Lessons

Lesson Info

Live View And Movie Mode

Working our way around the back of the camera, we have our menu button, and that is the whole second half of the class. So, we have lots to talk about in here, but we're gonna save that for another section of the class. The INFO button, never hurts to push the INFO button. So, if you press the INFO button, you'll be able to pull up different sets of information. And let me just kinda show you on the back of my camera real quick. And I'm gonna go through these same ones. First off, it's having it completely turned off. One's gonna show us some basic information. One thing to note is that down here in the brackets, it's showing me how many images I get, and this actually counts up to 10,000. So I can see that I'm gonna get 8,190 shots, approximately, left on this memory card. We have our little horizon line here. So, for all you pilots out there, you can feel like you're flying your camera here. When you get that green line, that means you've got it level left and right. But then if I wa...

nna get it level front and back, it's very sensitive and I think that's about the best I can do right there, which is pretty close. And then if we hit this again, we get our standard screen, which I've been showing you before, where it's got our shutter speeds and apertures. And this is the default one. If we go to one more, this is a customizable one. And this is something that's really cool because you can change what you see in here and how big it is. And I'm gonna be showing you, in the menu section where we get to customize this, what it looks like to customize and what some of the options are. This is something that you can really make your own and you can have bigger fonts, if you wanna have bigger fonts in there, which is kinda cool. Nice new features being able to customize that INFO screen. And as I mentioned, you'll be able to see the total number of shots on that one camera setting's screen right there, up to at least 10,000. Now, you'll be able to go in and control these, and if you don't use, let's say you don't use the electronic level and you don't find that very helpful, you can turn that off. You can uncheck that box by going into set up menu #2, looking under INFO button display options and then you can uncheck the boxes of the items that you don't want to see on a regular basis. Alright, here's a big one, folks. The Movie and Live View switch on the camera. When we wanna use the back screen of the camera for composing and shooting either still images or video, this is what we're gonna be doing with this switch. So, let's dive in and talk about Live View, first off. So, the switch has two positions, one for movies, one for still shots, called Live View. Once it's in that position you would hit the Start/Stop button to get the camera to flip the mirror up and send you the image on the back screen of the camera. From there, you can of course press the INFO button, which will have some slightly different settings compared to the ones we just talked about. So, always feel free to hit that to either get more or less information, whatever helps you out in your shooting. And then we're gonna be using the Q button, the Quick Menu button on the back of the camera, to access a number of features. Now, may of these features we've either already talked about or we will talk about as we got through the menu system. The one that I wanna talk about right now is one that's very important, is the auto focus system. And the auto focus system, in Live View, and in movies, is different than the way the camera normally works when it's held up to your eye for standard photography. So let's talk a little bit about what's going on here. So light normally comes in to the main mirror. Now, that main mirror is an unusual device because it is partially silvered in the middle of the mirror. So, it's a partial mirror that allows light through it. So, it's reflecting some light up so you can see it, but it's also allowing some light through, hitting a secondary mirror, and bouncing that down to an auto focus system, and that's our Phase Detection system, something that Canon has been working on for more than 30 years and is highly refined in this camera and is incredibly fast. Now, when you put this camera into a Live View mode, where the mirror is up, light comes straight into the sensor and there is no information going to that Phase Detection Auto Focus Sensor. So, 30 years of research and development have been thrown out the window. The camera focuses very differently because it doesn't use that same system. Now, the focusing points cover a modest, pretty good area in the middle of the image. This camera uses an unusual pixel system that is unique to Canon. So, with their pixels, what they use is a dual pixel system, Dual Pixel CMOS, which actually has two pixels in the place of one pixel, and it's able to analyze light coming in from different parts of the scene and determine if it is in focus or out of focus and which direction the lens needs to be turned to get the focus. And this auto focus area covers a much larger area, about 80% of the entire frame. And this is very, very quick in focusing and it's one of the best SLRs out on the market for focusing with Live View. We have a couple of different systems that we can use. We have a Tracking system and we have a FlexiZone Single system, which is just a simple box. We can also use our fingers to focus where we want. And I want to do a little demo for you here, but I need to grab a little prop from my prop stand over here. So let's just grab something to focus on. And I wanna show you how good this touch focusing is. Let's see if we can get things positioned right. So, I'm gonna turn on the Live View here. And let's set this in aperture priority, let's brighten up this screen so we can see it a little bit more easily here. Okay, so we have a subject in front of us and a subject in back of us, let's make sure that we're in auto focus. If I change my auto focus, I have the choice between Single and Tracking. I'm gonna go with the single point here. If I touch on the screen, let's see. It's not focusing, why is it not focusing? Let's make sure I got the right thing going on here. And I think I have gone into the menu system and I've changed some of the custom controls on the camera. So let me just adjust this back. And there we go. Alright, I'm playing around in the break times. So, touchscreen is incredibly quick on this, as you can see. As I say, it's gonna be the fastest of any of the SLRs that are out on the market. Now, I don't know if I can show you this other one very well, 'cause I don't have a subject that's moving around on it's own. But I can hit the Q and I'm gonna change this over to focus tracking. And I'm gonna select my subject here. I don't know if this is gonna work. But I'm gonna move the camera around, ooh, look at that. Let's see. It's not perfect, but it is tracking that subject. It's trying to adjust for the lighting. And so, you know what, I'm gonna switch to manual. Let's get this sucker some more light so that we can see what's going on. Okay, there we go. Look at that tracking. Now, if I press halfway down, it does lock in there. Let's see if I can move closer and further. And it's tracking that subject pretty well. There is a tracking system. So if you were photographing, for instance, a kid who's playing around, running around in front of you, it might be able to track that pretty well. It's not perfect, but it does a pretty darn good job of that. If you wanna switch to just Single focusing, you get to choose where you are focusing by just simply touching on the screen. If you want, you can use the little joysticks and you can choose to focus like that, if you want. That's a little demo on the focusing. I think there is a few other ones I wanna show you when it comes to focusing, so I'm gonna leave that prop out here for a little bit. But that is the focusing system. The camera does have a touchscreen, but it is highly limited. It's not something that you use in many cases. And this is kind of the main place that we would use it, which is for choosing where you want to focus. Alright, let's talk about the Movie Mode. So, if you flip it over into the Movie setting, and we're gonna get our 16 by, well, it's a little different than 16:9 crop. Depends on the system. But you're gonna see the top and the bottom of the edge cropped a little bit. We're gonna be able to press the INFO for more or less information. If we go into our Quick Menu, we're gonna see a similar set of controls. There will be some new features in here, for instance, movie quality. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. But you'll be able to go in and make some of those same changes in there. So, focusing system works in a very similar manner. At that time, we do have the tracking system and we do have our Single zone. I'm a dangerous person here, I'm gonna try a live demo that I haven't tried out yet. So, I got my camera in the video mode. And let's make sure that we're in the object tracking. And I'm gonna see if I can focus on my subject here. And I'm going to start recording and see if it follows that subject. Woo, look at that, folks. It is following that subject. So, I'm changing the composition. Let me try moving the camera a little bit forward and a little bit backward. And it seems to be following all of that. Now, if I press halfway down on the shutter release, it does lock that in, if I want, or it picks back up on it. And all the time, I am recording, right now. So, if I wanna play that back, we're not gonna watch that whole thing, but let's just watch a little of it here. Being able to track that focus, as I move that camera around, is pretty good. So, for a camera that shoots stills and videos, the focusing aspect of shooting video with this camera is pretty impressive, 'cause it's holding that focus right where it should be. Nice control on that. Not from me, the camera's doing great control. Alright, so that's a little bit of the focusing system that you can use on the Movie Mode there. Now, there is a number of controls that you have in the Movie Servo auto focus, where you can go in and you can control some tweaks on how that camera is focusing. And, you know what, since we're talking about Movies, and I'm feeling dangerous here, so I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna dive in to that menu section, that's something I haven't done here. I'm gonna dive in to the first part of this. And we can go in and we can control, actually, it is grayed out, why is it grayed out right now? 'Cause it's probably in the tracking mode. So let me take it off of the talking mode and see if I have access. Now I have access. So, there's some controls in here under AF speed and AF tracking. AF speed, I'm gonna change the AF speed down to something really slow. So, if you would prefer the camera to focus very, very slowly. So, we have an object in the foreground and an object in the background. And let's make sure, yeah. I can choose to focus on my subject. And if I wanna focus on the background, you'll notice how it focuses very slowly. It's finally in focus now, let's focus on the foreground. C'mon, keep hunting. There we go, it's slowly coming in focus. And if we wanna have our camera focus faster, and we don't always want our camera to focus as fast as possible, which is why 0 is towards fast, but not at the fastest setting. Because sometimes it can be a little jumpy when it moves too quickly. This is the fastest that it can go back and forth between these two subjects. Let's, just for kicks, set it somewhere towards the middle. So now, you can decide exactly how fast you want your camera to focus. So I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna just set that at normal. And another option is the Movie Servo AF tracking sensitivity. We'll change this to locked on. So, it wants to stay locked onto a particular subject. Right now, I'm gonna focus on, let's get this moved over just a little bit here. I'm gonna focus on our back wall back here. And as I go past this lens in the foreground, it doesn't really wanna focus there. It stays locked on where that back one. Now if I stay here long enough, it refocuses on that lens. If I'm on the back wall, and I just kinda pass by this, it doesn't respond and doesn't refocus on it. So, I can come into the Movie Servo AF tracking and I can change this to Responsive. And now it's gonna refocus very quickly. So I'm on the back wall, and it refocuses on the lens, and then refocuses on the back wall. Here it's where it's changing its focus. It sees something new and it immediately goes to it. These are some of the options that you have, I'm gonna get this reset back to 0, that you have when you're shooting the movies. We'll get into more of those when we get into the menu section, but I wanted to give you a little preview right now that this camera has one of the best focusing systems for live view and in movie shooting. Okay, so let's talk about the Movie Mode. We have a number of different resolutions that we can shoot at. All of these are gonna be cropped from the full frame, because they're a different aspect ration. The HD uses a 16:9 coverage and the full area, from side to side. If you want to shoot 4K, it's gonna be a cropped area within the frame. It's a 1.34 cropped area, and it shoots with a different format, it's a 17:9, it's a little bit wider format. Why they went with this versus 16:9, it's because of the file that they chose. I don't know exactly why they did it, they did, so be aware of that. Now, the camera uses a system called a DCI 4K, technically there are two 4K systems out on the market. There are other manufacturers that are using a 4K UHD system, which is 3840x2160. This one is true 4K, 'cause it is 4,096 pixels on the long side and that 17:9 aspect ratio. So, something to be aware of. For all of you who own HD TVs, your aspect ratio is 16:9, so when you shoot 4K and you show it on your TV, you will be getting black bars on the top and the bottom. That does fit a little bit more closely with the way a lot of Hollywood movies are made and the format that they have. But if you wanna get it to 16:9, you're gonna need to crop a little bit off on the sides. Now, the camera has a number of different compression formats in the video modes out there. We're gonna see one of the options of All-I, which is a format that gives you a lot of information that you're able to do pulling frames from. When you shoot 4K, it's using a Motion JPEG form, which is essentially a bunch of individual JPEGs, where each image is compressed and you can do easy editing on this because you can cut right to the frame and all the information is there. There is another format that compresses the information a little bit more so that you can get smaller file sizes. And what it does is it looks at objects that moves and it follows those. But any object that doesn't move at all, it basically kinda copies that information from one frame to the next. This is called the IPD system and it's gonna be a little bit lower quality, it's using this video keyframe, but it is gonna give you much lower quality files. And the way that I choose as to what I wanna do, if I'm thinking that I wanna edit with my materials and I wanna be able to get right to the frame editing, I'm gonna wanna use the All-I compression system. If it's a pretty simple video and I'm just gonna edit it to the nearest second, and that's good enough for my basic needs, then I would use the IPB system because it gives me a lot smaller file sizes. A little bit easier to work with in many cases. Depends on how you are working with your videos after you have shot them. So, some of the stats on shooting video, camera shoots 4K, also shoots full HD, if you want. There are a variety of frame rates that you can choose depending on if you have the camera set for the North American TV system or the PAL system. But everything from 24 up to 120 frames per second. Not all frames per second are available in all modes. You'll see this when you go in to select the variety of settings for the video functions. So the 4K is using a motion JPEG system, which isn't everyone's favorite file, but it is what the camera is using, and so that's what we kinda have to work with. The HD and full HDs are using an MPEG-4 format. There is also a movie and MP-4 option if you want smaller file sizes. We talked about all the different compression settings. And you can do a 4K frame grab if you want. I'm gonna do a little demo here on that. Let's see if this will work out. I'm gonna need to be in the video mode. And, first important thing for doing a 4K frame grab, is you gotta have your camera in 4K. So I'm gonna go into the menu and I'm gonna go to the movie recording quality. And I'm gonna get in here, and I don't see the set, because I think I was playing around with it. Let me make sure, I think I had this set, there we go. Okay, so now I see 4K over here, I can choose to shoot it at 5994. I'm gonna go down and shoot it at this, basically 30 frames per second right here. So, I'm shooting 4K, 30 frames a second. And you'll notice we're getting a little bit more telephoto out of this, so I'm gonna try to get this lens back a little bit wider here. And let's get some basic focusing action going on right here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start the recording. And just to make this real, I'm gonna come over, I'm gonna wave, hello. And I doubt that I was in focus, but now I'm gonna stop recording. I'm gonna come back, I'm going to play this, and I'm gonna wanna see if I can grab a 4K shot of me out in front. Okay, right there, that's what I want right there. And I'm gonna come over and there's a frame grab option right up here. I'm gonna hit set, save as a new still image. I'm gonna say okay. Now, if I didn't like this, I could go one frame forward or one frame backward from this. I'm gonna hit okay. Let's view the extracted still. We have previous images, we have our video, which we're in the midst of playing right there. I'm gonna pause that. And let's back out of that. So there's our video and there's our still image. If we want, we can zoom in on this and we can see how sharp it is. It's a little bit limited, it's an 8K shot. it's actually pretty sharp, there's pretty sharp detail there. 4K frame grabs are kinda nice if you are shooting something continuous, you wanna get a still shot out of it. And that's still a fair bit of information to get out of a single video frame and that's one of the reasons that they chose that particular format of shooting 4K video. So that is your 4K frame grab. Alright, so some notes to know about the recording options and the memory card options on this camera. Here's a relatively complicated graph. If you wanna record in 4K, which is a lot of information, and you wanna record at up to 60 frames a second, 50, 60 frames a second, you're not gonna be able to do that on your CF card, at least not for very long. I think you can maybe do it for about three seconds. You're gonna wanna have one of the newer, faster CF cards. We're gonna talk more about these cards as we go through the rest of this class. If you were gonna record the highest resolution at the fastest frame rates, you're gonna need the fastest cards. And as we kinda step down in frame rates and step down in compression and resolution, then you can start using slower and slower cards. If you are using compact flashcards and you wanna be able to use the camera in many different ways, look at 100 megabytes a second or better in the read and write speed of the cards. If you're gonna be just shooting standard HD stuff at the standard 30 frames a second, you can use a wide variety of cards in that case. Now, all of this is information I pulled from the instruction manual, page 316, if you wanna go back there and check it out yourself. Think about how you wanna shoot with this camera in a video mode and that's how you're gonna wanna spend your money on buying the appropriate cards for your camera. Alright, as you saw a little preview there, we're gonna be talking a lot more about some of the movie options and there is kind of a secret menu in the camera. If you normally just hit the menu button, you're not going to find a lot of those video functions that we had. You have to have the camera in the video mode and then hit the menu button, and then that fourth and fifth tab in the shooting section will show you a bunch of the movie options that we were looking at a short time ago and we will go fully through here in the second half of this class.