Pulling focus on the new GH4?

So I got the new GH4 with the Lumix 20mm f1.7 pancake lens and i don't seem to understand how to pull focus with this setup.

the lens focus ring is "focus by wire" and from ~5ft to infinity is a relatively small turn on the focus ring but from 5in to 5ft is a couple full turns of the focus ring.. is there any way to speed up the focusing speed?


the pancake lens is also very short and i do not have a follow-focus or a shoulder rig so 1. when i move the focus ring with my hand it hits the camera (which can be fixed with a follow focus) but more importantly:

2. without a tripod (and even with a tripod) there is some camera shakiness induced by turning the focus ring..is there any way to avoid this?

with the peaking feature and manual focusing on a canon camera, i have a good idea of how to turn the focus ring for the distances but it seems like these small logistical issues are bigger problems for me


thanks in advance
 
Sounds like it just might not be a good lens for video work, unless you're planning to use auto focus. This is why a lot of people prefer older manual lenses from nikon, etc, or their modern equivalents from zeiss, rokinon, etc. Lenses like the panasonic are optimized for autofocus performance and just don't work particularly well in manual mode - which is probably made worse in the case of a pancake lens where functionality & ergonomics have been traded off for maximum compactness. If you want to stick with a lens that can work for auto/still work as well as video, something like olympus' 17mm f/1.8 is likely to work a lot better for manual focus simply because it's much larger.
 
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