Is it possible to acheive the same kind of focus depth with a camcorder like you get with film?

What I mean is that with a camcorder if one person is stood right behind another you would really only be able to focus on both of them where as in a film camera you are able to focus clearly on the front person and the person behind would be more out of focus.

This may be something to do with lenses and if so does anyone have an answer?

Sorry if I've not explained this very well, but it's kind of an odd question.

shallow dof is the holy grail of budget film making to me. Because of physics type reasons the bigger the ccd the shallower the dof, well you cant cheaply change that but there are gadgets you can buy that will do it - thay project the cameras image ont oa larger screen, thay are usually expensive sloutions and may mean modding the camera. Fiddly and pricey.

A work around is to zoom in. The bigger the zoom the shallower the dof - so get the camera further away and zoom in. This isnt often practical sadly.

Lighting can be used to highlight a subject as an alternatinve.

Also dof is less with an open aperture but I suspect you know that.

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You could always try manual focus and use pull focus and throw focus. What is rack focus by the way?

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You have a Sony camcorder (if I understood correctly) so you can use the spot focus feature on your touchscreen very effectively.