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Movie Menu

Lesson 24 from: Canon 1DX Mark II Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

24. Movie Menu

Next Lesson: AF Menu

Lesson Info

Movie Menu

Alright, now it's time to get into the secret menu options on the camera. In order to do this, you need to flip the camera over to the movie mode. And then hit the menu button, and go to the fourth and fifth tab which now have been changed over from controlling live view features, to controlling movie features. And I'll warn you right now, there's a bunch of things in here, that we just talked about in live view, but they have separate options for changing it, so that when you're in the movie mode, you can have a slightly different setting, than when you do in the live view mode. First off, is the movie servo AF, and this where the camera will constantly focus and move, and will adjust focus for subjects. And I'm gonna do a little demo here, but I need to grab a little subject over here from my prop stand. And set this up here in front of us, I'm gonna put my camera in the movie mode. So I need to go into the menu, work our way over to the movie servo AF. And so, now what's gonna happe...

n is, when I'm in the movie mode, and you can see I'm over here in the movie mode, that the camera will continually focus no matter what, and so let's go ahead and get ourselves into this movie mode. Let's, brighten up this image here a little bit so we can see what's going on. And make sure my camera's in auto focus. And so wherever that box is, is where it's going to focus. And I'm gonna do something a little bit dangerous here. And I'm gonna come out here, and so hopefully, well, I can see myself on screen. There we go. Okay so the camera is going to focus on me, and where's my focusing box? Right here. And as I get closer to the camera, it's going to continue to focus on me. And if I move out, it's going to focus on whatever is back there, and it's going to continually track, even though I'm not even shooting movies, and so it's using a lot of battery power right now. And the question is, is do you want your camera to continually focus on subjects? And so for a lot of people, they may not want this, definitely the more serious photographers are not going to want this, and so you can turn this off and just put it on disable, and so that way, you can choose what you want your camera to focus on. And so here I'm choosing where I want, and then I'm pressing half way down on the shutter release, to achieve that focus right there. And so the servo focusing might be good for kind of a mom and pop, who just want simple video and let the camera record video and automatically follow their focusing. The dual pixel system in this camera is really good. But it's not totally awesome when it comes to following and tracking subjects moving back and forth. And so, you might want to be a little bit careful about using that servo mode. Alright, so the AF method, we had mentioned this before, in live view, you can either choose FlexiZone, where you choose your own specific spot, or the face detection which is going to look for faces and subjects as well. We have a grid display which might help ya line up horizons and so forth. It's the same options, 3 by 3, 6 by 4, and then the diagonal one. Movie recording quality. This in my opinion should be listed the top of the list. This one is really important, so this is a sub-menu of the quality settings. And so first option, is do you want to record a MOV file, or an MP4 file? MOV is a little bit more popular right now. MP4 is a little bit lower quality, if you want a smaller file size. The recording size. This is the really important one. This is where you get to choose, whether you're shooting in 4K, or full HD or standard HD and how much compression rate you are doing in here. And so, 4K is definitely going to be very popular for a lot of people. There is a crop on this camera, that you need to be aware of. You're not getting the full image from side to side, and so if you're shooting wide angle, you might want to be looking at shooting full HD in that case. We also have different frame rates in here. Roughly 24, 30, 60 frames per second. And so it all depends on what your final uses are. And so one of the options in here, is choosing specifically 24 frames. Down here. And you can enable that if you want your movies to look a little bit more like the Hollywood movies, which are mostly filmed at 24 frames per second. There is a high frame rate option here. And I believe we can get up to a 120 frames per second. This is not available in all the movie modes. And so this is either a hundred frames per second, or a 119.9, if you want to get exact. And I believe it is not recording video, at this, and this is just kind of a way for recording a high frame rate. You play it back at a normal frame rate, and it slows it down by four times. (no audio) Next up, is our sound recording options. So we have another sub-menu in here, we do have a built-in microphone for basic sound. But if you want really good sound, you're gonna wanna add something into the camera, with that line input. And so if you are, adding sound in, you can control it, from the camera. The built in microphone, you can go in and you can manually control the sensitivity of it's recording as well. The recording levels, you can have displayed to you. You can once again have these automatically, or automatically set. There is a couple of filters. There's a wind filter, which will help reduce the amount of sound of the wind buffeting the side of the camera. There's an attenuator. Which will basically dampen really loud noises. So if you're going to have explosions, or doors slamming, it will try to bring that sound back into the range that you can normally record. The movie servo AF speed, this is something that we looked at earlier. We can adjust the speed, and one option is when this is active, for instance, one of the options we can do, is we can slow the focusing down, so that it focuses a little bit more smoothly, but slowly, between subjects. What we can choose whether it always does this, when we're recording, and when we're not recording. Or perhaps we only want it to do it when we're recording and we want it to focus much faster between shots. And so, always on, leaves it very consistent. And as I said before, as we demoed before, you can slow this down, and you can even speed it up a little bit. The downside of leaving it too fast, is it seems a little bit jumpy, which doesn't look good in the final video. We also did a little demo earlier, on the movie servo AF speed, and the tracking speed, of how fast it would switch to a new subject that jumped into the frame. And so this is going to depend on what type of shooting and how much interference that you have and that. And so, example on that, we can leave it on locked on, or responsive, it's on a subject, we have a new subject coming into the frame. Do you want it to switch to that new subject quickly, or not? Is basically the question that you're asking yourself. And final tab in the movie menu, we have the metering timer, eight seconds, seems pretty good in most situations. We'll leave it there. We have our same controls over the touch, we can leave it on standard, or go to sensitive. And then we can get into the time code. And for any of you who are into video, you know about time code. If you're not into video, this is not that important. But for those of you shooting video, there's all sorts of ways of listing, where you are in the video. And one option is to have a clock, that counts up from zero. How many seconds have you been recording. Or you can have a clock that is synchronized with other clocks, that is running off of a continuous time, so that if you have multiple cameras running, you can synchronize them a little bit more easily. And so, those of you who are into video, you're gonna know how you want to have this set up. For people who are just shooting simple basic videos out of the camera, the recording run is going to show you the amount of time you're recording. You can go in, and you can select the time, the start time on this. If you are having multiple cameras this is usually when you're using a multi-camera shooting, is when you'd want to dive into these menus here. And so you can have that set to be the same time as what you have built into the camera, or synchronize with an outside source camera. When you're looking at the movies, are you looking at the recording time, or are you looking at the time code when you're playing those movies back. And when you're recording them you can adjust any of these individual settings. You can also record it as to what you see on the HDMI when you are plugged in with an HDMI cord, using an external monitor what are you looking at, when that's plugged in. And then if you are shooting at these frames rates, which are not technically 30 frames per second, they are 29.98 after you record enough time, there is the option of either using enable in the drop frame, or disabling it. If you record for longer times in editing you may have a specific choice that you're using. For the average person shooting short videos this is not real important. But for somebody shooting a video that they're gonna edit, that's longer in length it can be important. So that is the time code. Next up is our silent control. You can control the recording volume on the camera, with a silent touch of the wheel on the back of the camera if you enable it. And this is a great way to control the volume without any clicking noises of that dial that it would normally make, as it's clicking up and down and around. (dial clicking) So when you're in the video mode, what do you want the shutter button to do? Because that's normally not really used for much. It's not used for video recording, but you can use it for auto focusing. And so if you want to use it for focusing, you can. Or you can turn it off. So that it doesn't focus. You can have it set, so that when you press all the way down, it starts movie recording, and so this is a, maybe a better, bigger button than the thumb button on the back of the camera, or a preferred button, or it's easier to get to, when it's mounted in some sort of video-rig system. And so you can control what that button does either half pressed, or a full press down when it's in the movie mode. If you are hooking up to an HDMI display there's a couple of different options about the display, and whether you get information on that display, by hitting the info button on your camera. Cuz maybe you're recording from it? You don't want to record that information that comes up, so you don't want any chance that it would turn on. Or you're going to be using both displays. Both in camera and external for some reason, and you want to make sure that they both turn on.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

CanonĀ® 1Dx Mark II Recommended Settings
CanonĀ® 1Dx Mark II Fast Start Class Slides

Ratings and Reviews

Fred Innamorato
 

John does a great job as usual. He provides so many visual aides and demonstrations which really helps you understand how to operate and set up your camera. His step by step explanation of the entire menu and each tab is excellent. In addition to his many photography tips and instructions. What an excellent class and a great value for all the detailed instructions provided. Much better than the manual you get in the box. Plus you get to watch this as many times as needed. I highly recommend this course and all of John's other classes.

Joe Berkeley
 

I quite enjoyed John's course on the 1DX mark ii. To be frank, I should have taken it 122,000 shots ago when I bought the camera. I learned quite a bit. There were only a few occasions when I thought my cranium could explode. But I walked away from the course with some great tips and in the grand scheme of things, the money I invest in education is always more valuable than the latest and greatest camera strap, lens, or bag. It will probably take a few months for all of the information to sink in but I'm feeling good about what I learned and the price I paid for it. All in all, a good value.

Ian Sherratt
 

Great video. Loved the clear explanations, great views and mixture of video and slides. Iā€™ve read a lot of manuals and books on settings and use of various Canon cameras but this is the first time Iā€™ve really understood the full range of functions.

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