PTZ IR Mode On Manual Focus Doesn't Remember Focus Point

[PTZControllerSA]

@bigredfish
Yeah, the camera is running IR at night, and most of the night presets are zoomed close to max (20–25x).
The reflective marker idea won't work sadly, as it's a national park, and so we can't place tapes there.

When I get the cam's status from the API, the focus numbers doesn't change from night to night, so the preset stores the right point, but it's just not in focus any more on the second night
status.Focus.FocusPosition=976.166530
status.Focus.Status=Idle
status.FocusMapValue=7513

If the numbers don't change, should it not just be in focus still? The profile is set to manual only mode, so there should be no readjusting.

I guess I'm worried that the camera is broken or it's just a known issue and I have to live with it.

 

[wittaj]

What you will notice, or at least I do is that if I put an overlay of the zoom number on the image, I can hit the zoom in or out like 5 or 6 times before the number changes - the field of view will adjust every so slightly but there are X number of steps within each zoom number that the lens can move.

I think that is part of it too.

Sadly, it is just a known issue.

 

[PeteJ]

I had the same issue, but with a different camera that also does not have focus presets, but does have a http call you can make to force the camera to focus in either direction. To make this work for me, I have a script that runs ever few hours during the day time to go to a preset, which triggers the auto focus, and then I switch the camera immediately to manual focus mode. This prevents focus drift. Then at sunset, I call another script to max out focus in one direction (essentially enable focus far for X seconds). This gives me a known position to start the focus back to where I need it, which I control by timing how many 10th of a second I need to get back to a known good focus point).

It took a little work to get this dialed in, but it works flawlessly now. The important piece is to turn off auto focus. At night, at extreme zoom, your camera might have a difficult time focusing.