Some thoughts on the Preston HU4

I've been using a HU4 for a little while now and thought I'd share my experiences as there doesn't seem to be a lot out there about it. Obviously every focus puller has their own idiosyncratic way of working as well as their own preference for various focus and ranging systems, so I've tried to put it in context of how I work to better illustrate its pros and cons as I see them.

First impressions - it’s huge, and it is not an elegant design. Its like they mocked up the prototype in Lego and then just carried over that deign to the final product. The center screen section (though a little oversized) and the knob are ok, but the handle on the left that incorporates the joystick and battery bay feels especially chunky. Its like there was no thought given to the ergonomics of having to hold this unit in your hand all day (or hold it at all, really), which is especially disappointing given that this section of the unit has the user buttons for rolling camera, light ranger functions etc. It isn’t molded to fit it the hand in any way, just a big chunky rectangular block (though with slightly rounded edges).

It’s not particularly heavy (I read it’s slightly lighter than the hu3, which feels about right), but the balance makes it pretty awful to hold imho. I typically work with the unit in the hand, with a monitor attached to sit above it. Like the HU3, the HU4 has a 1/4” thread on the rear to facilitate this. I’ve always liked the feel of the HU3 with this setup (grabbing the unit directly - I don’t use the optional rubber hand grip). It feels well balanced and I have easy access to the camera roll button with my thumb. The Arri WCU4 by contrast always felt unbalanced, too heavy on the right hand side, so I had to grip it uncomfortably at the back (on the unfortunate occasions I was stuck with one). Well, the HU4 has this problem, but even more so. Its completely unbalanced for me when gripping it by the so called hand grip. Holding it like this for just one shot is uncomfortable, let alone all day - its a recipe for wrist strain. I’ve found holding it at the back is acceptable, though not as comfortable as the heavier HU3. But then you don’t have instant easy access to the user buttons.

Even gripping the unit without a monitor attached, the handgrip buttons are not so easy to access. The top one is ok, but the left and rear buttons aren’t where my fingers naturally are, and the camera roll button on the front isn’t super easy either (you can switch the button functions, but not duplicate their function… more on which later). Again, just not ergonomic. I found I mostly have to use a finger on my right hand to roll camera - this isn’t good for those times when you’ve rehearsed / set up a critical pull just before a take, and you have your right hand in a very specific place on the knob and don’t want to move it. And I have quite big hands / long fingers so I think this will be an issue for most people. Of course, if you mount your monitor on a stand or tripod, and especially if mount your focus unit also, the grip/weight balance may not be an issue for you.

On to working with the unit - its got that solid, robust feel you’d expect from preston. The buttons all feel nice to press, especially the camera roll button. The joystick is just like the microforce control, though now its 4 way instead of just up and down. The HU3 buttons weren’t great and tended to stick / stop working over time, and on (hopefully rare) occasion lead to the dreaded and embarrassing mis-roll. Problem solved here. The default camera roll button has such a refreshingly solid and definitive press and release. Big improvement.

The focus knob is just like the HU3, though slightly different (much better i think) in the way it is attached to the main body. Same size / rings etc as HU3. The knob light now illuminates the datum triangle pointer as well as the ring. The datum pointer occupies quite a tight bit of space; it is not really feasible to add your own offset datum on a piece of tape like it is on the HU3 (for the rare circumstances in which you might need to do that). Tension adjustment is tool free and much, much easier than the HU3’s rather ridiculous method with the tiny Allen key.

What I especially like is there is no mental housing around the inside edge of the knob like there is on the HU3, so I found it much easier to protrude a finger on the inside of the focus ring and execute a hard stop on the body of the unit. This is one thing I miss hugely from using a manual follow focus and always found awkward and often ineffective to do on a remote handset. On the HU4 the overall right hand feel is much nicer than the HU3 for me personally.

The screen is really nice. Very clear and clean, all the stuff you need to see without being crowded. Very easy to pick out whatever info you want to check on the display with just a quick glance. They’ve really nailed it on this one I think. Easily viewable outdoors in sunshine, a massive improvement over the HU3 (which wouldb't be hard...). Brightness is adjustable as you’d expect. You can also invert the display to have a white background / black text. Looks hideous. But who knows, someone might like it.

I never like touch screens on camera gear, although here it works better than I would have thought. I have no idea yet how durable it is. The menu button is physical, but once you get into menu options you must use the touch screen.

I did have instances of the screen getting touched accidentally, and it is possible to activate the LR autofocus by touch so this is potentially disastrous if you don’t have the screen locked during a take. Locking the screen can be done easily by pressing a certain two keys simultaneously, which also disables the physical menu button.

Expanding / contracting the focus scale by pinching is a nice feature. Not super useful 90% of the time, but nice all the same. Unlike the WCU4, there is no facility to add marks to the scale display, which would have been nice. As with the HU3, you have the option of displaying knob distance, LR/cinetape distance, or both. You touch once to cycle through the display options. The LR/CT info is in red. The knob distance display is white, but with the LR it turns green when any part of the LR detection zone has green bars. Again, perhaps not super useful in and of itself most of the time, but its a nice feature. The key thing is with different colors there’s no confusion - I found having both distance readouts on the HU3 display quite distracting most of the time.

You can lock/reset F/I/Z positions similar to the HU3, as well as set a limited distance range for the entire throw of the knob. The light ranger can be limited to a certain distance range too - it will just not display any of the rectangular bars on the monitor if the objects in that part of the frame are outside that range. It looks a bit jarring not to have bars there at all, and I haven’t really found a use for it - it might be good when there is a foreground obstruction (or, say, heavy smoke) and you don’t want to confuse a white (or indeed green) bar reading from your principal subject with a bar reading from said obstruction if you know your subject is gonna be further away… but then if it does pick up something in foreground outside the range the bars will just vanish.

Its menu user interface is completely intuitive for anyone familiar with a HU3. Mapping and selecting lenses, changing channel etc are very quick and simple, though I’d prefer a numerical input for the channel selection rather than the sliders they use here for each digit. There is now an option to calibrate any (or all) motors from the handset itself - though its somewhat buried in the system/motors menu rather than (more intuitively) being in the lens selection screen, and its quicker and easier in my experience to just hit the button on the MDR. You can now also view and adjust the torque and direction settings on the MDR remotely from the handset. All great stuff. One other nice feature is you can now reverse the direction of a focus/iris unit on the same channel - useful for situations where your direction of preference for iris on your handset may be different to the DP/DIT using an iris handset.

On to the “handgrip” user buttons… these are customizable but only to an extent. There are 4 buttons - front, left, top and rear. Aside from the nice big camera roll button on the front, they are small and recessed within the housing. Aside from the positional issues mentioned earlier, they feel good to press - similar to (though more solid than) the WCU4 buttons on the left handgrip. There are only 4 functions which can be assigned - camera roll, LR autofocus, LR hold autofocus (while holding down it ignores AF if it is on, and motor position/control switches back to the knob), and toggle between hybrid and normal LR mode. Each of the 4 buttons must be assigned one of these functions. You can’t, say, have roll camera or AF on more than one button. You can’t assign them to any other setting/shortcut either. Also, the AF setting must be set to either toggle or momentary, so you can’t have one user button set to AF toggle and another set to AF momentary. This isn’t a huge deal for me as I’d only really use AF to focus up on the slate (I can comfortably count on one hand the number of times I've used it during a take), but I’m sure there are more and better options for these buttons. AF is not implemented with cinetape. If you don’t have a light ranger, the three extra buttons serve no purpose as far as I can tell. I haven’t used the HU4 with the cineRT so no idea how that interfaces, but presumably its the same as the CT.

The joystick makes moving the red LR detection zone box easier, but its a 4 way controller, not 8 way. If you want to make your LR zone smaller and move to the right, you have to press down, right, down, right, (or down, down, right right etc) as opposed to diagonally down right. It works pretty well though, again a big improvement on the HU3. No zooms on my show so no idea how well the zoom integration works, but seems like it should just be like having an integrated microforce controller with the zoom data clearly displayed on the handset. There is a thumbwheel for zoom speed which changes the speed setting even without a zoom motor attached.

The unit uses different batteries to the HU3 - the same sony batteries as the Sony A7. I get about 7 hours out of a battery. The battery display has 4 bars, when it gets down to one bar the display turns from white to red.

This is a long overdue upgrade, but while there are some nice features it seems like they are only just catching up with the WCU4 in many ways (even just as the Hi5 is being released). There are a few issues mentioned above that can (and hopefully will) be solved with a firmware upgrade, but there is no escaping the horrible (at least for me) ergonomics of this handset, just so disappointing. I was playing around with a HU3 the other day, and it just felt nicer... while I will miss the display on the HU4 it won't hugely bother me going back to a HU3 on my next gig. But I'd still take it over an Arri system every time.

Any questions, I'll try my best to answer.