment, but understanding focal lengths changes how you read the moment in the first place. And this is also why I have never had any patience for the 2x, 3x, 5x terminology. I always prefer the actual focal length value, because that tells me something real about the relationship between camera, subject and space. “2x” may be convenient marketing language, but “35mm”, “50mm” or “85mm” immediately tells you much more about how the image is likely to feel and how you may need to position yourself. Leonel Vieira is a good recent example of this. This June, while shooting the making-of on A NOITE, I was able to observe that very particular relationship he has with focal lengths, especially his liking for 75mm and 100mm lenses, focal lengths he has often favoured and used there. That is not just a technical preference. It affects distance, performance, compression, the way actors are observed, and the emotional space between camera and subject. With those lenses, the focal length becomes part of the staging itself, not just a number attached to the lens.

Exactly. What you call availablism is central here. But with Wong Kar-wai it never feels merely opportunistic. The available does not remain simply available. It becomes emotional architecture. Pre-handover Hong Kong gave him the lights, the colours, the cramped spaces, the corridors, the streets, the reflections and the limitations. But the art is in turning those given elements into mood, memory and desire. That is the difference between just using a location and allowing the location to become part of the film’s inner life. In that sense, the uncontrolled city is not only a background. It becomes a collaborator. Wong Kar-wai does not simply take what is there. He finds what is hidden inside what is there.

The gyro control itself is not new, correct. But I don’t think the interesting part here is simply that “gyro control exists”. Of course it does. Larger gimbals, phone apps, remote monitors and systems such as the Ronin 4D have already explored that territory. The question for me is not whether the underlying idea existed before, but whether it becomes useful in a different way once the whole system becomes small enough, fast enough, integrated enough and unobtrusive enough. Many ideas in cinema technology existed before they became truly useful. Stabilised camera movement existed before Steadicam became the right combination of body, balance, operation and image. Small cameras existed before 16mm, and later DV, changed the way filmmakers could move through reality. Remote operation existed before it became practical in the hands of a one or two-person crew. So yes, if we reduce this to “a gyro controlling a gimbal”, then it may sound like nothing new. But if we look at it as a pocket-sized 1-inch 10-bit Log gimbal camera, with several focal lengths, proper monitoring, autonomous operation and a dedicated head-tracking accessory, then the proposition changes. It is not only the control method. It is the form factor plus the image pipeline plus the operating mode. A phone strapped to your head controlling a larger gimbal is one thing. A compact dedicated device that can sit inside a BTS, documentary or walk-around setup, become boring after a while, and follow intention without the operator constantly raising, aiming and correcting the camera is another thing. That is where I think the usefulness may appear. Not necessarily for everyone. Not necessarily for controlled narrative setups. And probably not as a replacement for a skilled operator with a proper camera package. But for small crews, making-of work, observational documentary, rehearsals, production diaries, street work and situations where the act of operating the camera visibly changes the behaviour of the people being filmed, I can absolutely see the value. In that sense, I don’t see it as revolutionary because gyro control is new. I see it as potentially revolutionary because a previously awkward idea may finally be arriving in a form factor where it can become natural, invisible and operationally useful.

During the shooting of IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, the lead actress, Maggie Cheung, complained to her co-star Tony Leung that she had absolutely no clue what was going on. He told her something along the lines of not to worry, because they would end up with a masterpiece. That uncertainty was not accidental, but part of Wong Kar-wai’s working method. Rather than starting from a fixed, fully locked script, he often finds the film during the shooting itself, shaping scenes, characters, rhythms and emotional tensions through repetition, variation and discovery. The actors may not always know exactly where the story is going, but the final film emerges from that process: less as a pre-planned construction than as something gradually found in the performances, the silences, the gestures and the atmosphere. It remains one of my favourite films, and Wong Kar-wai one of my fave filmmakers BTW : ) On a personal note, my own career in Asia as a filmmaker began there. Not only because of the beauty of his images, but because of the way he turns uncertainty, restraint and emotional incompletion into cinema. Few films are so precise while seeming so elusive, or so deeply romantic while refusing almost every conventional gesture of romance. With Wong Kar-wai, desire always seems to exist somewhere beyond the frame. The way the inner universe of the male character is developed makes cinema an internal experience: from the male character into the viewer. An absolute gem. Wong Kar-wai shoots the soul from within, and the inner world through the soul. Remarkable stuff, and yet it is there.

No. Remember: the First Amendment ; ) Secondly, we now have AI, and AI can be made to justify almost anything ;- ) The Soviet Union came to an end on Christmas Day, 1991.

WOW What a thread! :- )

Exactly, that is the interesting part for me too. I don’t think the best use of this will necessarily be obvious “POV footage” in the usual action-camera sense. The more interesting uses may be the almost invisible ones: situations where the camera is there, alive, following attention, but not constantly being operated in a way that announces itself to everyone in the room. Your point about parallax and offset is completely fair. If the camera is too far from the head, then the head direction and the actual camera perspective will never match perfectly. But I am not sure that perfect matching is always the goal. In many documentary or making-of situations, what matters is not to reproduce the exact optical perspective of the eye, but to reduce the burden of manual operation and preserve a more natural relation with the subject. That is why I find it interesting for BTS, documentary and observational work. Not as a perfect substitute for a shoulder camera, not as a Steadicam either, even though, as a gimbal camera, it belongs to a lineage that goes much further back, including the invention that so impressed Kubrick that Garrett Brown ended up operating his own system on THE SHINING. I see it more as a small autonomous B-camera, or a reactive camera system, able to follow intention without forcing the operator to constantly lift, aim, correct and therefore disturb the situation. In a film set, for instance, the value may be precisely in allowing the device to become boring after a while. If people stop reacting to it, or react to it less than to a conventional camera operator moving around with a visible setup, then it starts doing something useful. So yes, I think the strongest uses for it may be almost invisible. Not spectacular POV shots, but the kind of footage that exists because the tool reduced the amount of intervention needed to capture it.

Yes, but I don’t think it is exactly the same thing. A GO clipped to a hat gives you a small head-mounted action camera. Useful, of course, and probably better for some pure POV situations. And I say this as someone who actually owns two Insta360 GO 2 units and the GO Ultra. In fact, the GO Ultra was also used in the making-of situation I mentioned above, so I am not dismissing that kind of camera at all. But the interesting part of the Luna accessory, at least to me, is not simply “put a camera where the head is”. It is the possibility of using the head as a control input while the camera itself can remain somewhere else. And that is a whole different thing. With a hat-mounted camera, the camera position, lens, sensor, stabilisation, codec, monitoring and point of view are all physically tied to the head. With something like Luna Ultra, you are potentially dealing with a much larger sensor, better latitude/dynamic range, 10-bit colour, log recording, stronger codec options, proper monitoring, several focal lengths, a real gimbal system and a camera body that can be placed where the shot actually makes sense. So it is not just “POV versus POV”. It is the difference between a tiny self-contained action camera recording from the head, and a more complete image acquisition system where the head becomes one possible way of controlling the frame. The gaze and the camera body become partially decoupled. The head can guide the framing, but the camera can still benefit from a better sensor, 10-bit recording, log capture, stronger codec, better lens choice, better stabilisation, better monitoring, better audio possibilities and a more deliberate production setup. So I agree that an Insta360 GO on a hat is a valid alternative for some situations. But I see this as potentially more than that: not just a POV camera, but a different way of operating a small gimbal camera with less visible intervention from the operator, while still keeping the image quality, 10-bit colour depth, focal-length flexibility and production control of a more serious camera system. And the outcome is already starting to speak for itself. Even if the example comes from the competing Osmo Pocket 4P/Pro side, the IQ benchmark is becoming very clear. D-Log 2 10-bit colour: https://www.facebook.com/reel/937883892382597 Small pocket gimbal cameras are no longer just convenience tools or “good enough” secondary cameras. They are beginning to produce images that can stand on their own, with a cinematic quality that would have been unthinkable in this form factor only a few years ago. Back to the subject and to my eyes, this is not just a clever accessory. It is part of a real revolution already in motion.

I think the POV Head Tracker should not be seen merely as a vlogging gimmick or as another accessory for people who want to film themselves walking down the street. There are many different ways of filming, framing and capturing reality. The most “professional” approach is often understood as the most controlled one: you plan the shoot, you discuss the framing, you block the scene, you decide where the camera goes, you decide what the subject is supposed to give you, and then you execute. That is obviously valid, and it is the basis of a lot of good cinema. But it is not the only way to make images. There is also another tradition: a more intuitive, observational, physical and spontaneous way of filming, where the camera is less a machine imposing a pre-decided frame on the world and more an extension of the filmmaker’s presence inside that world. That is where I think something like the Insta360 POV Head Tracker becomes interesting. The question is not only “what can it do technically?” The question is: what kind of relationship with reality does it allow? When you are operating a camera in the conventional way, you are always doing several things at once. You are looking, framing, correcting, adjusting, deciding, reacting, and at the same time you are also visibly present as “the person filming”. That presence changes the situation. It changes the people in front of you. It changes the rhythm of what happens. It can intimidate, formalise, freeze or theatricalise reality. In documentary, this is especially important. The more you plan, the more you risk fixing the subject before you have really encountered it. You may think you are observing reality, but you are already working on a construction of reality. You are no longer only receiving what is in front of you. You are fabricating a gaze, and the subject starts to exist inside that fabrication. Of course, complete objectivity does not exist. Every image is already a point of view. But there is still a big difference between a camera that constantly announces itself as an intervention and a camera system that allows the filmmaker to remain more physically and psychologically inside the situation. This is why the POV Head Tracker interests me. It may allow the filmmaker to film without constantly “operating” in the traditional sense. The camera can follow the natural direction of the filmmaker’s attention. The image can become closer to a lived point of view rather than a pre-composed shot. Not perfect objectivity, obviously, but perhaps a more immediate form of subjectivity. That distinction matters. A head-tracked gimbal camera could be useful not because it replaces deliberate cinematography, but because it opens another mode of acquisition: a more instinctive, embodied, less intimidating mode. It lets you be present with the subject while still filming. It can reduce the gap between seeing and recording. In that sense, I see a possible historical parallel with what happened when smaller 16mm cameras became available. Those cameras did not simply make cinema smaller. They changed the grammar of cinema. They allowed filmmakers to move differently, to follow people differently, to enter rooms differently, to film streets, faces, accidents, gestures, private moments and unstable situations in ways that would have been much harder with heavier, more industrial tools. You can connect that to cinéma vérité, direct cinema, the Nouvelle Vague, the New American Cinema, Jonas Mekas in New York, underground and independent filmmaking, and later the influence of that freer, more mobile language on figures like Cassavetes, Scorsese, and the whole post-studio generation. Even mainstream cinema eventually absorbed some of that looseness, that handheld energy, that search for immediacy. Jonas Mekas is not just an abstract reference for me. I had the privilege of knowing him personally in the mid-1990s, at the Figueira da Foz International Film Festival, which he used to attend. In that same context, I was also fortunate enough to receive an award as best daily press film critic. More importantly, a project I am still developing today was born precisely from that contact with Mekas. So when I refer to him here, I am not only invoking a name from film history. I am also referring to a very concrete personal encounter with a way of understanding cinema as diary, presence, immediacy, memory and life. The technology did not create those artistic revolutions by itself. But it made certain gestures possible. And when a tool makes a new gesture possible, it can also make a new kind of cinema possible. That is how I would look at the POV Head Tracker. Not as “AI tracking for creators”, but as a small step toward a different relation between body, gaze and camera. From the end of last month and carrying into this June, I worked on the making-of for A NOITE, Leonel Vieira’s film adaptation of José Saramago’s homonymous play. During the shoot, we used the Osmo Pocket 3 alongside other cameras, including a Sony A7S III, an FX30, a Panasonic GX80/GX85 and other small-format tools, Insta360 included. The film itself was being shot on two ARRI cameras, so this kind of low-profile equipment was obviously not what people on a cinema set are most used to seeing. Even Leonel Vieira, the director, looked at the Osmo Pocket 3 and jokingly said it looked like a toy camera. But that was precisely part of the point. I took the initiative to use it without hesitation, accepting the risks of bringing that kind of device into a professional film set, and combining it with different optical tools, including black mist filters to create atmosphere, Sirui anamorphic lenses and other accessories. In that context, I became very aware of how valuable it would be to have a device that lets me film without constantly managing the camera as an object. Not to mention that 10-bit Log recording is now available on the Luna Ultra as well. In a making-of situation, the best moments often happen before people know they are “performing” for the camera. They happen between takes, in hesitations, glances, silences, rehearsals, small gestures, private exchanges, and moments when the machinery of cinema briefly becomes human again. But the moment you raise the camera, adjust the frame, move closer, correct the angle, ask for space or visibly operate, you can lose the very thing you were trying to capture. The reality in front of the lens changes because of you. And that is fundamental in a making-of context: to be as minimally intrusive as possible, so as not to disturb the set of the main film being shot. The reactions of the professionals involved are, in many ways, the real subject of a making-of, and those reactions should not be manipulated by the visible presence of the image-capturing device itself. In our case, we were working with a very small crew: two to three people at most. In fact, it was necessary to convince Leonel Vieira to accept a maximum of three people, because ideally he preferred two, and sometimes only one person could be present. In those situations, when only one person was shooting and I still needed two possible angles, a camera A and a camera B, the only viable option was to have a B camera as autonomous and unobtrusive as possible, which is exactly how the Osmo Pocket 3 was used. With a device such as the Luna Ultra and its POV Head Tracker, that kind of work would become much easier, not only during the shoot itself but also later, when reaching the post-production suite and needing more options in the edit. So a device that lets the camera follow your attention, while your hands and your body remain less occupied by the act of filming, could be extremely useful. It could allow the operator to be less intrusive, less theatrical, less visibly extractive. It could make the camera feel less like a weapon pointed at reality and more like a witness moving through it. That does not mean this is for every situation. It is not a substitute for composed cinematography, lighting, blocking, lenses, or intentional mise-en-scène. But it could be very valuable for documentary, making-of work, rehearsal footage, street filming, travel, observational cinema, and any situation where spontaneity matters more than perfect formal control. The professional instinct is often to control everything. But sometimes cinema gains power when we control less. Sometimes the most authentic image is not the one we planned best, but the one we were able to receive before reality became aware of our plan. That, to me, is where the POV Head Tracker could become genuinely interesting.

No idea about you guys, but I am in love with this tool accessory... pretty useful in those much different configurations: Head tracker, finger tracker/tracking, etc.* ; ) *shoulder mode: More comparisons here and there or yet this one too from same Chinese tester BTW. And here, more for the new Osmo Pocket 4P/Pro with the sample(s) of the new add-ons introduced (whereas Luna Ultra reaches 4K120fps across 20-60mm, DJI's Osmo Pocket 4P/Pro goes up to 4K200fps at the telephoto end). Haven't you bought a gimbal-pocket-cam yet? This is for those who will buy one then : D ;- )

Here's another from same 1st round of comparative tests: And about the Insta360 detachable screen vs DJI FrameTap remote: The sound in slowmo sounds just different enough too... Unlike the Osmo Pocket 4 / 4P (Pro), the Luna Ultra appears not only to provide 48 kHz AAC audio listed at a higher 32-bit depth — with true 32-bit float reserved for the external Mic Pro/transmitter — rather than standard 16-bit audio; it also appears to make 4K100/120fps available as a standard video mode, effectively usable as HFR when and where needed, captured as straight acquisition rather than pre-baked slow motion. That is a different proposition from restricting those frame rates to a dedicated slow-motion mode with more limited audio handling. So yes, both may offer “slow motion” (4K200/240fps with DJI) but audio-wise, this is more apples to oranges than apples to apples. And in slowmo, DJI does not appear to include built-in Mic Audio Backup either. That matters because, once high-frame-rate capture is baked into a dedicated slow-motion mode, the audio can no longer behave like normal sync sound unless the footage is brought back to real time. By contrast, 4K100/120fps as standard video mode is straight HFR acquisition: usable in real time with normal audio, or slowed down later in post.

Well stated @eatstoomuchjam @kye :- )

Indeed : ) https://freewellgear.com/blogs/news/dji-osmo-pocket-4p-vs-insta360-luna-ultra But: I wonder whether will Insta360 POV Head Tracker, or something similar, come to the Osmo Pocket ecosystem too? Will DJI eventually offer something like this? If they do, it might sound a little like DJI quietly admitting that Insta360 has come up with something genuinely unique this time or once again? LOL* ; ) At least for now... *disclaimer: happy DJI user here and just as happy an Insta360 camper... The FrameTap remote is interesting, but it is not really the same thing. The Luna’s head-controlled POV accessory makes it** feel like a more distinctive product: **AND Insta360 products, in general, BTW... : X