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Well, I got more curious and pulled out the manual for my camera, just to understand what did end up in Lightroom Classic.
Post Focus does actually save videos. After you press the shutter, the manual says “a motion picture in MP4 format will be recorded. (Audio will not be recorded).” You don’t get a still until you play back the Post Focus video in the camera and press a button to export a still from the video. That answers the question of why they all imported as videos into Lightroom Class
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I see them on my camera's display as "post-focus play". I have no clue what that means or how it was set up like that…
By @raphaels28255986
I also have a Panasonic, so I thought I recognized the term, I think my Panasonic has it. But I don’t use the feature, so to learn more about it, I looked it up.
Post Focus is a Panasonic name for a focus-bracketing feature that many of their cameras offer, for choosing the focus point after shooting. In your case, the option was probably enabled unintentionally. The way it works is that when you press the shutter button, the camera records a 4K video while racking focus, so you get a series of frames focused behind, at, and in front of the current focus point. You then pick which frame has the best focus.
If the viewfinder says Post Focus Play, it’s offering to show you the series of Post Focus photos so you can pick the one that has the focus point you wanted. Because you said they all come in as videos, it might store the Post Focus bracketing preview as a video, similar to how a preview video can be generated for a Panasonic in-camera time lapse.
If you normally shoot in raw, it’s unlikely that raw files were captured in this mode. Most of these Panasonic convenience features capture in JPEG. You might still be able to get the JPEGs out of the camera by doing whatever the camera does to let you select and export the best focused image from the Post Focus burst.
Anyway, if you have more questions along those lines, it sounds like they’ll be in the manual for your camera.
Well, I got more curious and pulled out the manual for my camera, just to understand what did end up in Lightroom Classic.
Post Focus does actually save videos. After you press the shutter, the manual says “a motion picture in MP4 format will be recorded. (Audio will not be recorded).” You don’t get a still until you play back the Post Focus video in the camera and press a button to export a still from the video. That answers the question of why they all imported as videos into Lightroom Classic.
From this point, to edit them as photos in Lightroom Classic, you could do the following:
1. In the Library module, view one of the videos in Loupe view so you can see the video playback controls, and move the time to the frame you would like to keep as the still image.
2. Choose Capture Frame from the video playback bar. This extracts one frame from the video and saves it in JPEG format. In the catalog, the new image is listed in the same folder as the video it came from.
3. After you extract a JPEG image from each video, you can filter the Library view to show just videos and then delete them all, leaving only the JPEG images you extracted from them. Now that you have JPEG stills, you can edit them in the Develop module.
On my camera, Post Focus is one of the dial settings, so all it takes to accidentally shoot that way is for the dial to get bumped. This is like one of those cases where I forget to pay attention to the dial setting before shooting, and end up shooting JPEGs in Scene or Full Auto mode instead of raw files in P, A, S, or M.
I did notice the original video file is around 45MB. How large is the jpg file you ended up with?
By @raphaels28255986
The file size of my JPEG won’t be helpful, for several reasons. I showed still frame extraction using a normal video I shot, not a Post Focus video. My video was 2K (1920 x 1080), but a Post Focus video from my Panasonic camera is 4K (3840 x 2160 px), so a Post Focus frame would have a lot more pixels. Also, the file size of a video depends on the content and specific video format and compression settings that Panasonic uses to record a Post Focus video, and I am not sure if they document that.
Because Post Focus records a 4K video, a JPEG still extracted from it will probably be 3840 x 2160 px, and maybe (I am guessing) a file size of 1 to 2MB depending on content.
In the end, I'm not sure how useful this Post Focus feature is to be honest.
By @raphaels28255986
I don’t use it, and it sounds like you probably won’t. Post Focus is a semi-automated convenience feature that is probably the most useful for beginners who want to try focus stacking, especially for macro photography. Kind of like the built-in panorama feature. A beginner would enjoy using those features because you get quick results in camera, but a pro would slow down and plan out multiple manual exposures and merge their focus stack or panorama later, in Lightroom Classic or Photoshop.
Post Focus can also be useful for a beginner who has not yet gotten fully comfortable with rapid manual focus override to nail focus in tight situations, like trying to focus on a bird with thin tree branches in front of and behind it, to get the shot before it flies off. Auto focus can often lock onto one of the nearby branches, throwing the bird out of focus and ruining the shot. Post Focus would burst-capture a range of focus distances, so that you can simply pick the most focused frame later. In this case, instead of using Post Focus, a pro might use auto focus to get into the ballpark right away, and then quickly adjust the lens manual focus ring and press the shutter the moment the bird becomes fully focused and sharp.
One reason people decide not to use Post Focus is that it gives you only 4K JPEGs from a video. If they want full resolution camera raw images instead, the more hands-on focusing methods must be used.
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