Red Komodo X Autofocus | Is it Worth it After the Price Drop?

all right so I'm out here with my buddy Marcus and today we're going to be trying to figure out how good is the autofocus in the red Komodo X what's your experience been like been a little little shaky shaky is the best word yeah in my most recent red Komodo x video I announced that red had officially dropped the kodo X by $3,000 and the number one question I kept getting was how good is the autofocus because I think a lot of mirrorless Shooters are planning to pick up their first red let's talk about this autofocus so originally when the OG Komodo came out we got our first taste of autofocus from red and it was a little shaky that was because it was still in beta and when the original Raptor came out it was also still in beta we then got the Komodo X which took autofocus out of beta which was nice but a few months later they then gave us face detect autofocus which personally I was a huge fan of and super excited when it came out but the truth is is that kind of put autofocus back into beta it's kind of weird so if you are someone who's trying to figure out is the Komodo even decent at autofocus is it usable can you use it in a real job scenario that's exactly what we're out here to figure out now when you hop into the autofocus menus here the first option you're going to get is obviously to turn it on and turn it off which is pretty easy but then next to that you're going to get the different modes now your modes are basically single and continuous continuous is what most people expect out of autofocus single is if you just wanted to hit focus and then not move any further now the next option you're going to have after your modes is going to be the size of the box now the size of the box if you're using pH detect will change obviously with the size of the face but if you're not using face detect this is where you can choose between a small medium a large box from there you have your position which is where you want the box to be on screen and then down below you have a autofocus toggle which again allows you to turn it on and off but what we are here for today is the face detect autofocus now again you have the option to turn that on and off and then when it comes to the phas priority this is where making the right decision can completely change the way your autofocus actually works if I go in here you'll notice that you have first found last found closest and furthest underneath that you're also going to have when there is no face found well what does the camera do well you can have it pause the autofocus you can have it continue doing the autofocus or you can have it automatically revert back to the box one thing that you'll notice that I did not say is touch to focus there currently is no touch tracking autofocus on the red honestly that's a little bit of a bummer okay so this first test is with autofocus turned on I have the autofocus turned on face detect is currently turned on still under beta and I've got face priority set to closest found and uh as far as like no face uh if it cannot detect a face that is set to pause focus and this is the only time where I find the uh face detect autofocus doesn't work really well because the issue here is that like if I'm really close the background as you can tell is currently blurry as it should be and then if it loses me and then I walk back here and I come back in it kind of hits or Miss as far as like if it can find me again because I'm showing back up into frames so far away from the focus point it can't recognize me as a face it will not get me back no matter what I do and sometimes you get too close too fast and it loses you and then it kind of starts hunting and jumping around and nice thing is that I can back up really far and I can see that it does tend to hold with me pretty well right now I'm super far away from the actual frame um but as I start to walk back in uh it does a pretty decent job at kind of staying with me now that I'm coming back into frame it's doing that thing where it just kind of loses me for a moment and this is making this uh a little more challenging now as far as like how do I actually go about getting these shots well if you're filming by yourself this is sort of my recommendation I'm actually going to stop recording I'm going to go into my settings I'm going to go into autofocus here I'm going to choose to choose uh we're going to go on face detect and then when it says no face found I'm actually GNA say uh continue AF uh and so what that'll do is that'll actually allow it to jump to the background and grab Focus so now you'll see now this is the only time this is the problem though so now it's rolling on me which is great I like that it's it's got me it's got me locked but if it loses me you'll see that it will go grab one of those faces in the background and then if I come back hopefully it should jump to me and the reason being is that we have closest face detected now this is a setting that you can change but you want to make sure that you're choosing either the closest face or the furthest face if I were to switch it to furthest face right now it would most likely jump to one of those faces on the wall behind me it's interesting though because we have cameras like the fx3 which is not a traditional cinema camera that has phenomenal autofocus that's trying to get into the traditional space and then you also have a camera like the red which is more of a traditional cinema camera trying to do the autofocus thing and sort of get more into the Creator space so it's very interesting this is one of those features that I feel like if red could just nail it especially with like maybe eye autofocus or just really get good at Tracking not just faces but other elements they could absolutely take over because the image quality is absolutely unmatched but when it comes to the focus well there's a lot that's being left you know on the table dude you too big go that way go that that way there you go she am I kind of it's better I think so okay all right so let's talk about this autofocus thing so you've used it on a professional set what was that like um so I had a job where I had to get b-roll right and I said let me just use a kodo it has autofocus is going to help me collect some of the people that are walking back and forth um at this uh screening and what I found was like if someone was standing still and I wanted to kind of like give it some motion or whatever as long long as they were in the box it was fine it worked fine it didn't hunt or anything but the second they started moving or more people came into that area even if they weren't in the Box area it just seemed like it was competing for what to focus on so yeah it just it wasn't reliable yeah I think I think that's the most difficult part about this I mean we can see what it's capable of because when it works it works really well and most people who are buying this camera probably don't actually care about the autofocus but I know because it technically has it people are going to judge it for it because aside from the autofocus it's a phenomenal camera but unfortunately if you're using it for autofocus like if you're in like sports or weddings or anything where it's like Live Events and you have to trust that it's going to get that shot I don't know if I can comfortably recommend relying on this camera when it comes to autofocus to get that shot I I don't I don't I I couldn't either which sucks because it's there like you see the option in the menu you want to click on it and say autofocus small box medium box large box you know and U the fact that it doesn't really 100% work great for you it just it's it sucks so here's my request to you red one please keep working with the autofocus get the face detect autofocus working flawlessly and let's get it out of beta two tap to focus please tap to track to focus we need that because right now the only option is furthest face or closest face which isn't super helpful because what if you're in the middle so being able to tap on the face I want to focus on and have it tracked just to that face would be phenomenal I think these are going to be the updates that are needed in order to get it on par with something like a Sony or Canon Nikon we need to see this upgrade in the autofocus because as of right now I mean can you recommend the autofocus absolutely not I wouldn't trust it I I can't I can't either and that damn that sucks to say damn