Lessons

Lesson Info

1:15 pm - Setup Menu

So we're going to move on to the final section of this class, which makes it sounds like this class is almost over. But then again, this is the setup menu, and this is the dumping ground where sony has decided to dump all the features so within this, and I have to look at my own little sheet here because I've organized it better than they have. We have different sections, we have the shooting sections, so things that are involved directly with the shooting of the camera and then we have something called the main settings, which are just basic camera settings that are a variety of other things, like the time and date and so forth like that, and then there's another section for memory card access and control and then there's yet another section for basically wifi information called network cities. So let's, go ahead and start digging our heels in and see what we can find in here. So we're in the setup men you were at the top of the scroll bar with the a e l shutter button. So in this cas...

e, when you press down on the shutter release as you get the camera brand new from the factory, when you press down on the shutter release, it locks the exposure if you want, you can turn that off. So that the only way to lock exposure is by pressing the button on the back of the camera, and this is just a matter of personal preference. The camera comes with it turned on. I'm fine with leaving it on and so it's, not a critical thing, but depending on how you like to work the buttons on your camera, you can feel free to change it. Next up is the auto focus illuminator. If you recall on the front of the camera, there is a small little light that will turn on to help the camera focus under low light conditions. This can be irritating, pointing the camera had somebody and having this light shine in their face because it is a little bit bright for what it is. And so I like turning it off. I think if you're very aware of where your focus point is and what you're pointing at, you will be able to focus under extremely low light conditions with auto focus. And of course, you could always go to manual focus and probably see it in the viewfinder or on the lcd as well. So I like to leave that turned off the face detection area area shows you where the ninety nine phase detection auto focus points are on the sensor. I think everybody should go in and turn this on, take a look at it and then turn it off and clutters up the screen. But it's, good to know how much of the frame it has. If you do shoot a lot of action, there may be some scenarios were turning it on helps you keep it framed up, but I think once you get used to the area, you can turn it off and live a clutter free life. Next up is red eye reduction, and the camera uses the's bright flashes before the picture is taken in order to reduce the red eye. The problem here number one is that the shutter dude, the firing of the shutter is delayed by about one to two seconds, which means that you might miss that critical moment. It's also very annoying and disturbing to your subject that you are shooting in. However it does fix red eye, but I think red eye could be fixed so much more easily in post these days that it doesn't passed that I would rather get the shot right the first time and do a little fix on it later than miss the shot at the beginning. But your choice depends on how much red eye you get and how much you have to deal with it. The finder lcd setting controls how the camera switches back and forth from the view, the eye level finder and the lcd display. In most cases, I think people would want to have this in automatic, where the sensor will determine whether you are close to the finder and it switches over to the finer or whether it's further away and you're on the lcd. If you know you're only using one and you don't like it turning off because something is passing in front of that sensor, you could manually he's elected live view display. I would leave this as setting effect on you could turn it on or off, and by leaving it on, it shows you a really life exposure of what your final picture is going to look like if you called back when I was doing the wifi demo, it was a little dark, and there was something set on the camera that was giving me a dark image, and it was showing me a dark image on the lcd. And so this is a good preview of what your final image would be if you were using this in a studio with flash equipment, which is not real likely, but if you were, you would probably want to leave this turned off because you're having flash fire in it. The image that you see in the viewfinder is not the image that you're going to be capturing but under normal lighting conditions I would leave this turned on keep scrolling down and we'll get down to auto review this is simply how long the picture comes up on the back of the camera after you've taken a picture you can turn this off you could make it longer two seconds is a reasonable amount of time change it if you need to grid lines will be turned on if you want we have rule of thirds square grids as well as a diagonal grid if you're trying to keep something aligned up, it works real nice for architectural landscape work or any time you're trying to get a subject at a very specific point in the frame maybe you're fading from one image to the other and you want some of these face in exactly the same area with a question earlier jim about peaking levels on so what we're going toe shows I'm going to show you a little video here about what peking is if you've never seen it before let's take a look over here and so just take a look on this camera and what I'm doing is I'm manually focusing and you can see that I focused on the foreground I focused on the background I've come back to the middle and the areas that are in good focus our kind of shimmering with white light and this is a great way to see how your camera's focus and where it is the sharpest at and I'm just going to back that up and I'm gonna play it once again just so that you can see it this is the peking level it's in white as I focus from the foreground to the background it does kind of you know hurt the image quality a little bit as far as what you see in the viewfinder but that is not what is going to be recorded and this is a fantastic tool for anyone who likes to manually focus there are different levels high, middle and low that you can turn the peking level on and in general I would start with medium and adjust according to your needs from there and that is if you like to manually focus next up speaking color you get to choose which color white, red or yellow and white seems to be the most well the least troublesome you might say for most people but if you prefer something a little bit brighter depending on what color is your shooting you could choose different colors okay this is where the sony engineers in charge of digital manipulation get there their hands in clear image zoom is basically a digital zoom where the camera is enhancing pixels and it's blowing up small portions into bigger portions and it does so with a higher quality than the next feature we're gonna talk about, which is just straight old digital zoom, and I prefer to leave both of these turned off. If I want to zoom, I will actually zoom the optical len's on my camera. That way I will keep the good quality sixteen megapixel image that my camera can record, and so I am a big non fan of digital zoom and clear image zoom. Please leave those turned off for best image quality s auto image extract when you have your camera in the superior auto mode that's that little orange I camera on the top of the camera, sometimes your camera will re shoot a siri's of pictures in order to record one picture, and what will happen here is it will keep each of those individual pictures as well as the final picture. If you have the camera in that mode and it happens to shoot that mode, I don't recommend using this mode a lot s oh, this doesn't really matter too much, but it's probably not something that a lot of people are going to take a big advantage, so we're going to continue scrolling down through the setup, which we're going to be doing for quite some time here. Manual focus assist and this is a magnification that will turn on to help you manually focus and I think this is a really nice thing and tell you what, justcause, we're kind of rolling through this let's do a live demo on this one, so let's get cameron position and the first thing I need to use for manual focus assist is I need to put the camera in manual focus, so I'm going to so actually I'm just gonna get the function button here currently disabled, I bet you I'm still in a wifi setting, so let me see if I can exit wife I kind of shuts down the number of features on the camera, all right? So what I want to do first is going to manual focus, I'm going to go up to the focusing area auto focus I don't want the imf because that's still auto focus with a manual focus assistant, I'm going to manual focus and I'm going to change my display, I'm going to zoom in a little bit so that we could see a little bit more closely and I'm manually focusing in as I focus. You'll notice that it jumps in tow a magnified view that's what I'm really getting, but for focusing reasons I go in nice and close, I need to focus up a little bit higher so in here we kind of saw this earlier jumps in magnifies the focus and that is it right there and so I'm magnified in four point eight times and actually let me just take a quick look in a place if aiken wanted to see if I could change the magnification by attorney in any of the dials, I can do it by pressing the center button so iten this and go back I gotta focus to go in and then now we're just going in at four point eight times and so that's how you could manually focus it jumps in quickly and so leading that turned on now you notice it turned on and then turned off well, the manual focuses this time will control how long it stays turned on in it's magnified state the way you just saw it right there was two seconds. Let me do this again on a live demo, so we'll go back to the back of the camera I will turn the focusing will go in and then as soon as I'm done focusing one thousand one one thousand two kicked back to the normal view. If you want, you can leave it on for five seconds or leaving and magnified view for an unlimited amount of time moving on next one is color space this is important for people who shoot j peg's not important for people who shoot drop if you shoot rot, you are getting adobe rgb, which is the largest color gamut possible. If you shoot j peg, you can choose between adobe r g b and es rgb. I prefer getting the largest color gamut possible that gives me the white a variety of colors toe work with later on in the computer. If you were going to shoot pictures straight from this camera, send them straight to your phone and up on to facebook and that's all you planned on doing. I think you're probably better off at s rgb because that's, how facebook deals with photos is just in an s rgb color range and that would convert it in the best way possible. Okay, the camera doesn't have image stabilization, but many of the lenses do. If the lens has a stabilization mode, you can turn it on and off here in the camera. This is something for most handheld work now pretty much all handled or I would leave it turned on when you put it on a tripod. It's recommended that u turn this feature off. One of the great things about the muralist cameras is that you can use adapters to use a lot of old manual focus lenses, and when you use these adapters, the camera doesn't read the lens information. So it's, as if there is no lens on the camera, and normally with my recommendation is just leave this to disabled so that your camera can't fire the shutter. Wow, our you fire the shutter while the lenses off, which can potentially cause damage if there's something that gets in there, and so it just kind of locks your camera up if there's no lens on the camera. If you are one of those people that's using the adapter and older lenses, you would want to enable this so that you can shoot pictures at any time with any adapter. I start a f is something that you're on lee going to be using with the l, a, too, a siri's lens adapter, and this is that adapter that has faced detection, and what happens is, is you put your eye up to the camera, the camera will start focusing, but it's on lee with that adapter, this feature probably doesn't matter in most cases. All right, I mentioned at the very beginning when I was explaining how this camera worked with an electronic front shutter curtain or a physical front shutter curtain. This is where you can control what type of curtain is being used, and the description here is not really clear, this should say front elektronik, curtain shutter is on and that's the normal way that this camera said it's, normally using an electronic first shutter curtain, and I would leave it in that mode, there is a slim chance that you may get some ghosting or perhaps let's, see what else might happen, mostly it's ghosting at really high shutter speeds, and if you want to turn this off and use a mechanical center that's perfectly fine, the camera will make a little bit more noise. There is more vibration going on in the camera. Eso it's. Not something that I would highly recommend for normal situation, so just leave. This one turned on keeps growing down. The next items will see I'm going to talk about two of them together at the same time long exposure noise reduction and hi s o noise reduction. So any time you shoot an exposure longer than one second or any time, you use a high I esso and that number convey area little bit. But let's, say thirty, two hundred and above your camera is not going to look the sensor. The image off the sensor is not going to look as smooth. Let's, take a look at a visual example so under low noise, we're gonna have nice, clean information under high noise we get this very grainy look to it. The camera has a built in noise reduction system that does a pretty good job and if you want, you can have the camera fixed that noise for you. I'm not a big fan of having the camera fix it because I can fix it later in other programs even better than the camera can do it because I can adjust it individually for each picture depending on how bad it is in that particular scenario and if you do have it set too long exposure let's say you're doing a fifteen second exposure what's going to happen is that the camera is going to shoot a fifteen exposed fifteen second exposure and then it is going to do fifteen seconds of processing of information so you can't shoot another picture until that fifteen seconds is up and so that's going to slow the rate that you can shoot pictures in the field and so I like to leave long exposure noise reduction off and with high I s o noise reduction you can't turn it off you either have the option of low or normal and I like that leave it on low so that I can work with it later on len's compensation shading so let me give you a little visual as to what is going on here lens compensation shading deals with the problem called the yeti by most people and this image you can see has very dark corners compared to the rest of the image, this is often caused by a lens that's not letting in its much light at the corners and in this situation, it's something that I would want to fix. I would want to lighten up those corners to make it a more even tone across the skyline. However, not all images do you want to do this on? In fact, I add vignette in tow a lot of people, photographs and other types of photographs to keep the eye drawn to the middle of the photograph. And this is a operation that I would like to perform on a computer later on. And so I tend not to want to do this too much, and so my tendency is wanting to leave this off. Now you may be saying, but john, you've recommended leaving it in auto. Well, that's, the reason is, is that the lens that most people have with this camera? The sixteen to fifty has a lot of vignette ing problems, and in this particular case, I think it's probably less best to leave it on auto. So if you have the sixteen to fifty lens because of the extreme compact design on this lands, they had to compromise in a few different areas in one of the areas. Is that there is a lot of in getting and so what that lands? I would probably leave it on auto, but other lenses, I would probably leave it off. Next up is chromatic aberration let's go to another visual on this one with digital cameras and very bright backlight, you will often get chromatic aberration, which is a color ghosting, and it causes a ghost of a line around the solid object upon which there is a light background. And so here you can see examples of a kind of a little bit of a teal colored and magenta colored line, and the camera can figure this out according to witch lenses on it and automatically fix it. And so far I haven't met anybody that likes chromatic aberration, and so this is something I am goingto have no problem letting the camera fix weak in, turn it off or leave it in auto and I'm going to say autos a good place for it. Next up is distortion let's take a look at an example so if you'll notice the horizon line it's not perfectly straight, the cameron knows how distorted the lenses are and can automatically fix them and because very few people like distortion in this manner, I'm going to recommend leading this in auto and the lens that we have on the kit version of this camera, the sixteen to fifty has a lot of distortion to it, so I would highly recommend leading this linds, especially in the auto fix for distortion face priority tracking I've told you what I thought about face priority tracking give it a try if you want, but in general you're going to probably want to leave it off so that you can be more specific about where you are focusing auto slow shutter deals with video and if you need a slower shutter speed, will it use that somebody who's pretty serious about shooting video is going to want to leave this turned off because if you're serious about shooting video, you probably know exactly the shutter speed that you want to have set and you don't want the camera to go in and change it for you. If you're just recording us simple little family video and you just want the camera to work right, you're probably gonna want to leave it on so different needs for different folks here continuing to scroll down next up is the movie audio record if you want to record sound you want to leave this turned on, which is probably where most people are going to be unless they're using a separate audio recorder you can turn on a wind reduction in case you are in a high wind situation I would normally leave this turned off so that you get better quality sound under non windy conditions a f micro adjustment is something that you may need to work with if you are using the sony l a too mount adapter, which has thie phase detection, focusing it is a way for you to go in and carefully adjust the exact focusing of fast lenses, lenses that let in a lot of light. Not too many people have this. Not too many people are going to need the micro adjustment, but it is there for those who have that type of equipment. I might do a little check in on questions here because we're going to be kind of starting the next major grouping in the setup menu we are, we're almost folks were almost halfway through the set up menu just to let you know how long this is, but I need to get a drink of water and I want to hear a question, and that sounds perfect. We are we love doing the question, so my two bob's ihs says, I'm getting a lot of messages that say these functions are disabled. Yeah, any clue what's going on there, john, I knew there'd be lots of questions on this, and I should have preface this whole menu setting excellent that address it now I missed it before the camera will not let you set something if it is in a mode where that doesn't apply and so there is something blocking that set menu setting. For instance, when I was trying to demo something over here in the camera few minutes ago, I couldn't get in and change it because I was in wifi. It was causing a conflict and this camera more than any other camera I've seen grey's out and makes a number of items not available if you're in the wrong mode. And so, without knowing detailed information, I wouldn't be able to figure it out. So I would ask you to think logically about what you're asking the camera to do and think about what might conflict with that particular feature and at first that's going to be really hard. But as we work our way through the menu, you might see, oh, if I have digital zoom turned on, I may not be able to access this quality setting or something like that is is a for instance. And so there are a lot of these, and they frustrate the heck out of me.