Lessons

Lesson Info

9:45 am - Back, Sides and Bottom Deck

All right, working our way to the back side of the camera and the monitor on the back of the camera is a sixteen by nine aspect ratio, so it fits very well for anyone who shooting hd video because it's the same aspect ratio as an hd tv. But when you shoot still photos, you're not using the whole screen, and we're going to talk a little bit more about this. The elektronik viewfinder is a three by two aspect ratio, so they have slightly different heights with ratios between the two, so the displays are slightly different in what you see. Now. The eye level view finder has a focusing knob called the diop ter, and this simply adjust the focusing of the viewfinder itself. It has nothing to do with the final picture, but you do want to make sure that looking through the viewfinder, you can clearly see the screen inside, so simply adjust that die achter, and I will warn you, it does get bumped from time to time, so you may set at one time, but you will likely have to go back and reset it agai...

n in the future. All right, this camera also has an eye sensor right next to the elektronik viewfinder, so that if you take your eye away from the viewfinder, the lcd monitor will automatically turn on. And so, as you move your eye back and forth whether you hold the camera at arm's length or up to your eye, it automatically switches back and forth now if you are only using one and you don't like it switching, you can jump into the setup menu undershooting settings and under finder lcd setting and you can change it to only work with the viewfinder or on ly work with the lcd monitor, but I imagine that a lot of people are going to want to use it in the automotive because it's just the most convenient for regular day to day shooting. All right, next up we have our playback buttons so let's talk a little bit about the playback of features and functions of the camera so hitting that you'll allow you khun play your images back for rate rotating through your images you can use either the dial on the top of the camera or the wheel on the back of the camera. The soft button a you will see has a little menu right beside it, and so if you want to press that it'll jump you directly into the playback menu. The menu has several different sections and in this particular case it'll kind of shoot you straight to the playback options, which is nice you can change the display of the camera, so go ahead and play back an image right now and if you hit change display. You can see different types of information and tell you what. Just for a live demo. Let me go ahead and do that with this camera. Here, let's, play back an image and let's, take a look. See if we can find some other images that says take a look at our studio here and by hitting the display button, we can get the history. Graham over here on the right hand side. We could get some blink he's going on and they're showing us are hot pixels. If we just want to see the whole image, you'll notice that we have a three by two aspect ratio with extra space over here on the right to show you our soft key information, we have a menu up here. We have a garbage can down at the bottom, and then we have a magnify. If we press this middle button here, we could magnify in and we can zoom around to see other things in the image. And we can get this to go back. So that's what's going on in the display let's. See, let's, go through the rest of this place. We have some information about shutter speed aperture the date it was taken. And we go back to our history, graham so that's a little bit about what you're going to see with the display button as you saw in that example by hitting the center button that will magnify the image so you can check sharpness if you go down on that button, you will go to image index, which allows you to scroll through a lot of images very quickly, and we have come to yet another little section where sony has its quirks, and here is the kind of quirks sony when you take a still image puts all of the still images into one particular folder on the memory card. When you shoot video with the mp four format, those videos go into a different folder, so if you want to switch between your still shots in your videos, you have to switch folders in order to do that and just to make it especially awkward. The hd format videos, which is a different type of video, go in yet a different folder, and so is use want to switch from video to stills? You'll have to kind of tab your way over to that left hand icon, which allows you to switch from video two still images and I don't know why they do this and it's a little bit of a hassle because I would be nice just to have everything in a nice chronological order but it does group them, and for some people, this may be a convenient thing to have stills in one area and the video and others. I guess it kind of depends on the way you look at things in the way you access your images finally down there at the bottom, we have the delete options, so if you take a bad picture, I know that's unlikely to happen, but you could delete it just straight with the delete button, and so that is your playback functions. Next up, we have kind of a strange button because right now it doesn't do anything it's the auto exposure lock button, a l and normally on most cameras, they have cameras, they have an a l button, and what it does is it locks the exposure, and I say it doesn't do anything right now. Well, it does lock the exposure when you press it in, but the thing is, is that when you press down on the shutter release and you locked down halfway, it locks the exposure. Some people don't like the shutter release locking exposure, so what you can do is you can go into the setup menu undershooting settings, and you can turn that particular function of this button off, and so you can have this button so that it is locking exposure and it's the on ly way to lock exposure, or that it does it as well as the shed a release there's not I guess you do there's some button pressing sequences where it might be handy where you want to lock the exposure, but you don't want to leave your finger halfway down on the shutter release and it's. If there is an option and you get to program it. One of the nice things about it is that you can dive into the set up manu under main settings and custom key settings, and you can change the features of that particular camera. You can have it as a press and hold button. You can have it as a toggle button, which means you press it, wants to turn it on and then press it wants to turn it off. You can also have it control auto focusing. You can have it be a shortcut to object tracking, as well as a number of other features that we will see when we get in more to the menu section will be a bridge, which will be a pretty big section on this glass. And so for most people just generally shooting the buttons, not going to be really useful into you reprogramming. Okay what do we have next? We have the mod I'll we've already kind of talked about that the control dial we're used to using that and then over on the corner of the camera we have the movie record button so let's talk a little bit about recording movies with this camera so obviously you're going to hit this button when you want to start recording a movie you can do it in any mode and you will suddenly start recording if this is a button that you accidentally pressed on a regular basis and you have no interest in shooting movies you can turn this button off so that it does nothing in the camera at all all right? Another little little cork about the camera is that the screen on the back of the camera is a sixteen by nine aspect ratio is we've talked about still photographs are a three by two aspect ratio so you end up with a little bit of a margin over on the right hand side and then when you start shooting videos it uses a sixteen by nine aspect ratio within the three by two aspect ratio which gives you a very small area or at least smaller than it could be when you are shooting videos so one of the things that you can do in the menu system his turn on something called wide image and what that will do is when you go to movies it'll suddenly fill the entire frame, and I think for anybody who is shooting a lot of video with this camera, you're going to want to have it in the wide image mode because then you can see as much information and your your image is as large as possible, so I'm going to recommend that change when we get to that section in the menu. As you play back your movies, you will be able to press the center button for pause and play. You could turn the volume up or down by pressing up and down, and if you posit, you'll be able to fast forward and rewind by spinning the dialogue or tapping it from left to right now, there's, a number of different controls on the types of movies that you can record in all of this will be controlled in the menu setting. Under the movie option under image size, under file format and recording setting, there are two different file formats that you can shoot a vc, h d and mp four in general purpose. In general terms, the mp for is a slightly the lower quality. I think it's going to smaller file size works very good if you just want to download a video on your computer, for instance, and there are two different sizes there's, a small size and a large size and it seems a little strange to me, but fourteen forty by ten eighty scales up to be nineteen twenty by ten eighty and exactly how it's doing it the camera's not real clear on whether it's using rectangular pixels I believe it is just scaling it sideways a little bit and keeping the resolution still very good quality so you could get very good quality with the fourteen forty by ten eighty for a slightly better quality video, you probably want to look at the a v c h d option and there's a number of different options we're going to talk a little bit more about the specifics, but we have different frame rates, which is the sixty and twenty four option we have different compression settings which are in relation or progressive settings, which we'll talk a little bit more about the twenty four m seventeen him that you see there that has to do with how many megabytes per second it is recording and so the higher the number generally the better quality video that you are getting now once again, remember that when you are accessing your images and your video off the memory card when you were downloading images it records stills, mp four videos and abc hd videos in three separate types of folders or files and so you want to make sure that you get all of those off your camera when you are transferring him now let's talk a little bit about the frame rates that are in the camera. We have a number of different options twenty four p is what hollywood uses for a lot of their movies, so if you want a film, look to your videos twenty four p would be a good option if you are shooting in thirty p that's very much the way that standard tvs or shooting and the p stands for progressive and as you can see in this visual, it records each individual frame on its own when we get to sixty I what's happening here is that it records an inner lace frame which is a half frame. What it does in this very simplified visual example is it records one line of information and then skips the line and goes to the next line of information for a particular frame and then the next frame has the opposite lines recorded and when you combine the two of them together very quickly it appears to be one cohesive moment in time. And so the interlaced is done basically to save space on a memory card and to make transferring files easier and so interlaced is how we have done things in the past because file size was very important and there are very there are fewer and fewer people I should say who are choosing interlaced over progressive progressive will be a slightly higher quality and so generally, if you want higher quality, I would choose one of the p settings, but if you're trying to match video with something that you've already shot that's interlaced, it might be easier to work with an interlaced video. All right, so back on the movie setting some other things to know about is that when you are shooting video, the max s o is sixty four hundred the camera can go higher than that for still pictures, but that's the highest for movie recording camera, uses sd memory cards. You're going to want to use a class four card or higher because when you record video that's a lot of data that is constantly being streamed and recorded to that card. Now there's, a special type of focusing system in this camera called hybrid auto focus, which does not move work in the movie mode. We're going to talk about hybrid auto focus in a little bit, you know, once again I've said it before, I just want to stress that the movies are stored in separate folders will be aware that if you change between, say, mp four videos and abc hd videos, they're going to be going into separate folders that you're going to have to look at him in there is a two gigabyte file limit when you are shooting with the mp fief with the mp for format and if you are shooting an abc hd, it'll automatically create a new file after two gigs, so you do not lose any frames or any information, but you will have separate files with each of those videos, which you just need to line up in your timeline, essentially, for putting together if you are shooting longer clips and so that's some of the information on the movie mode of the camera, this might be a good time to check in to see if there's any questions on the movie settings of this camera before we jump forward, you know, john, I don't know if we have anything specific to the movie settings, but we did have a question from web twenty five forty that basically wanted to know, you know, they have seen a bunch of your classes here, a creative live on, we were talking in the intro about how you have eight cameras and that big army box full of them, and the question was, is, do we do the camera manufacturers give you cameras to review our do you is an independent of the manufacturers, your reviews and the well, I don't call the reviews, but the training that I've been doing is is that just independent? Now, I've never been given a camera by manufacturer, okay, great, I've borrowed a camera, I've bryant any camera I've bought I bade bought this camera s o I own this camera I could do anything I want with it and so no, I've completely a new influenced I love being independent for the manufacture and been able to say whatever I want you and it's great what's makes it what's makes the training really special because you can be critical as far as you know how you're looking at the even the training of the cameras very important so think sure yeah, I got a great you're going to hear about it? Yeah sorry good thank you all right, so what we're back to the back side of the camera we're going to talk a bit more about those a button the button cluster down here so soft kiai sake be we've already talked about that and softkey c is going to be in the middle there and if you want to customize, you can customize at least softkey number b or letter b I should say and you'll do that in the set up menu under main settings under custom key settings you can customize the number of buttons on the camera and that softkey number being on the bottom is customizable why can't you do this the sake a well sake eh is mostly dedicated to a short cut into the menu it's how you get into the menu system and that's how it's going to work under most situations, which is a pretty valuable option considering how many items are thrown into the menu on this particular camera now the wheel on the back of the camera were going to use for a bunch of different stuff if you tab upward, it says, despite which means the display, and so when you are shooting let's, go ahead and press the display button and look at some of the different options we have. So the graphic display is something that I would have come up with. It shows you your shutter speeds and apertures in a graphic matter, which I kind of like, but it uses up quite a bit of the actual screen area, so I have a bit of a love hate affair with it display all info really just fills that screen with a lot of icons a bit more than I think most people need most of the time. Big font size if you like a little bit bigger letters, I think that's a pretty good, easy to read screen the no display info actually has some display information on it as faras shutter speeds and appetizers, and I think it's a pretty good option there is a built in level that you can turn on, which is nice when you're trying to level the camera with the horizon line not something I would leave on all the time, but might be nice when you are setting up your tripod and you're trying to get your camera exactly just so. And then there is a history graham option, which is very nice for judging exposure. You can see it alive readout of the light that you are gathering and whether it's over exposed are underexposed and probably the most valuable one is the what's called for viewfinder, and what it does is it shows you just a whole screen of icons, and this allows you to go in and change a lot of the menu settings of the camera. This is nice because I'm not a big fan of holding the camera out away from your face. I like holding it up to my eye, it's easier to see, and this just gives you a very quick access to a lot of the functions of the camera. And as I mentioned before, this camera doesn't have a lot of buttons on the outside of the camera. If you were to compare it to any of your other standard night guns and cannons, it's probably got one third of the buttons, which means we have to dive into the menu, and this just makes it a little bit easier to get in and change those functions that were normally going to change. How do you change this? You can go in and you compress the display button within the camera. You can go in and you can turn some of these options on and off within the camera menu called display button. If you don't ever want to see some of these, you can turn them off, which is kind of nice. But normally you just hit the display button on the back wheel of the camera and you khun cycle through all these different options and find one that works for you. All right, back on the back wheel of the camera. The right hand side controls the s o b I s o is the sensitivity of the sensor on the camera and the native sensitivity. The best quality images off this camera are going to come when you shoot it. S o one hundred. As you shoot at hirai isos, the camera is getting less light in the the camera's getting less light on the sensor and it is having to boost the signal and the image quality gets less and less as we go upward. So let's, take a look at example, that I shot just a standard studio little test shot to see how good the quality is at different eyes. So settings eso one hundred obviously looks really good to hundreds great. Don't even bother showing it and as we move on up the scale let's just go straight up to the very end if you don't have a good view of your screen, you can just tell you that twenty five thousand six hundred looks a bit like sandpaper it is very, very grainy and noisy not something you would want to use if image quality is highly important if you could get away with it and I would say on this camera that up to thirty, two hundred is looking quite good so you could feel pretty comfortable about maintaining very good image quality up to thirty, two hundred now this is a sliding scale and every time you go up it makes it worse and every time you go down it means a little bit cleaner image. And so this, as with all cameras, you want to try to keep the ice so as low as possible and that's a bit of an exposure of balance that you're going to be running with your aperture and your shutter speed and so what's the best setting. It depends on the situation in many many ways, but this cameras I say, is pretty darn cleanup through thirty, two hundred and that is the eye, so next up pressing down is exposure compensation and what this allows you to do is allows you to make a picture a little lighter or a little darker. So when you press down, you'll enter the exposure compensation mode, and then you can dial up to the plus side to make images brighter or down to the minus side to make images darker. Now this is going to be useful in moz like aperture, priority, shutter, priority and program where you shoot a picture and you look at it and you go, I think this might be better a little lighter or a little darker. You could simply press down on the aperture or the exposure, compensation and dial in whatever change you think is necessary. It's pretty rare that you go much beyond plus one or minus one, but the camera can go all the way to plus three and minus three. And so if you have your camera in the quick walkaround aperture priority mail that I said that I like, this is a good, handy way to get in there and just make a quick adjustment without having to get diving into too many different features of the camera. Now, the most important thing to know about this feature is when you are done using it, you need to manually reset it back to zero because it is sticky, it stays wherever you leave it if you leave it at minus two and go out and take pictures and forget about what you did all your pictures are going to be two stops under exposed, so every once in a while I just tend to want to check my camera to make sure that it is still at zero unless I'm specifically wanting it changed. Next up, we're going to be moving over to the left hand side of the wheel, which is the drive mode. This controls what happens when you press down on the shutter release of the camera. Normally, most people have their camera in the single shooting mode. You take one picture at a time you want to take another picture, you lift your finger up the oppressive back down, but we also have a number of other options in here. Continuous shooting on this camera is going to shoot at three frames per second speed priority shooting shoots at ten frames a second. Now the disadvantage of shooting at speed priority is that your exposure will be locked on the first image and the focusing will not be as good as with the camera in the continuous shooting option. So speed priority works for some subjects, but not for other types of shoved subjects. It depends on how rapidly they're moving towards you and whether they're changing environments as far as the light is going, and so two different options for continuous shooting. We have a ten second self timer so you can run around and get in the picture yourself. We have a self timer that is ten seconds but gives you three images just in case you have a blinker in the group or you want to do something different on each shot to get the best image possible and then we have a bracketing mode as well as a remote commander mode and so you will see the softkey's giving you options on going in and controlling these particular features because there are some custom options that you can turn on an office you get in here and so I wanted to take the camera and shoot with it in a couple of different ways, and I wanted to check out what this camera was like at ten frames a second, so I went down to the local fairground and as they're spinning around, you can see that you can capture just about every moment. This is shooting at ten frames a second for one second so you can capture a lot of different options and if you plan by real quickly it almost turns into a short little videos you can see here and so ten frames a second is really freaking fast for a small little camera like that. So for a subject that's not changing distance, that one distance from the camera works very well in that scenario one of the other options and there is exposure bracketing exposure bracketing is used by photographers who for a number of reasons number one they're not really sure as to what exposure they want to get so you can do bracketing with this camera for three frames making one frame what the camera thinks is a normal exposure and then you would do in underexposed and overexposed and the camera would do this in a very rapid sequence. Now the photographers that really like this feature are each day our photographers high dynamic range photographers who are shooting a series of photographs that are going to be combined later in a separate program for one image where it uses the best of all three different images as far as the different exposure you can control this by shooting three pictures at one third of a stop two thirds of a stop one stop to stop three stops and so for somebody who wants to shoot hd our work and manually manipulated later you could do it here now the camera does have some of its own hdr functions that we will talk about a little later and then finally there is a remote commander mode on the camera and if you want you can purchase the rmt d s l r two for about twenty five dollars from sony and that will enable you to trigger the camera whenever you want from a distance now it is an infrared remote so it is not real good at long distances so ten twenty, thirty, forty feet something like that works a little bit better under low light conditions but allows you as much time as you want to get in the picture and take it all right moving over to the side of the camera the left side of the camera don't have a lot to work with over here ah lot of people like myself have purchased this camera with the kit lands and this lens is a little different than most of the sony lenses this one does have a power zoom suite feature on it which is a little spring loaded lever to go from white angle to telephoto so it works a little bit like a point and shoot camera it's not a manual zoom in I kind of prefer the manual zooming feature and I'm not a big fan of the power zoom but it is one of the things that was put on this lends to make it so very small and I do like the size of the lands now out of the front we have a focus ring but it is also a zoom ring and so this can work if you're not manually focusing the front ring becomes a zoom ring and I think it becomes a little bit better tactile feel for resuming and so if you aren't using manual focus than it becomes the zooming ring, which is quite nice the little lens mounting index just gives you a reference point of what you need to line up on the camera and on the lens to mt them together and in the little door on the side, we're going to have a couple of little sockets. The first is a micro usb socket, and this is where you're going to play to the camera and to charge it, and when you charge it there's going to be a little tiny light that turns on that lets you know the cameras charging takes about five hours to charge when it is finished, the light turns out if there is some sort of problem, maybe you have a bad battery. The light will be blinking at you, so you want to take a look into that if it does, blank down at the bottom is an hd in my socket, so that if you do want to play your movies or your still images back on an hd tv, you can plug in using the hd in my socket. The micro usb I should also mention is how you can download images directly from the camera to your computer it's, not a system that I highly recommend, but it is a system that can work directly right there without any other accessories. Other they on a cable and as far as the focusing ring, there is one of the interesting options that you can select is something called g m f focusing where when you focus in on the camera automatically you can grab the ring and manually adjust focus for fine tune focus afterwards and so this is something we'll talk more about when we get into the menu section, so there are a lot of neat little options buried in this menu system and giving you kind of a preview now, but we'll detail him closer as we go through the class moving on over to the front of the camera we have our lens mounting index, which is what you want to mount up in correspondence with the index on the lens itself you can't see it here, but just inside this little left side of the camera is where the wifi sensor is on this camera this camera has wifi we're going to play around a little bit later on hooking it up with a wifi system. I got my phone here I'm crossing my fingers hoping that this is going to work out because this is one of those things that doesn't always work out his plan sometimes but the camera does have wifi so if you are trying to transfer images that's where the signal is and for some reason sony found it important to tell you and so I had to repeat it next up, we have our sixteen megapixel sensor that we see straight in there at the bottom, we have our lens contacts, which is communicating with the lens contacts on when we attach a lens to it, which is communicating all the information back and forth, so make sure they're not obstructed. We have a little relent lens release buttons will press that when we want to take the lens on and off. If you do want to use and purchase of the wireless remote, this sensor on the front of the camera is right there, below the grip. Make sure you don't put a piece of tape over it, and we have an auto focus illuminator and self timer, light it's, a little light and it's not very powerful, so it doesn't help out very much for auto focus. But if you were focusing on something very close, let's, say one or two meters away, it would be helpful, but I find it kind of disturbing, and I like to turn this sorts of things off on the camera so that's something that you can do in the set up menu undershooting settings under the a f illuminator when you're recording your movies, the camera does have a built in stereo microphone with mike's right there on the front on either side of the lens mt working our way down to the bottom of the camera, we have our standard tripod socket, which will fit all normal accessories that you would put there in one of the most unusual placements for a speaker on a camera it's right there in the bottom it's a small camera, they just simply ran out of space is what I'm guessing, and then when we opened the big door with, we will have access to the battery. The npf w fifty sells for around forty bucks, which is one of the more affordable batteries for these types of cameras will get you around three hundred sixty shots per charge, and it does come with this little charger in a usb connector so that you could charge it from a computer's usb port. It would take a while in order to do that, and, of course, you would killed the battery on your laptop most likely because there's a lot of power in that battery there, if you do want and you are frustrated like I am a little bit by the slow five hour charge, time in the fact that you can't use the camera while it is charging because you have your charger is your camera, you can buy an a c charger that plugs into the wall that a c charger is going to sell for about forty bucks, and it will take that charge time from five hours down to an hour and a half and so if you do want to use the camera while the batteries charging or you have multiple batteries that might be a good system to have for not much money. More also within that compartment is where we put our memory card in this camera is quite unusual is it takes two different types of memory cards in the same slot. So sony many years ago introduced their own memory stick they wanted to do their own thing so he always likes to do their own thing and the memory stick was not the most popular memory card on the market and so luckily thankfully this is a great system. They allowed the camera to use the sd card which is the most popular memory card in the market of digital cameras at this time and so you can use it all the different common sd cards in your camera be aware that on the sd cards themselves there is a right protection switch and so if you have that flipped it down you may not be able to access information off of that car it's done for preventing data from getting delayed its deleted so you normally want to keep it in the upward position now I had mentioned before that you should be using class four cards or higher for video so four six eight ten this card that you see pictured here is what's, called a u h s class one, which is even one step higher, so perfectly acceptable for shooting video on. And there is a little access lamp that lets you know whether the camera is writing information to the memory card or not, and so that's something to be aware of. Just don't take the memory card out of the camera if that light is turned on. One of the things that you want to do on a regular basis on this camera or any camera is that when you have successfully downloaded your images and backed him up on a separate hard drive, you want to reformat the memory card, which deletes all the photographs and initialize is the card for working again and re establishes a communication between that card and that camera. So any time that you are transferring memory cards from one camera to another, especially different brands, you would. I definitely want to reform at that card to have it set up properly for this camera in particular. Now, as I mentioned the port on the side of the camera, which can be used for downloading your images, that is going to be one of the slowest ways for you to download your image to a computer. A faster way is to use a card reader and the fastest way if your computer has this option is to simply plug it in to the sd card slot. That'll a lot of laptops and desktops have these days. And so that's what I do when I want to get my images downloaded to my computer as fast as possible.