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Firmware Addendum

Hello, welcome all you Fuji users. As you are well aware, Fuji likes to put out a lot of firmware updates to improve the performance and add features to their cameras. And they have had a number of changes for the X‑T since I originally recorded the fast start class for this camera. And this video is to go over all of those changes, and dive into some of the details about some of those improvements that they've made in that time. Let's go ahead and jump into this addendum to the Fuji X-T2 fast start class. What we're gonna be doing here is I'm going to cover a little bit about what firmware is and how to get it, and what the current version is. I'm gonna go through the basics of what are the basic things that they changed. Then on some of the more interesting ones, I'm gonna dive into the details about what those actual changes are, and how you might want to implement them for your photography. To start with, how do you check the Firmware on your camera? If you hold in on the display b...

ack button and turn the camera on, you will get a screen like you see on the screen here that tells you what the firmware version of your camera is. Now, the Firmware version when I originally recorded the class was 1.10, and it is now at 3.21, as far as the current firmware for the X-T2. If you wanna get the firmware for this, you're gonna need to go to Fuji's website. And I find this easiest just to do a Google search for Fuji Firmware Table, which gives you a list of all the Fuji cameras and their current firmware. You will need to download the firmware and load it onto a memory card, and then put the memory card into slot one of the camera. Then hold the display back button, turning the camera on. It's gonna recognize the firmware on the memory card, and it's gonna ask you if you wanna update. And of course, you'd say okay, and then it takes about three to five minutes for it to load all of the new software onto the firmware, so that you get the updated firmware on your camera. When you do that search for the Fuji Firmware Table you'll get to Fuji's website, and it will give you the most current version, and that's what you wanna download. Something else you may wanna take a look at is the update history. What I did actually, just in preparation for this little addendum is I went through and I printed off the updates. So, if you wanna read through Fuji's description of what I'm gonna tell you, you can do that at Fuji's website. And it tells you on each version, version from 2.0, from 1.2, what did they change, what are the specific things that they changed. Now, in some cases they're a little vague, and not so clear on exactly what everything they did, but they will tell you all the basic steps of things that have changed. That's how you check the firmware, and how you download the new firmware into your camera. They've made so many changes, they've actually come up with a new version of the instruction manual. This is for version 2.10. And you can go to Fuji's website and you can download an instruction manual, 346 pages in length, that goes through the camera, including all of the new features and changes that they've made to the camera. In this section I want to take a look, a brief look at all the changes that they've made over the camera over the course of time. So, starting at the very beginning with 1.0 to 1.1. And any time it's a .1 change, it's a relatively minor change. You know how big a change it is. If it's .01, it's an incredibly small little change. .1 is a minor. And if it goes to version 2.0, that's gonna be a pretty major change. And so they've added a new feature of a lock mode so that you could lock buttons and dials that are not being used on the camera. We have a number of performance improvements with tethered shooting, the shutter speed display. And then they just say that there's bug fixes where they go in and they fix little things where there might be a misspelling on one of the foreign languages in the menu system and so forth. The performance improvement, it's great to have in the camera. I don't know how much I can tell you about it. Just that something works a little bit better or it's a little bit faster. So I'm gonna be looking a little bit more closely at the new features and things that the camera did differently than in previous generation. Continuing our quick tour through the firmware history. They brought out the EF-X500 flash, and they wanted to be able to add options for firmware updates for the flash. And so in this 1.10 to 1.2, you can now add firmware and update firmware for the flash. You do need to have the flash on your camera. I believe it needs to be turned on, but I'm not 100% certain on that. When you turn the camera on you hold in the display back button and then you will get firmware for the flash version. And I'm sure going forward they're gonna update the firmware in that as well. Next update was from 1.2 to 2.0, which is a pretty big update. And you can now shoot RAW photos in their bracketing and in their advanced filters, which you weren't able to do in all the previous versions. We have a couple of new ISO options for the low option on the ISO dial on the top of the camera. They've extended the Time mode all the way down to 15 minutes. There is an on/off for the third stop shutter speed. Some people don't like bumping the dial in the front, so you can turn that off if you want now. And if you want to change the controls for the ISO from the top of the camera to the front of the camera, there's a complete option where you can move that feature over so that you can change it even more quickly. We have a new Auto Shutter Speeds and Auto ISO, which is a good option. A lot of people have been asking for that one. And then we have a new extra small focusing point when you want to have pinpoint focusing accuracy. And then we have Separate Auto Focus modes. And so if you have the camera focus in one area for vertical you can have it separate and different when you are in the landscape mode of holding the camera. All right, so those were the new feat-- So we have more new features. Excuse me. We can now see the histogram in the Movie mode. Good for judging the exposure. Eye sensor with LCD playback. And this is gonna get the camera to mimic more of an SLR where you look through the viewfinder to shoot a photo, but then you hold the camera away from your face so that you can see the image playback on the back LCD of the camera. Next up, the custom settings can now be customized as far as the name of them. So you can give them different names for the different things that you have them set up for. You can now add in author and copyright information into the metadata of each of the photos. You can also record a memo recording after you've shot a photo and you want to describe something. Maybe you took a photo of a traveler and they want to tell you their email address. You can just have them speak to the camera and it will record 30 seconds of audio along with the picture. We've now extended the bracketing. It was always a bit limited on the Fujis where you couldn't bracket in very big amounts, or over a very large number of photos. And now that's been rectified and now you can have many, many more options when it comes to bracketing. Shoot without card option. If there is no card in the camera, you can either have the camera lock up or allow it to shoot if you want. Now there's been a number of performance improvements, and I'm not gonna go through the details on each one of these. It's just everything is working a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit easier on it. Let's see if there's anything I need to talk about in here. Not really, but there is some minor changes in the operation of the camera. But it's nothing radically new. It's just an improvement in the performance. More recently we went from 2 to 2.1, which is a fairly minor update. There is tethered shooting by wireless communication. So you can use your phone to trigger your camera which is tethered to your computer. There is a neat All option now for the Auto Focus, so you can go from the pinpoint to the largest group of all focusing points, I think in 10 different increments, incrementally without having to choose I want the small, and medium, and large. I'll show you a little bit more about that in the next section. New options for the Shutter Auto Focus and Shutter AE. So this just gets you better customized control of the shutter release button on the camera so that it works exactly the way that you want it to. Extended options in manual focus EVF brightness, and so we just have an extended range on how bright or dark we can make the electronic viewfinder. The dual display now has the option of choosing whether you want the big image to be for composition or for focusing. It can be a nice option for those of you who use the dual display. Added function, so there's just more functions that you can use with the back dial on the camera. And then along with that there is some performance improvements. They seem to be constantly improving a number of different actions on the camera, making things a little bit faster and a little bit more surefooted in what it does. And then finally we've gone up to 2.11. Another minor update, which is basically just some bug fixes. And so there's just some small issues that they might have found that wasn't anything of notable note, but something that they wanted to fix in there. In the details section here I want to go in and show you what I think are some of the more important points in the change in the way the firmware is working and the way the camera works. One of the things I will note is that I have put out a new recommended settings for the class. And so in this new PDF, in blue lettering and in the gray box, we have all the new items in the menu system. So the menu has grown by, oh, maybe 5% or 7% in here of new items that are available. And so if you want to download that new PDF, that is on the course page under class materials, I believe. And so take a look for that. You may want to download that with your new software and replace the old PDF that we had. In firmware 2.0 we now have RAW shooting in bracketing and the advanced filters. And so those Instagram-style advanced filters, which were only able to be shot in JPEG, can now be shot in RAW. And so all of your bracketing options: dynamic range, white balance, ISO, auto exposure, you can be shooting in RAW in all of those. And that's something we've been asking for for quite a while. And it's good that Fuji finally came around and figured out how to process all that information. 125 and 160 are new ISO settings that you can now set. If you recall, on the top of your camera there is 200, which is the native ISO of the camera. And then there's a low setting. And traditionally that's been 100. But now, if you go in to the set up menu under button/dial setting, under ISO dial setting low, you can set 100, 125, and 160. And so let me just show you on making those changes here on the back of my camera. And so we're gonna go into the menu system. And go into the tools section. Is that where it was? No I think it-- It was under the camera section, excuse me. I think. No, it was under here. It was under button/dial setting. And then there's gonna be a low ISO setting right down here at the bottom. And so you can go in here. And before where this-- This wasn't even a part of it, because it was just 100. You can now select 125 or 160. And so you do only have one setting. So that, once again, is for that dial setting on the top when we have it set to the low setting right there, which one do you want. As we go forward on the keynote, just pay attention to my little map on how to get there. This is where you're gonna be finding these new features. The next one is the extension Time mode to 15 minutes. And so when you put it in the T mode, you're gonna change your shutter speeds with the dial on the camera. And now you can dial it down up to 15 minutes for night time exposures. Great for all of you who are doing those night time photographs. Much more range to work with. The shutter speeds, if you want to do the third stops, is with the dial operation in the front. If you don't want to have control of that you can turn it off under the set up, button/dial setting, and the third stops shutter speed operation, turning it on and off. If we go ahead and take a look on my camera for just a moment. Let's get my camera back in the right mode. So if I put this into a manual shutter speed here at 1/250 of a second it looks like I can change the shutter speeds right here on the back, up and down 2/3 of a stop. And so if I go into the menu, and the button/dial setting in the tool section. And shutter speed operation on. I can turn that off. And so now it's locked in there at those specific numbers and I can't change those third stops. And so if you accidentally bump that dial, this is something that you may want to turn on. I like having control of it, and so I think most people are gonna leave it turned on. But you can switch back and forth as needed. Full ISO control with the front dial. This is something a lot of people wanted to have because they wanted that third dial just to be able to control ISO so they could have shutter speeds in the back and apertures on the front. And so we're gonna go into button/dial setting and under the ISO dial setting we can put that as a command dial. So let's go ahead and program that into the back of the camera. And so once again we're gonna go into the tools section. Button/dial setting. A lot more customized setting. Command dial setting? I'm trying to remember... I think we were on page-- ISO dial setting here. And so under ISO dial setting we can put it under the command dial. And so now on the camera... Let's see if I have this in the right setting. Here we go. So what I've done is I've taken my ISO dial and I've put it on A. Let me just try it on 200 to see what happens. And so then it's at 200. If I put it in the A setting, rather than being auto ISO, I now have control of ISO on the front. Now I do have to press in, and it's locked. And I'm controlling-- Let's just do full, full control here. So I have... Actually I got this in the wrong mode there. Let's go there. So now I have control of my apertures with the aperture dial on the front of the lens. I have control... Of my ISO by pressing in. And my shutter speeds. Can I... I'm gonna just do that on top of the camera. And so we've got our shutter speeds. And then we can turn the ISO locked on and off on the front of the camera. And then changing our apertures. And so we don't need to go up to the top ISO dial to change our ISO. So if you change ISOs real quickly and frequently, this is gonna be a really nice feature for you. Next up, Auto Shutter Speeds in Auto ISO added. So in the shooting settings, under ISO auto setting, you can now set an automatic shutter speed. And what that's gonna do is that's going to give you a shutter speed that is appropriate for the focal length you're using. And so it's generally using the one over your focal length rule. And so if you're shooting with a 50 millimeter lens it's gonna try to give you 1/50 of a second. And so this will be a little bit better as you have a zoom lens, or you switch from wide angle to telephoto lenses. This will just make sure that your minimum shutter speed is appropriate for the lens you are using. And so it's a very good system for working with when you are using Auto ISO. Another new feature is the extra small focus point is added. We used to have five, and now we have a new sixth point that is very, very small. And this will be available not in the continuous but only in the AF-S, or in the manual focus option for using the camera. Just an extra small one. Next up, separate AF modes for landscape and portrait. Here you can have it stored by orientation. We're gonna go into the auto focus/manual focus setting and look for store by orientation. Let's go ahead and go into the menu system. And we're gonna go up to the auto focus options. And store by orientation, and make sure that this is on here. What we can do now on our camera-- And let's change our display on this. I'm gonna throw this into an aperture priority so that we can see kind of what we're looking at here. And so what we're concerned about is what focusing point. So in the horizontal mode, let's say I want to change this down to a single point but I want it way over here on the right hand side. Let's go over here to the right hand side. Clearly the box is over there. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn the camera vertically. It's gonna shift on this tripod here. And so if I bring it over here vertically... Get the tripod adjusted right. I can choose a different area for the focusing point. Let's say I want a big area down at the bottom, down here. So it's a big area on the bottom. And then when I rotate the camera, it's a smaller one over on the right. And you can go back and forth between these. So if you are shooting different types of photographs, maybe you're shooting action shots with the horizontal frame but then you're doing portraits with the vertical frame, you can have different frame points set up. Now the time that you definitely don't wanna shoot with this is if you are shooting straight up or straight down because the level in the camera isn't getting clear information about whether you're shooting portrait or horizontal. And so I think it's good to have on most of the time. But really high angle and low angle shooting, you may want to turn that feature off. Next up, histogram in the Movie mode. So if you want to see the histogram to judge exposure while you're recording the movies, it's now an additional checkbox that you can go ahead and have checked and turned on while you're recording your movies. Eye sensor with LCD image playback. For all of you coming from the world of digital SLRs, that are used to looking through the viewfinder with one eye to compose and shoot your subject, and then you want to review it on the back of the camera on the LCD. And so this is a new option available for you. It's kind of interesting because when you have it in this mode you can look through the viewfinder, you see what's going on. You shoot a photo. You can wait a little bit, and then when you hold the camera away from you and it senses that the camera is away from your face, the image automatically turns on on the back of the camera. So it's an interesting option. It's a good one to have in there. So it's nice to see that added to the options. Next up, you can change the names of your custom settings. So if you want to get in there and add a custom name, like you have black and white for dark and moody. You can add that in as your title. Any sort of custom settings that you want to make in the camera, nice to have your own little name so that you can remember more easily about what they're doing. Another new feature is adding in your name, copyright information, email information into the copyright info. Go into the set up menu under save data set-up. You can go into copyright info. It takes a little while to input your name and contact information, for instance. But you can get it in there, and it is added to the metadata, which you should see in Adobe programs and other various post-production software because it's gonna be added as part of the image file. As a side note, it can easily be deleted, so it's not a permanent form of embedding your images with your name. But it's at least a preliminary step, so if someone wanted to know who shot the photo, you've got that in there. Next up is voice memo recording. In the play back menu you can turn the voice memo setting on. I'm gonna go ahead and make sure that is turned on on my camera. Remember, to get to the play back menu you gotta hit play back and then hit menu. We're gonna dive in here. And voice menu setting is on. Okay, very good. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a photo. We don't really have much to shoot in here, but it doesn't really matter. We're gonna shoot a photo, and we're gonna press play back. Here's our photo. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna hold in on the front dial and I'll have 30 seconds to record a message. Press and holding in for two seconds. Now we are recording a voice memo for this awesome photograph. Actually, I did it wrong. I'm gonna try again. I'm gonna hold in, and... I'm gonna record a new message because you actually have to remain holding your finger in. And then when I release, it automatically turns off. And if I want to play back I will press play back and we'll see if we can hear it. I can record a new message because you actually have to remain holding your finger in. And then-- And so you can play back your messages and record up to a 30 second sound bite there. So that can be really good if you're trying to recall some important information, or something that you just can't simply shoot a photograph of to remember exactly what you needed from that. So, great feature to have. And the key on that is you gotta hold in the record or play on the front dial of the camera. All right, so bracketing options. I'm not gonna go into this, but you basically now have nine frames and 3EV steps that you can go into when you want to do your bracketing series. Before it was limited, I think to three frames at just one stop apart, on some of the earlier Fujis. And so now you just have many more frames that you can get. And for all of you landscape photographers, and people doing HDR, this is a big help, and it's nice to see in there. Shoot without a card option added. So if you don't have a card in the camera and you still want to be able to shoot photos, or you want to turn that off, you can. It doesn't make a lot of sense unless you've got the camera hooked up to something where you don't have memory cards in there, or you just want to show what the camera sounds like and you don't have a memory card. So it's great for people working in the camera stores. For most people, we want to make sure that there is a card in the camera. There's a number of performance improvements that have come with 2.0. I'm not gonna go through all of these, but they are ways that they've made the camera just a little bit better. And so I encourage you to dig in and see if there's anything in here that's important with the type of photography that you are doing. Another new feature that we've talked about is tethered shooting by wireless communication. So you could have your camera tethered up so that you're downloading straight to a computer but you are triggering the camera and seeing what the camera is doing with your remote smart device, your phone, or your tablet, or something like that. Now if you do want to hook this up with a computer, for the Windows system you'll need the Fuji HS-V5 software. And if you want to use Adobe Lightroom, you want to be using Tether Shooting Plug-in PRO. Both of those are pay for programs, and so you do have to buy those if you do want to use that tethered program. For the AF mode you now have an All option added in there so that you can seamlessly go from one area to the rest. Let me show you quickly, on my camera, about this. To get to these focusing points I'm gonna press in on the little joystick. Excuse me, I'm gonna press in on the top button on the back of the camera. And I have our single point, which is six single points. And then I have the zone, which is three areas there. And then I have wide/tracking, which is one area there. Or I can just choose to seamlessly go between all of them. And so now when I press in on the button, and I want to-- Let's just go to the center of the frame so we can see this. I can go larger to all of them. We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. And so we have our new spot point there. In my mind it's best just to keep this in all and you can just keep scrolling through and choosing whichever size bracket is exactly what you need. It's taken a long time for photography to get here, but it's nice to see that we can choose any size bracket that we want, from the smallest to the largest area. New options for Shutter AF and Shutter AE. I'm gonna go in here and show you this one. We're gonna go into the set up menu under button/dial setting, and there's a couple of options for Shutter AE and Shutter AF. We're gonna go into the menu system. We're gonna look over here in the tools. The button/dial setting here. I think we were on page two of this. And here's our Shutter AF and Shutter AE. Shutter AF basically means that when you press down on the shutter release, the camera is going to auto focus. Now, do you want the camera to focus in single or continuous when you press halfway down? It's an option we can have. So in single, we can turn that on. We can turn it off to maybe where we don't use it in AF-C, but we do use it in AF-S. And you remember, back around on the front of the camera is where we change between single and continuous. So perhaps you don't like to use the shutter release button when you're in AF-C, but you do want to use it in AF-S. And this allows you to go ahead and make that specific control. Shutter AE stands for Shutter Auto Exposure where it locks it in for you. And so in this case, with the camera in AF-S, or manual focus, you can have this turned on so that it locks your exposure. You can also have it turned on or off when you're in the continuous. And so it depends on whether you like that exposure locked with that initial press of the shutter release button. Once again, just more customization of the camera. Extended options in manual focus EV. Not too exciting here. You can just go in and add a-- Or you can select a -6 and a -7 option when it comes to the brightness of the electronic viewfinder. For those of you using the dual display, you know, that's where you get one bigger frame and one smaller frame. You can now switch between the bigger frame being the one for composition, or the one for focusing. So if focusing is more important and you just kind of want a general idea on the composition, and it's focusing that's critical, you can make that one the bigger part of the frame so it's easier to see. For those of you who use that, I think it's a nice feature to have. So play around with that if you do like using the dual display. Next up, the back dial has a number of functions. And so now you can go in and add more functions to the dial. Remember, that rear dial is not just a dial, it's a button as well. So when you press in on that, that can be a custom function to go to one of the many different features available in the camera. There's been a number of performance improvements in this. Faster transfer. They've fixed some more bug problems in there, which never really noticed myself. But they were found out by somebody, and so they went in and fixed them. And then finally in the latest update, 2.11, there was some more bug fixes they made in there. That brings us up to current date with the camera. I have no doubt that Fuji will probably put on some more firmware adjustments and new firmware, adding new features in the future. As they are significant and change the operation of the camera, don't worry. I'll come back and add another little update video for whatever changes they may take. Take a look at the new features. See what's gonna work for you. And enjoy that Fuji X-T2 of yours. Thanks a lot.