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Movie and Live View Mode of the Canon 7D Mark II

What else do we got going on the back of the camera? Oh, yes, this little, but this little colored area around a button is for both movie and live you options, and this really changes how the camera works and so let's dive into our live view section if the collar is pointing straight up towards the back of the camera, that is the live view mode, which means you get to see what the cameras pointed at on the back lcd of the camera, and once again you can hit the info button and nothing is hurt. By pressing the info button, you could get more or less information about what you're doing. The cube button that we were just talking about comes into play again here, and this allows you to dive in, and this is a shortcut to a number of the menu options that you are most likely going to want to change while the camera is in the live view mode for shooting still photographs. Now, the one thing that I do want to talk most about is the method, because the camera uses a slightly different system tha...

n most other cameras out there and being an slr it's at a little bit of a disadvantage when it comes to focusing when it's in the live you, because as we're watching those waves rolling in on our live view screen the mere needs to be in the upward position. So let me explain a little bit about what's going on behind the scenes. So here we got light coming in your camera. You remember this from the earlier section. It hits the mirror, bounces the light upward, right? Well, that main near is a partially silvered mirror, which means that it lets light through the middle portion of the mirror and it bounces that light down to the auto focusing sensor at the bottom of the camera. So when you take a picture of the mere needs to go up, but when you put your camera into the live view position, the mere also needs to come up so that light can go straight into the image sense or so it concerned it back to you on the lcd elektronik lee, that focusing sensor that cannon has been working on for the last thirty five years is now rendered useless, and it doesn't know how to focus. And the only thing that it knows how to focus with is bythe light hitting the sensor. So cannon has worked and developed and brought out a new sensor, and this special sensor has unique set of pixels on it that is different than virtually every other camera on the market other than the cannon seventy d and what this is using is a dual pixel seamus autofocus sensor and what that means is that each pixel has been broken into two halves, and the camera can now look at the information on the pixels and help determine if your subject is front focused or back focused and how to focus the lens to get the sharpest image possible. So this camera is the best slr out on the market right now for focusing while in live you having said that it is still not as good as it's standard focusing system when it's not in live you so it's both the best and not as good at the same time. Now, one of the advantages of using the live you focusing is that you're not regulated to just the sixty five focusing points you can focus almost anywhere on frame. You can actually use about eighty percent of the frame for focusing, so if you want to focus way up in the top right hand corner, you could do so with this camera. There are three different ways that the camera can focus wow in live you or in the movie mode. One is with a face tracking system that is remarkably accurate but can be a little difficult to use when you are focusing more on focusing on more than one person. If there are multiple faces at different distances, that's going to cause a problem. And for fine tune control you're going to want to have mohr specific control of where the cameras focusing so I would recommend either the full tuck multi let me get this right flexi zone multi which uses thirty one different auto focusing points in nine different areas as kind of a big box in which to focus but if you're wanting to be more precise you would want to choose the flexi zone single which is going to be a single bracket that you get to choose almost anywhere on the back of the camera for it to be on and so for most precise use I much prefer the just single box of the flexi zone single in order to do that one of the things to note is that on the face tracking mode you can use the little joystick on the back of the camera the multi controller to help and jump from face to face as to who you want to focus on and so you're going to have to see if this works for your photography it's a little bit fiddly diddly for me there's a lot of moving of little brackets and trying to get the focus right and so I prefer the single single box or just one large area with the flexi zone multi if you want something very generic and easy to work with so little bit different focusing here than in the standard mode within this camera all right, so let's switch over to the movie mode now when you switch over to the movie mode the camera that button in the middle rather than activating the live you it now starts the recording of a video and stops the recording as well. So it's one press to start one press to stop you don't need to leave your finger on the button. It is very important where you have your mod dial because as you will see here there are some very different cities the automatic settings the camera will give you will just automatically jump in and set shutter speeds and apertures for you. Manual aperture, vier aperture value and time value will allow you to set some settings or all settings yourself, and you can also have your own manual setting set in custom that would work as well. So for instance, you could use one for landscapes to for action and three for video settings. And so that way you can customize your camera to the different types of ways that you would want to work but just realize if you leave it in bulb or program or a plus, the camera takes over in the exposure settings when shooting movies so let's talk a little bit about shooting the movies in the camera. One of the things is the focusing situation is much better here than in other cameras in a unique little dual purpose button that you'll have on your camera is the flash button now you're not going to use flash while you shoot movies right? Right so now they've taken that button and it is now the auto focus hold button so if your camera has movie servo turned on, which is a continuous focusing system and you just want to say hold it there you could hold this button on the camera and it will lock the focusing in so that it doesn't jump around focus because you don't like focus jumping around when you're shooting the video so that's kind of a neat little secret feature that most people probably don't know about unless they really dig through the instruction manual which is my job that's why that's why I get paid the big bucks to do this okay uh you have different types of files that you could record and so most of the previous cameron canon cameras shot in the dark movie file we can now shoot with an mp for file and so we'll have options that we're going to see in the menu setting on how to change so this is just a preview of what we're going to get teo when we get to the menus we have different resolutions that weaken set we have different frames per second that we can adjust to to adjust for different parts of the world or different looks in our video we have different compression settings, we don't have the option of shooting raw video we have all of our videos are kind of like j peg images, but in the movie industry we have different systems. We have all iipf pipe light, I'll explain these in an upcoming slide coming up, which is just different compression levels, which is going to give us a different file size. In any case, we have a maximum file size of four gigabytes if you record more than four gigabytes, the camera continues to shoot but just starts putting it into a new file. So if you go for a long period of time, you may have to take those two files and piece them together in a video editing program. Now, because this is a still camera and not a videocamera, its primary job is to shoot still photographs while you are shooting video. If you want to stake, take a still photograph you can by pressing the shutter release button. You will, however, get a cropped image that it's sixteen by nine in its aspect ratio. So you'll be getting the image that you see as it's recording the video, but it is going to be cropped from what you would normally get in a standard picture taking mode. So the resolutions are pretty simple to figure out most of the time people are wanting. The fullest highest resolution, which is the nineteen twenty by ten eighty, which is known officially as full hd standard h d is twelve, eighty by seven twenty, which is still very good. If you want something pretty good to go on the internet, for instance, but have a smaller file size and then six forty by for it, he might be a smaller youtube style video now I had mentioned earlier the compression format in the camera. There are two major differences in or there's two major choices to make. The first one is called all I and it's, an inter fame compression where it looks at the information each and every frame compresses the information and saves an individually. This is really good for somebody who's shooting professionally for somebody who is going to edit down to the frame and wants to be very exacting in there. Editing it's a bit overkill if you are just shooting some video of your child out playing in the yard and you're going to crop it or edit it to the nearest second and not to the nearest frame, the other option is the I p b and what this does is it looks for information. That hasn't changed from frame to frame and it will simply copy and paste that information onto subsequent frames thus saving space in the file size. So for most basic video work is going to be perfectly fine and you will never notice the difference it is technically a little bit lower quality and it will give you much smaller final sizes so if you don't want to fill up your hard drive you're shooting just simple basic video the I p b is a fine option it's actually how I shoot a lot of my videos because I'm not going in and doing professional video I'm just shooting simple basic video that will be edited to the second and not to the frame and there are actually two different versions of the I p b there's a night light which is even smaller and file size but it is only with an mp for file and so you'll have to see what type of file that you want to work with so there are three different compression options in the camera so there's a lot of things going on video the seventeen original camera was very well known for its video we do have very good video here the one complaint that some people have is it doesn't shoot for kay but there is very few cameras out on the market shooting four k right now for thousand pixels on alongside and my guess is that it might technically be possible, but it's just kind of pushing the limits of where this camera is right now, I don't think they'll ever have an update for that that's going to have to be a seventy mark three before we get to be shooting four k and one of these cameras there's a ah lot of processing to work out there's, a lot of heat issues to deal with and this camera's not quite ready for it, but still we do have sixty frames per second in hd, so it is a very good shooting video camera. We're going to talk about some of the other controls when we get into video in the menu section, so there are some very nice controls on this in that regard. Finally, finally we have a silent touch pad. This was inherited from the cannon five d mark three. If you are recording audio in camera and you want to make adjustments, the camera does have a headphone jack and you can listen in the headphones to the sound that camera's picking up or the microphone that you have plugged dad because it does have a mic jack as well, and you can silently adjust the volume levels and this is something that you do need to go in and turn on, and you could do that in the menu system by going into the movie record recording quality and turning this particular feature on you do need to have the camera in the movie mode in order to get to the movie menu. And I'll talk more about that as we get into the menu setting. But this is nice, because normally, when you turn the dial on the camera, there is some slow tal clicking that you would normally hear in. Still photography. And now you can just use the silent touch pat on the back of the camera to increase or decrease the recording levels.