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Canon 7D Mark II Menus: Shoot4 Movie

Movie shooting mode and in order to get this it's a little bit of a secret, you have to have your camera in the movie mode. So you got to turn the little collar to go into the movie mode, and then you hit the menu button, and suddenly the fourth tab and the fifth tab in the red shooting menu has suddenly become something different. A few of the items are very similar, but they're now on ly impacted if you are in the movie shooting mode. First off is movie servo auto focus. What happens here is in the movie mode, the camera will focus continuously now when you are shooting a video, do you want your camera to auto focus for you or not? And right now there are two types of people out there. Some are screaming. Yes, I wanted to do it, and other people know and so, uh, very busy mom or dad trying to shoot their kids are probably going to say yes. Please focus for me because my hands were full and holding this camera is more than enough work for me. Just focus on my subjects as they move aro...

und. The professional videographer is going to say no, I want to have specific control, whether I want the person in the front row or the person in the back row and focus and so it depends on how you like to use your camera if you want to use your camera like a videocamera camcorder on vacation you khun leave this on enable and it's probably going to be fine because it will just focus on subjects it may not be super fast it may not do it in a smoothness that you really really like, but for the serious photographer they're going to disable it and they're going to do it all themselves on the camera and so very much depends on how you plan on using the camera next up is your f method and this is something we just talked about a moment ago in live you but you can choose a separate different options for when you're shooting movies we have the face option we have the flexi zone f which is a larger box or the smaller box and it's whatever you like. I prefer the smaller box so I can be very particular about what I'm going to focus on we have a grid display that we can see in the movie mode this is the same as we saw in the live you so same options just different mode this is probably the most important mode in the menu setting it's their movie recording quality and there's a lot of different options that we haven't here so let's take a look at some of these recording quality options first off, we can record in a movie format or an mp four format, and some people prefer one, some people before the other. The emo viv format is generally a little bit higher quality format and is available for use on pcs and max, the mp for something that will see on the smaller file sizes. So the movie recording size there are three parts to this. The first part is thie f h d. What that stands for is full high definition, which is nineteen twenty by ten, eighty pixels that's where most of us are probably going to want to shoot our videos, although there are a couple of lower resolution modes. If you do need smaller file sizes for use for a very simple, more basic videos, the next is the numbers the twenty nine point nine seven, for instance. How many frames per second do you want to shoot now? Usually when we're talking about this, we generally say twenty four, thirty, sixty frames a second, but in reality, technically what it is is it's twenty nine point nine, seven frames per second, where we don't have time to get into the why in the history of this, this has to do with the television systems. But the three options that we have twenty four frames a second, roughly is the way hollywood shoots most of their movies. Thirty frames a second is how television is filmed in the united states in many other parts of the world, a lot of europe it is filmed at twenty five frames a second, which can be doubled to fifty nine frames per second, so that's the frames per second. Most people, the average user is probably going to want thirty frames per second on this one. Finally, there is the compression, the way that the files are compressed, the highest quality setting is going to be the all I setting. This is where individually compresses the information per image, and if you plan to do editing down to the frame you want, all I if you want a smaller file size and you're shooting more basic video, the I p b or the pipe light should do the job. If you're not sure which one I would say should attest video in both and see if you can see a difference in the way that you're going to use it. And if not go with the lighter one uh however you may want to use that in the future so you may want the higher one so there's a bit of a trade off here between file size and kind of longevity and what you're going to be doing with the footage from that and so very important settings when it comes to setting the quality, we also have a full twenty four frames per second, so if you do want to mimic the look of hollywood movies, they're for the most part filmed twenty four frames a second and that is slightly different than everything else and that's part of the unique look of those hollywood movies so that is all in the movie recording quality and so most people are going to be wanting to shoot in full hd twenty nine point nine frames per second I p is going to be fine for basic video all I for those who are really shooting the serious video next up is sound recording. How are you going to deal with sound? So the main option is just to let the camera figure out where to set the levels and it doesn't reasonably good job if you're going to use it as a simple camcorder type device if you want to get in and really seriously control it, you can manually go in and control it on sixty four different levels you can disable it completely and record with an external device which is what a lot of serious videographers would use you can also in enable a wind filter and an attenuate er which will suppress very loud noises so if there's a loud bang it kind of suppresses it so it doesn't peek out the meter and cause a major problem in the audio channel so those air options that you can turn it on and off according to your needs the movie servo a f speed gets into some very finicky adjustment of how the camera focuses when it's in this video mode and one of the things that you khun d'oh it actually focuses so fast and video now some people think it focuses too fast so you can actually slow it down to focus so that it's more smooth and it's focusing now the question is do you want it to always do this smooth slow focusing even when it's not recording or when it's not recording you wanted to focus really fast and then when it's recording slow down a little bit and that's why there is an option when active during shooting is an option on there or you could have it always on so if you want to slow it down you can slow it down just during shooting or you could always slow it down and so the real question is do you plan on using auto focus while you are shooting, if yes, then this is kind of important, and you'll want to tweak with it to see what works best for your type of shooting style, and then the tracking sensitivity on the movie servo you, khun, choose how quickly the camera will jump onto a new subject that it wants to focus on, and this is always one of the problems that the serious filmer is goingto have is they know what they want to focus on, but the camera doesn't. And so if somebody walks into the frame, is that who you wanted to focus on or not? And so this will tell you this was going to give you just a little bit of an adjustment to make it a little bit more sticky or a little bit more responsive in switching over with new subjects. The fifth page in here, which is really the second page of movie options thie, silent live you option, we still have the same options we had before when it comes to shooting a still photo. If we are shooting a movie, if we are shooting a movie, one of the things that will happen is let's just imagine we're doing a panning shot across this room and I start recording video and I decided to take a still picture right here the camera will pause the video allow me to shoot the still picture, and as I continue to move, it will kick back into the video mount. It will then take the video over here in the video over here, and it will stitch them together, and there will be about a one second gap that there will be a still photograph. I forget if it's placed before or after the video clip, but you'll have one continuous video clip and a single, still sixteen by nine aspect ratio image to go along with that, and so you can shoot still pictures even while you recording video, but it does pause while you're taking that still image. How long do you want to leave the meeting timer on eight seconds? Is a pretty good in between time code is for people who are serious about their video work. This is often done by people who are running multiple cameras, and they're trying to synchronize between the two cameras so that when they can make their cuts more easily and do the edit a little bit more easily. So for mom and pop, just recording some pictures of the baby crawling around on the floor, you probably don't need to get into the timecode settings, you could just let it let's see where you're going to set it on, you're going to set it on count, uh recount up where it just tells you it's been recording for five and ten seconds as opposed to the specific starting time of the day to the frame number but if you are working up to a more professional system you're working with other photographers, then you're going to probably want to get into the time code and start manually controlling that silent control gives you the ability to adjust the mic levels by just kind of sliding your finger around the back dial on the camera and so let me just show you on my camera here I don't I'm not going to put it all into the manual control mode, but there's normally a dial right back here and if you listen carefully it's got some little cliques and you don't want those clicks in your final video and so you can set this little tab right back here and so you could basically increase the volume or decrease the volume by just lightly rubbing your finger around this. Now you would see a control in the lcd whether you are making it louder or quieter when you do that but it's a nice little device something they added in with the five d mark three and they've brought forward with this camera all right here's a decision point folks are us still photographer or you a videographer because if you are a videographer, you'll be saying shut a release button. I don't need no stinking cheddar release button for taking still photos. I wanted to use it to take videos, and so, if you want to use the button function, the shutter release button to start your movies, you can re assign it to shooting movies. But if you do, you can no longer take still photos. While you are in the movie mode, you can still take still photos when you're in the still mode. But when you're in the video mode, it begins and ends the video recording. If you hook your camera up, too, and external hd my connection like a monitor or tv of some sort, you can either mirror or not, mere what you are seeing in the back of the camera.