I hope they work out for you! 😀 Lemme know if you find any different settings that work better for you - I’m always interested in possible improvements

Haha yeah poor timing on my part, but I do have the new firmware installed now and I’ll be testing it out to see how it compares!

Ooh great question - I completely forgot to mention this in the video. So if you have 3D tracking on AF-On and an area on the shutter half-press, it behaves differently depending on which button you press first. If you half press the shutter and hold it, then press AF-On, the 3D tracking will start from what it picks up inside the area (but it can then move outside of it). If you press and hold AF-On first then the area mode never engages when you then press the shutter. Something I need to experiment with is whether I can change the blocked shot setting whilst also triggering 3D tracking and AF-On, as I usually find it works better when stickier 🤔

Ooh always nice to see someone else attempting shots of swallows - easily the best way of filling a memory card 🙈I'd be curious to know how you get on and any tweaks you make to the setup!

@@robert_may Hi Robert, I did attempt shots of swallows and in addition to Shutter/AF-ON option I set the camera to Shutter priority 1/5000 of a sec at least. I got some great shots with these settings and also got great shots of a swallow attacking an Australian black shouldered kite up high (500mm). Very pleased with the results!

@@paulverma9770 Ooh awesome! Yeah agreed on the shutter speed - I tend to be around that speed for swallows too, especially as panning reliably with them is extremely difficult compared to other birds 😅

Ooh exciting to see a wild eagle like that! Yeah agreed - the Z8/Z9 are a bit slow to pick up a subject but once they have it they track it really well, even towards the camera. I found the OM-1 was great at birds in flight but bad at birds in bushes, the X-H2S not quite as good at birds in flight but much better at birds in bushes, and the Z9 seems to be a combination of the two and is good at both. Though I do have to swap the sensitivity between those two scenarios. The X-H2S seems to have improved a bit since I briefly owned it - my dad's finding it pretty reliable now. It is much faster at AF than the X-H2, I presume because the sensor is stacked and there's a lot more data to play with. And yeah I thankfully take fewer photos to get a good shot with the Z9 than the previous two cameras, though I have to admit I now take just as many photos because I'm getting so many good ones that I get a bit obsessive about it 😅

I actually haven’t used pre-capture at all yet, as I found that with the near-unlimited buffer I was getting similar shots just by pre-emptively starting shooting. There is a rumour that pre-capture will be getting RAW support soon, which would be exciting. Pretty sure you can combine pre-capture and 3D tracking. I’ll go test that out soon as I should really try it out 😅

I don't shoot many sports but I would think similar settings should work, although I'd probably change the "Focus Tracking with Lock-On" to a higher number, as you'll likely want it to track the person you've focused on rather than get distracted by others running in front of them.

@@robert_may Do you recommend that I do the same settings?

For birds in flight, I use either Manual or Shutter Priority. I have auto-ISO enabled in both 😀 I’d say most of the time I’m using Manual just because the settings don’t change much outside of ISO.