Lessons

Lesson Info

Movie Menu

Alright, so first item in the movie shooting menu is the reset movie shooting menu and this is just simply for resetting specifically all the items in the movie menu. There'll be another reset option in the setup menu if you wanna set up the or reset up the entire camera. If you wanna rename the file names for the movie files, you can rename the first three letters of the movie file name. Not necessary in most cases, but if you do wanna name it to identify it to you or your camera, this is a good place to do it. When shooting your movies, you can choose for them to be destined either for the SD slot or the XQD slot. Now because the XQD cards are typically faster than the SD cards, if you have both in your camera it's probably smarter to have your movies sent to the XQD option. You can choose image area. There's gonna be a little bit of a sub-menu in here. When you are shooting your video, you can choose to shoot in the FX area or the smaller DX area. And the reason that you might wanna...

shoot in the DX area is if your subjects are further away and you just don't need that extra space. But for the most part, most people will be shooting in the FX area. We talked about the auto DX crop before. Do you want your camera to automatically crop in when using a DX camera? I think for most people, this would be smart. If you manually wanna get around it you can, but I think it's a smart idea to leave that turned on. Next up is the frame size and frame rate. This is probably one of the most important settings within the movie setting menu. You have a lot of different options when it comes to resolution and frame rate so let's look at what some of those options are. First off is the resolution so you wanna be thinking about how large you want your images and what size of monitors you're gonna be using. HD, full HD, and now 4K is the new standard for a lot of people when they want the highest resolution possible. You can also shoot at different frame rates, frames per second and it will vary according to which resolution you shoot. There's a limit to how much data the camera can handle. And so 4K at 30 frames per second is the fastest it can shoot in the 4K mode. There are two different movie file formats that you can shoot, the MOV and the MP4. MOV is a little bit more popular right now. MP4 is a little bit more computer friendly in some older computer cases. The camera has a number of slow-mo options where the camera will record faster frame rates and then play them back at a slower frame rate. And so if you do wanna do slow motion, there is a couple of nice options for getting in there and doing that. The standard frame rate for most video is either 30 frames a second like here in the United States or 25 in Europe and many other countries. That's the PAL system versus the NTSC system. You can also do it at double frame rates, 50 and 60 frames per second. And there is also a movie frame rate which is what a lot of movies are recorded at, at 24 frames per second. And so those are some of the different options you're gonna see on this listing when you go into frame size and frame rate. And so for many people just shooting basic video, full HD at 1920x1080 at 30 frames a second will be enough if you want the highest resolution, that's getting it up to the 4K which is actually 3840x2160. Movie quality. When you shoot movies, they are not raw or JPEG images, they are recorded into a movie file format and they are compressed a little bit and you can choose to kind of vary the compression quality a little bit by going with a little bit higher quality or normal quality. If you plan on doing any very careful editing, I would probably go with high quality. If you're shooting just simple basic videos, you could leave it at normal and save a little bit of storage space. The movie file type can be chosen here between MP4 and MOV. Most people are gonna be choosing MOV. It's just a little bit more popular right now. ISO sensitivity settings are gonna be very similar to the setting we saw for still photographs, but here you can have an independent set of control set for when you are shooting movies. And so there's gonna be a lot of duplicate information from what we talked about in the previous section about still photography. You can choose the maximum sensitivity that will be available to you. Generally I would set this to the highest possible, so that if you wanted to use it, you could use it. You will have an auto ISO control, which can work and can make life much easier in shooting some basic videos, but if you're really manually controlling everything you may wanna turn it off. And then you do have ISO sensitivity when you're in the manual mode. It's in the auto mode when you're in some of the other modes, but in the manual mode you can choose what the ISO sensitivity is and it can be different here than it is for your still photographs. So maybe you prefer shooting at ISO 200 here, but for still photographs you prefer to be at ISO 64. You can choose an independent white balance for video compared to still photographs. This is where you set the video white balance. Same thing with picture controls. A lot of independent controls here. One of the new ones that they've added in somewhat recently is the flat picture control. So if we look at videos, you can see the flat video on the right hand side has much less contrast and so if you wanna do color grading on your own after the fact, you'll have a little bit more exposure latitude to work with with the flat image to start with. If you want a more finished image, then you would go with a standard option right from the get go and it's gonna look pretty good right out of the camera. Like in the previous camera section, you can go into manage picture controls. You can create your own flat or vivid controls for shooting video. It's a little bit more important here because you can't shoot raw the way you can with still images and so this is a good option to tweak according to your own needs. The active D-lighting, if you'll recall, is where the camera goes in and adjusts for the highlights and the shadows and so in this case leaving it on normal is probably gonna be fine in most cases, but if you wanna do that color grading afterwards, you can leave it turned off. The high ISO noise reduction will once again come into play for shooting video. Normal is fine in most cases. Other people will wanna control it themselves in post-production software and they'll be leaving it turned off. Flicker reduction here is a little different than we talked about earlier. In this case, it's going to adjust the screen on the back of the camera in case there is flickering light sources that may not match with the workings of the screen on the back of the camera. Leaving this in auto should be fine and you shouldn't notice any flickering, but if you do need to manually change it, you can change it to 50 or 60 Hertz. The camera has built in microphones that we talked about earlier. Auto sensitivity is where the camera will control the sensitivity and is fine for simple basic videos, but don't expect great audio in that case because it's gonna adjust up and down according to how loud the sounds are. If you really wanna get in and control it, you're gonna need to get in there and manually control it. Or you can even turn the microphone off and record on an external device. The attenuator is a device that automatically dampens really loud noises. So like if you were gonna be shooting a fireworks display, it's gonna make sure that those fireworks are not out of range of the rest of the sound that you have and so you might wanna be a little bit careful about turning that on 'cuz it is gonna change the way that your sound is recorded. If you are recording voice range versus standard range, you could change the frequency response to pick up a little bit better sound for the vocal range if that is specifically what you're choosing. Most of the time you could just use the wide range. There's also a wind noise reduction if you are in a strong windy environment. That wind buffeting the side of the camera is gonna cause a lot of really bad noise and so that would be a good time to turn the wind noise reduction on. The camera does have an electronic vibration reduction system built in. Now you can turn this on and it will stabilize your images if you're doing hand-held photography, for instance. Now on the down-side of this is that it does crop in on the image and so you're not gonna get the full width of your wide angle lenses. It could actually be very helpful on telephoto images because it's gonna just give you a little more telephoto reach. So it's something that you wanna be a little bit careful about using. It might be good sometimes and not others, so I would probably leave it off most cases and turn it on only in particular other cases. Time-lapse movie is very similar to the intervalometer mode that we talked about before. The main difference here is rather than ending up with a collection of still images, you're gonna end up with one video file. But it's gonna go into a sub-menu that is very similar to the one for time-lapse photography. You can start it with the top setting. You can choose the interval, the distance between one shot and the next. How long you want to shoot for. There'll be a little bit of math done for you down there on the bottom to tell you how long you're shooting for, how long the clip is going to be. You can turn on exposure smoothing if you want the camera to control adjusting the exposures to try to make them even if they're in an automatic exposure mode. And then you could turn on silent photography, which I would recommend in most cases so that you put less wear and tear on the shutter system of your camera. And then you can go back up to start to start the entire sequence and when you're done with this entire sequence, you're gonna end up with a movie file that you can watch right there in the camera. Now, it'll be a little bit more difficult to go in and edit individual images on this and so for the person who's really into time-lapse movies, I would probably look at the intervalometer rather than this time-lapse movie option because here you're ending up with a finished file that's gonna be a little bit harder to go in and edit and work with compared to the individual images. But it's nice for anybody who wants to end up with something and not need a computer to put it together.