Lessons

Lesson Info

Back Side: Live View & Movie Mode

Okay, so let's get back to the keynote. So next up, we have our LCD monitor on the back of the camera, and this is a capacitive touch screen. We can use this for a lot of different things. When we play back our images, we can pinch and use our fingers to go in and out. We can scroll around. We can go back to thumbnails. We can kinda cycle through all of our images. We can find an image we want. We can double tap on that image and see that more closely. So that's gonna work very much like many people's phones these days. Those kind of gestures are kind of standardized nowadays and so you'll be able to use that on this camera as well. We'll see how to work with that in the live view and in the focusing of subjects 'cause you can just touch to focus or you can touch to actually fire the shutter as well. Now if you're the type of person who doesn't like touchscreens, that's okay. You can go into the touch controls and you can turn off the touchscreen if you want. So if you just don't like ...

that, you bump it all the time and it's not how you like to interact with the camera, turn it off, but you can also change the sensitivity of it, depending on if you're wearing certain types of gloves. So we're gonna work our way around the back of the camera with different buttons. The menu button is the second half of this class. So we're gonna dive into the menu which is kind of the full list of all the options that can be turned on or off on this camera. I had mentioned the info button earlier, never hurts to press the info button. So if you press this once, you'll get the camera settings, you press it again, you'll get the electronic level, and you press it again, it'll show you the shooting functions. So if you have the electronic level, it is a tilt-left-right option. There are some other cameras which are a little bit fancier, a little bit more money, that will tell you if you're pitching forward or pitching backwards. So it's basically just left and right level on it, but the camera settings one is the one that I like to have activated a lot just so that I don't have to look at the top screen of the camera. I can look at the back of the camera, which makes it easier to work with in many handheld situations and many situations on a tripod as well. Now if you find one of these just not useful, let's just say shooting functions is something that you never use, you never looked at it, it's just not that important, well you can go in and deselect it by going into the menu system and saying I only wanna look at camera settings and electronic levels. So they'll be some check boxes that you can turn on and off as to which ones you like to see. Next up is the kuh-ler which controls the movie mode and the live-view mode and this is kind of a whole mode unto itself. So let's get in and talk about some of the different features of this. We're gonna talk first about live view. So in live view, you'll have the kuh-ler up, pointing towards the live-view icon which is just the back of the camera, that little black rectangle, and then you'll press the start-stop button to activate the live-view function. What's going on now is that the mirror's gonna pop up and light's gonna be coming straight back to the image sensor and that's what you get to see on the back of the camera. Now you can always press the info button for more or less information and the Q-button will give us options as well. So let me go ahead and put my camera into the live-view mode and we'll take a look. Let's put this into the live-view mode. So now if we press the info button, you can see we can change the amount of information. So we're getting a histogram up here, less information, more information, even more information, back to the histogram, back to less information. So it all depends on how much information you find helpful in that particular case. Now we do have the Q-button here which is a shortcut to a few of the most common features that you're gonna find in the menu. You could dive into the menu and find these, but the Q is the quick menu and that's gonna allow us to cycle through some of the few most common settings that we would want to use in the live-view mode. Now, once again, this is a touchscreen. So you can simply touch on the mode that you want and there'll be additional options down here at the bottom for exactly how we want to change things. So be aware, there's a lot of different ways to touch the screen. So, back to the keynote. We're gonna be talking about all these options in the Q-menu as we work our way through the camera. One thing that I would like to just kinda talk about right now because it is a little bit different is the autofocusing system when we're in live view. So a little bit of background information before I tell you how to turn it on and off is that this is a single-lens reflex camera, which means the mirror is normally blocking the sensor and the mirror is kind of an unusual mirror. It is a partially-silvered mirror. The center portion of it is a little bit see-through which allows light through. Now the reason it does this is so that light can pass through to a secondary mirror and down to a phase-detection autofocus sensor. This is the way single-lens reflex cameras were designed to work about 30 years ago and this is the process which they have been slowly improving on for the last three decades. Now when the mirror goes into the upward position, you'll know that it blocks light off from the viewfinder and it also blocks light getting down to the autofocus sensor. It's not getting any information. So this highly-developed phase-detection autofocus sensor no longer works in the camera at all when you are in live view. It's just using the information that is going on to the sensor and generally this is just called contrast detection. It's looking at contrast, trying to determine if it's in focus. Now the pixels in this particular camera is something different than it is in most cameras. These pixels are a special type of pixel called a Dual Pixel CMOS AF sensor in here. So these are dual pixels and they can sense whether a subject is in focus or out of focus because they're checking it in a different way. They're comparing the focus of it and they can determine by that focus whether it's focused on the foreground or on the background and it gives more precise information about how to change the lens. So if you want a camera that can focus quite well in live view, this is as good or probably equal to the best of the SLRs when it comes to focusing in live view. One of the advantages of focusing in live view with this system is that you can cover about 80% of the frame, so a larger percentage of the frame than you could with the normal focusing points. So it's still not as fast as the phase-detection system when you're in the normal shooting mode, but it is not bad at all for a camera in live view. We do have three different options on live-view focusing: we have a face-tracking system, we have a multi-zone system which is using 35 different focusing points, nine different areas, or we can use a FlexiZone single which is a single movable bracket. So let's do a little live demo and go into live view and show you these different modes and how they work. We can press the Q-button to activate, and then we can go down to select through the various different options and the one we're talking about is the top option on the left, the autofocus option. Now we have our three different options on the bottom of the screen here. The first one is face detection, and then it's the FlexiZone multi which is a large collection of points, and then we have a single point. So if we choose single point, I'll press set, you can see the box on the screen and we can move this back and forth and we can touch to focus. Now let's make this a little bit more interesting. I'm gonna move the camera here just a little bit, and then I go to a little bit wider angle. I'm gonna grab a little prop over here and bring it back to the table. So now we have a subject in the foreground and a subject in the background. So I can just focus by touch. (beeps) Wherever I want to focus, I just simply press on that and very quickly use that. So that is the focusing system. Let me go back in. I can press the Q-button. There's a Q, little icon up here. I can change it, and now we're just gonna use multi which is everything. I'm gonna press the set button. So now it's focusing in a nine-block region. One of things I can do here is if I press the set button, I can go everything, I can press with everything, but every time I touch the screen, it does wanna go back to that nine-point area. So I'm gonna press set, and set, go to the whole thing. If I press down on the shutter release, it always goes to what's closest. So if I point my camera off a little bit different, (beeps) I'll focus there, (beeps) and it will focus there. Finally, let's go in and back to Q, we can go back to the face detect, now we don't have a face over here to focus on, but it would be looking for a face to focus on, but it doesn't have a face, so it's just using all the points right now. Let's make sure we got that set. So I can press the set button, and well actually here we are in face tracking, it is looking for a face and doesn't really find a face. If I press the set button, it'll just simply go to all 35 focusing-point areas. So if you wanna use face detection but you know it's not right all the time, you can kinda go back and forth with the set button when it's set to the face detection. Now the set button will allow you to go back and forth. The other option is on the multi-point were it's all 35 points. If you press the set, it jumps back and forth from 35 to nine boxes. If you go to the single-point, the set button don't do anything. It's nothing. So this is either gonna be where you tap your finger or where you move the four-way controller on your own. The dials here do not work for moving the focusing points. You're gonna have to use the little touchpad to move back and forth, but the finger focus is definitely gonna be the fastest if that's easy to work with. So that's a little bit on the focusing system in live view. A lot of that is gonna carry forward into the movie mode as well, and so just remember whether you're in live view or the movie mode, the focusing system is virtually the same between both of those. So using that set button will turn that face tracking on and off. So I'm not a big fan of face tracking all the time because a lot of times I don't have a face in the photograph and so if you don't have a face, it doesn't really do what you want it to do. So for anyone who goes back and forth, that's a key little trick setting to know how to get back and forth very quickly. So let's switch over to the movie mode by flipping that kuh-ler down to the movie mode. Now your screen's gonna go into a 16-by-9 aspect ratio, which is how this camera shoots movies. If you press the Q-button, you're gonna see a slightly different set of controls. These are controls and features that we're gonna talk about as we go through the menu system, but the autofocus system is gonna work just as we had mentioned before. One of the ones in here that is a little bit unique that I just wanna draw a little bit of attention to is only available when you're shooting movies in the A+ mode which I think is really unusual why they did this, I don't have an explanation, I just know that it is this way, is there is something called HDR movie shooting and it's not HDR in the sense that it's shooting multiple frames. It is HDR and it's a high dynamic range. What it's trying to do is it's trying to protect the highlights from getting lost. So a situation in which I was shooting where this can be really clearly seen is up here in the tulip fields north of Seattle. You'll notice there's a mountain range in the background, but you can only see it when HDR movie mode is turned on because it's protecting the highlights from being thrown out. So if you are in a tricky lighting situation and you wanna shoot basic movies, you're not like a cinema photographer doing a commercial or a production shoot of some sort, you could put the camera in the A+ mode in the HDR movie-shooting option by going into the quick menu and selecting it and you're gonna get a little bit more dynamic range in your shot. They're just compressing the information and holding back those highlights and keeping that in, giving you a little bit more information in those highlights. So in this particular case, it was a pretty big deal as to what was in that information and how much we lost, and that, for some reason, is only available in that A+ mode. To change that, you simply go into the quick menu and you can select the HDR movie-shooting mode. So let's take a look at the camera in the movie mode and I wanna talk about the focusing system in here 'cause we have a few different options. So I've flipped the kuh-ler down to the movie mode, and now I'm gonna hit the Q-button and I can access my extra focusing features. The first one on the top left if I, oops, let me try this again, is if I go left and right, I can choose the face and tracking option, the large multi-zone area, or the small single area. So this is gonna work in the small single area right here. I can focus, and let me get the camera positioned slightly differently so I can focus on something close up or focus in the background. Now this is doing what one would call one-shot focusing. It focuses and then it locks in and you can recompose as necessary, but once we start recording, so now we're recording, the camera's gonna look at what's in that box and it's gonna refocus automatically at whatever you point the camera at. Now is this good or is this bad? Well, it depends on what you're trying to do in your camera. But if you want to, you can lock in the focusing by going over the side of the camera and finding the flash button and pressing in on the flash button. I'm gonna press in, and notice, the box changes to a black box. So now when I move it around, it will no longer refocus. I can press the black or the flash button and it will go back into focusing. So if we wanna temporarily hold the focus because we want our subject off to the side, we can do that by just simply pressing that button on and then pressing it off. Now whether this should be on or off kinda depends on your style of focusing. For what I would call the mom and dad on the weekend, mom-and-pop photography, you might wanna leave it on just 'cause it's gonna take care of things for you. For the cinema buff, this is something that you're probably gonna wanna turn off, and let me go ahead and let me stop recording, and then I'm gonna go ahead and, well, we're gonna jump into the menu system, we have to jump into the menu system and we can turn this off, this Menu Servo AF. I will cover this when I get into the full menu system, but you can disable this in the menu system. So that's how you control whether it's in the servo mode or not, but I will give you one more in case you don't wanna jump into the menu system. I'm gonna go back and enable this. Let's go back into live view. There is a little button down here in the left called Servo AF and I can block that off with the touchscreen. So that is essentially the same as pressing the flash button on the side of the camera, so multiple ways of controlling the focusing on the camera. So some background information on the movies. They are MOV files. You can also shoot MP4 files if you want, if you want really basic ones, very common settings. These should be files that you can work with on any type of computer. It is not 4K 'cause that's kinda the new hot thing right now is 4K movies. This does not shoot 4K. It is standard full-HD or standard HD, which are those two different resolutions right there. We can shoot at a variety of frame rates up to 60 frames per second. So if you want more information, that's one way of getting more information for a different type of look to your photographs. We have a variety of compression options: ALL-I which is gonna give us a very large movie file, we have an IPB which is a compression file which can get us MP4 files which are a little bit smaller files, and it really depends on what you're doing with your images and how you're editing as to what size of files you need to use out of this camera. Then, finally, maximum file sizes is gonna be 4 gigabytes. If you go over four gigs, it'll create a new file and those two files can be matched back in editing later on, so that's not a problem. It does have a 29-minute-59-second time limit and that is more for tax reasons because cameras that go longer than that are considered video cameras and they have a tax rate about three times higher than that of still cameras. So in order to save you money, they've limited the recording time at 30 minutes. If you run longer than that, you'll just have to press record again. Oh, and I guess we do have one more item. Because this is primarily a still camera and not a video camera, if you wanna take a photo, you can, anytime you want, even when you're shooting movies, you will end up with a cropped 16-by-9 aspect ratio when you do it, but feel free to do it anytime you want. It will interrupt the movie shooting process. The two different resolution modes that are on the camera is your full HD which is 1920 by 1080 in pixels. There is high definition which is 1280 by 720. So those are the two different resolution modes that it can shoot. The compression format, the question is is are you gonna be doing editing down to the frame, because if you are, you will probably want to shoot the Intraframe, the ALL-I movie mode because it records and compresses information from each frame individually, so you can edit down to the individual frame, having all the information you need. The other option is a inter-predicted bidirectional system where what it does is it looks for information that has not moved and it just simply kinda copies and pastes that from frame to frame. So it uses this keyframe every 1/15th of a second, so one out of every 15 frames, excuse me. So it's a way to compress the information and simplify it. In most standard basic video situations, you're never gonna notice this. If you're gonna simply edit to the nearest second, you're probably fine here. If you wanna edit to the frame, you want the ALL-I option. So for basic movies, IPB will be fine, but for the more serious shooter, the ALL-I is gonna give you just a little bit more information to work with, and we'll see this again when we get into the menu system to select which resolution and mode we should shoot in the movie mode. So all of this can be found in movie control in the menu system and we'll be covering that in the second half of the class.