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Live View & Movie Modes

So let's talk about the Movie and the Live View Mode. We have a switch on the camera, very common for the Canon cameras these days. Let's talk about these in two parts. First part, Live View. So the collar is at the camera, the screen on the back of the camera, which means that when you flip it over to that mode and you press Start/Stop to enter the Live View Mode, you will see a live display of what's coming through the lens at that point in time. And so, this can be very handy when working from a tripod. I find it difficult to use when I'm handheld in many situations, unless I'm trying to get a very unusual handheld shot like really low to the ground, or holding the camera up above my head. For normal photography, I don't prefer using this. When you are in this mode, you can of course press the Info button. Remember, nothing is hurt by pressing the Info button. You can go in and cycle through four different screens and these screens can be highly customized. We'll talk about this mor...

e when we get to that section in the menu, but they can all be very much customized. When you press the Q button, it's gonna be a shortcut to a number of menu items, some of which we've already talked about, some of which we are gonna talk more about in the future. The one that I really wanna draw attention to right now is the auto focus method. And that is because auto focus, in an SLR style camera, is a little bit different when you go into the Live View Mode, and so let me explain what's going on. With a single lens reflex, normally we're looking at the information bouncing up on that mirror. But, the mirror is kind of unusual. It is a partially silvered mirror which means that it lets light through the middle of the mirror and this is when you're just normally holding the camera up in its standard mode. And a little bit of that light passes through to a secondary mirror down to the Phase Detection Auto Focus Sensor. This is how your camera auto focuses when you have it held up to your eye and you're using it in its normal fashion. When you put the camera in the Live View Mode, the mirror needs to get up and out of the way, shutter opens up and the light goes back to the sensor. And that auto focus sensor is doing no good at all, and so the camera has to use the information on the sensor and the contrast of it in order to figure out if things are in focus or out of focus. And most SLR cameras in Live View Mode, focus very slowly, and that has been the case for quite some time, and Canon has been trying to attack this problem and solve it and they have done a very good job with a new piece of technology they've been using in a few of their most modern cameras. Normally, you've got pixels, and they're recording the light. Well, Canon's done something special and they've introduced a special little feature called Dual Pixel CMOS AF, and what it does is it breaks those pixels into two parts. There's a left part and a right part, and it's covering about 80% of the frame, which is much larger than the normal focusing area. And this dual pixel system allows the camera to focus pretty darn quickly when it comes to working in the field. In fact, it is the best of all of the SLRs out on the market today when it comes to focusing in the Live View. Now, for this feature as well as a number of other features, we wanted to show you what this will look like out in the field shooting it. And so this is the first of our kind of bonus videos where we went out to shoot with this camera in the real world, and the first item we're looking at is this dual pixel CMOS, so let's go ahead and get that video started. All right, folks, we're down here at Golden Gardens in Seattle on the water. We wanted to run the Canon 5D Mark IV through a bunch of field tests. We're gonna have the GPS turned on because we're gonna be moving around here quite a bit. We want to check some of the video functions on the camera, we're gonna throw it through a little time lapse option to get a time lapse movie out of this. And we want to see how this works in the real world and what it looks like when we get back in the studio as well. And so I'm looking forward to it because it's supposed to be a great camera. All right, one of the big features of this camera as well as many of the other recent Canon cameras is the dual pixel raw, which allows the camera to focus pretty quickly when you're shooting Live View or in the Movie Mode, and so I want to do a little test here with somebody walking towards the camera to see if it can actually track that sort of action, so what we need to do, we're gonna be shooting a movie here so you can see footage from my camera as well. So we're gonna go into the Movie Servo AF, which is in the Movie Mode here, page four, and we are going to enable this, so that it is constantly looking for the sharpest focus wherever we are in the frame. And so I'm gonna need to keep my subject in the frame box that you can see on the back of my camera and I'm gonna go ahead and start recording right now and Jake, okay, let's do a slow walk towards the camera, and we're gonna see if it tracks our subject and we have a great subject for tracking, look at that grid pattern. All right, that's pretty good. It looked like it fell out there at the end, and so we're gonna try this again with a faster walk. Let me go ahead and get lined up here. It looks like we're good, I'm gonna start recording now. All right, let's see a little faster walk. It started to fall off when it got pretty close and so for a subject that's moving reasonably slowly, this is gonna track it pretty well. But I don't think it's up to any sort of sports action. But just for fun, let's try it one more time and see how good or bad it does, say at a slow run. So let me go ahead and get positioned up here. Start recording, and come on in. All right, definitely fell off there at the very end, but did a little bit better than I expected it to do. And so this is a feature that is one of the best on any of the SLRs on the market, and so it's a great feature, but it does have its limitations, and you'll have to do a little bit of testing on exactly what you're shooting to see if it's gonna work but for slow moving subjects, very good. Fast moving, not so good. But it's a great feature to have, very valuable tool in this camera. Okay, so we were using that demo in the Movie Mode, but that is active in the Live View Mode as well, and that is not the case on some previous Canon cameras and so this is something new that you can use in Live View. You can shoot subjects. You can have the motor drive turned on. You can have it tracking subjects, and you're limited not to the seven frames a second in standard mode using the viewfinder, but it's about 4.3 frames a second that it can track subjects. But once again, it's not as good at tracking subjects, but it can do it, and it's better than anything else. So it's nothing to sneeze about, it's pretty good, and as I said, you'll have to do some testing on your own. Now, there are three different focusing systems in here. There is a face tracking, there is a FlexiZone Multi and a FlexiZone Single, and Kenna, I completely forgot to check with you ahead of time, but would you be willing to help me out on a little bit of a demo up here? We're gonna do, have you up in front here, just by the ... cameras that we have. I'm gonna throw my camera into the Live View Mode, and I wanted to show a little bit about some of the Live View capabilities. That's a good spot. And I'm gonna have you stand a little bit between this screen there, yeah, right over here, and looking a little on the dark side so I'm gonna just throw in a little exposure compensation just to brighten things up a little bit here. So, in the Q mode, I can bring up our focusing and I can choose facial tracking, a multi zone, or a single, so the single is, I can choose where I want to focus, and that's where it's gonna focus. The next one, let me go back here, is a large frame area, and, stand, on the other side. Yeah, right there, that's good. And let's see, stand a little bit closer to me. And so, you can see it picked up right on her face, and take a step to your left, and it automatically picking her up because she's the closest thing in the large frame area here. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna change this one more time, and we're gonna go to the face and subject tracking, and now it's automatically picked up on Kenna's face and so now just kind of wander around a little bit in that area, and you can see that it's tracking her face, and just take a couple steps closer to the camera and then step back a little bit. She's too tall, but there we go. And so you can see that it's tracking, and so if I wanted to, I have it in single shot right now and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change this to continuous shooting, right here. And I'm gonna change one more thing. I'm gonna change it from one shot to Servo, so now, now let's just have you move around a little bit. And so, if I was shooting with a fast enough shutter speed, it's just gonna track and I can shoot pictures whenever I want. Thank you, Kenna, appreciate that, good job. And so we have three different modes in here, about, and the first one that I want to talk about there was just simply where you focus, and that's this first option here. And once again, we can use the touch screen as well and we get to choose either one small area, we get to choose a large area, or something that is looking for subjects and in particular looking for faces. And so, it depends on the type of subjects. If you had multiple subjects and you're trying to stay on one of them but not the other, the face tracking would not be good because it can't identify which face you want to focus on. But they're all three very good modes serving three different purposes and so things that you will want to take a closer look at because it is quite quick in its focusing. One of the things that you can do is if you hit the set button, you will turn the face tracking capability on or off. Maybe you just want it to focus on a subject, like a car that's moving through the frame, and not particularly looking for faces. And so that's something that can be turned on and off, once again, just by pressing the set button when you're in that mode. All right, time to switch on over to the neighboring mode, Movie Mode, and so it, very much the same things take, are gonna happen here as they did in Live View, but you'll notice the screen is cropped because we're shooting in this different aspect, this wide aspect ratio, for shooting movies. And there are a number of things that change on your camera when you simply flip that switch into the Movie Mode and so it's not just you're ready to shoot movies, the menus in your camera are changing as well. And so, once you get into the Movie Mode, the Q button is your shortcut to a number of different features that you can get into. And we have either talked about, or we will talk about, all of these at some point in this class. The one that I wanted to draw attention to right now is something that is a little bit unique. Not many cameras have this and it's an HDR Movie Shooting. And what this is doing is it's basically trying to compress the tonal range into what it's recording in video, because when you record video on this camera as well as pretty much any other camera in this price range and of this style, you are not recording raw image information, you are recording a compressed image. There is compression being done with the camera software. And so as an example of what HDR Movie Shooting is, these are videos, you can see the tulips moving around in the field. You can see we've lost those highlight mountains in the background because they're just a little too bright to be seen in the Standard Movie Mode. In the HDR Movie Mode, it pulls those highlights back a little bit so we can see that information and utilize that in post production if necessary. Now, the obvious big downside on this is that you cannot shoot in HDR Movie Mode when it's in 4K or in most of the different Movie Modes. It's only available in these full HD 29.9, seven frames per second, with this one compression rate, so it's only available if you see, you're going through your camera and you're like, ah, it's not, it's grayed out, I can't get to it, and that's because it only does it in this one basic mode. And so it's not something most people are gonna use most of the time. It's one of those options you can go to when it's necessary for solving a problem. Now, the focus tracking is exactly the same between Live View and movie focusing, and so everything that we just talked about in Live View also applies here, so we're not gonna go through the whole demo again, but it does work quite well. There will be some additional features that we're gonna get into when we get into the movie menu settings itself. So a little bit of background information. The camera can shoot in 4K, it's one of the first, not the first Canon camera to shoot in 4K, which is 4,000 by 2,000 pixels roughly. You have many different frame rates that are available to you depending on if you are in the NTS or the PAL system. Real quickly, North America is the NTSC, Europe and most of the world is in the PAL system. The standard full HD is gonna give you the most options all the way up to 60 frames per second, and the smaller HD option is available if you want to shoot at 120 frames per second. And so there's a lot of options and you can't always get every set of features exactly where you want it, you can't shoot 4K at 120 frames a second, at least, not yet, in this camera. So the camera can shoot in 4K, full HD or HD, but the frame size is a little bit different. So first off, full HD is that wider aspect ratio, and 4K is a little bit different. It's a 17 by nine aspect ratio, whereas most TVs and most video these days is recorded at 16 by nine, and so there are many other cameras on the market that are shooting 4K, but they are doing it with the 16 by nine aspect ratio and so it's just a little bit longer on the sides and so you may need to trim the edges of this video if you are needing it to match video from other cameras. And what that means is that if you're gonna shoot 4K video off of this camera and you're gonna look at it on an HD TV, you're gonna have some very thin black strips at the top and bottom, because it's a different aspect ratio. Now you can crop that to get your, to fit your TV if you want to, but it is slightly different than other brands of cameras shooting 4K. As I mentioned, the camera does not shoot raw video. It uses a compression system, and there's two basic compression systems. It uses an All-I system, similar, related, is the motion, the 4K motion JPEG, and here's what's going on in that session, is it's basically recording independent frames throughout the video, and it does a compression on each frame, and what's great here is that you can pull a frame out of the video, and so if you just want one frame, you have that frame. But it also eats up a lot of space on memory cards and hard drives, and so that's the down, that's the big downside for it. There is a more highly compressed version, IPB, where it basically looks at information that has not moved from frame to frame, and it just copies and pastes it to the next frame. Now, you don't notice this when you're watching the video, but if you go in and try to cut one frame out of the video, not all the information is there. And so it's a lower quality, it's gonna give you smaller file sizes, and in general, if you are, you know, mom and pop and you're just getting some basic video of your kids playing around, it's fine to use the IPB system. If you're just gonna be editing to the nearest second, it's perfectly fine. If you're working in a commercial industry, you're working on a movie and you want to be able to cut exactly to the frame you want, that's when you want the All-I compression. Unfortunately, All-I is not available in 4K, but they use a similar system called 4K Motion JPEG there. So you're gonna see that when you get into the collections of different options on the setting. And so 4K is this motion JPEG, which is very intensive when it comes to storing data and memory cards, that's gonna be a big issue we're gonna talk more about as we get into this. There are a variety of compression formats. There's the MJPG for 4K. There's the ALL-I for your HD movies. There's the compressed version, IPB, and then there is an even higher compressed version, if you have a lower end video, let's say you had a basic video for YouTube. It doesn't need to be HD in quality, it's just a basic simple little video. You can compress it so that you have a lower bit rate, so a smaller file size, and so there's a variety of options, depending on what your needs are. Now all of these are items that we are going to go through again a little bit more in detail when we get to the movie section because there is a couple of tabs and a lot of menu sections on the movies, so this is not the last time we talk about this. As I mentioned, 4K is a lot of data and in general, I wouldn't recommend using it to SD cards. If you get the very fastest cards, you can record, but you may have limited time. If you have a little bit older card, you may not get more than two seconds recording to a SD card. If you do want to use them, look for the UHS ones, speed class three or higher, which is the latest cards that have been out in the last couple of years or so. If you are shooting 4K on a regular basis, you would be wise to stock up on good CF memory cards. You will want to use the UDMA 7 protocol which they have and you want to look down in the corner, there is a VPG, Video Performance Guarantee, and the fastest out on the market right now is rated at 65. The camera in, my camera is rated 20, and I can record, I haven't tested the limits of how long I can record on the VPG20, but you can go for quite a bit of time. 65 is if you want the highest performance or in the future if they come out with something faster, that'll be available. And so it really depends on how much 4K footage you're going to use. If you're shooting standard HD or FHD, full HD movies, that can go to either card, not a problem. All right, so we're gonna have two tabs of menus. We're gonna go through these in more detail when we get into the menu section. So one of the cool things is that you can shoot 4K and do a frame grab from it, and I want to do a little demo of that right here now, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna first make sure that my camera is in the Movie Mode, right down here, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make sure my camera is recording 4K and I don't know that, so I'm gonna dive into the menus real quick, and I want to go over to movie record, and let's come down here and I am in 4K right now. And so I'm gonna shoot some 4K in the studio here, let's throw a little auto focus on and let's back off a little bit, and forewarned, everybody's gonna be recorded on video now, so you can see the red dot, I'm recording video, and I'm gonna pan around our studio audience here, and I'm gonna stop recording. And I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna play my video and so I can use the touch screen. I'm gonna use the set button over here, and you can see my controls come up on the bottom and I'm gonna play. On video now, so you can see the red dot, I'm recording video ... And so I'm playing back and I want Kenna right there, and so, well, no, that's not quite right. I want to get a close frame, so I'm gonna come over here, and I'm gonna go to the next frame. I can go frame by frame, wait, no, I want her on the left side of the frame, so I'm gonna come back frame by frame, right there, and I want to pull this frame out of the video. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna dial over. Now, I can trim the front and the back ends of the movie. I'm not gonna worry about that, but that's what the scissors is for. And I'm gonna go up to frame grab and I'm gonna click this and I wanna save it as a new file. Okay, and then let's go view the extracted still image. And so now when I hit playback, I have a movie clearly indicated by the playback sign there, and then down here, I have an image that I have pulled away from this, and so if I want to, I can zoom in on this image right here. A little bit slow of a shutter speed here in the studio, but you can pull an eight megapixel still frame from your camera using that technique. And so if something is happening pretty quickly, you could use that. It's not a real good technique, and at one point, I could see this conversion of video and stills and I'm like, we're just gonna shoot video, for everything, and we're gonna pull stills. But there's a major problem with that. When you're shooting at 30 frames a second, your fastest shutter speed is a 30th of a second, which means you can't use fast shutter speeds and so it's really not a very appropriate tool for shooting high speed action because you're gonna need a faster shutter speed and you can't use that in some cases with the video because you're limited in other ways. And so it's not the key that's gonna solve all the problems but is a tool that can be used, and I'm sure that a lot of people are gonna be able to make good use of it. Okay, back to my final wrap up, general information on the Movie Mode. So, if you've wondered why you can't get to all of your ISO settings, it's because they are limited depending on which Movie Mode you're in. And so this is where the instruction manual goes through a whole laundry list of things that this doesn't work with that, and I'm just trying to bring up some of the highlights that you are most likely to encounter. Another issue is that the camera uses auto ISO in all the Movie Modes with the exception of Manual Exposure. So when you're in Manual, you are fully in charge, but if you're in aperture priority, the camera is also controlling the ISO along the way. If you want to activate the microphone or headphone levels while you are recording, hit the Q button. So once you start recording, hit the Q button and you'll see those onscreen controls. You can use the touchscreens to silently go in and control those features. The standard time limit is gonna be 30 minutes, 29 minutes 59 seconds, for shooting most videos. There is a high frame rate where you can shoot at 120 frames per second, and that's gonna be limited to about seven and a half minutes. And if you do record for too long a period, if it's very hot out, you may get a heat warning indicator where the camera would shut down if it gets too hot or if it's starting to get in that area of getting too hot, so just be aware that that's a little warning that you may see on that. And so, that's kind of the highlights of Live View and Movie. We will continue in the menu section to go through and dive in and look at some of those menu settings a little bit more closely in the menu section of the class.