Lessons

Lesson Info

Camera Settings: Pages 1-3

Alright folks, it is time to dive into the menu system, so the Sony menu system is fairly extensive, there's a lot of things that we can turn on and off, I know it may not seem like the most fun, but it is something that we want to do to really get to learn the camera. So let's dive into the menu system on this camera. Obviously you're gonna hit the Menu button and you're gonna see different tabs, so Sony has organized information into these different tabs and we're gonna be going through them one by one. Now to navigate through these tabs, you can of course use the basic dials on the camera, either on the top or the back or you can use the Up/Down to go left and right. Now as we go through these, you will find some features have icons next to them, the little mountains means that it applies only to still photos and the movie frame means it applies to only movies and now we will begin my rant on the Sony menu system is that not all items, that strictly are for still video or still shot...

s have that little landscape shot and nor do all the ones that specifically deal with movies, they are selected, but all of the ones that do have it definitely are for that particular mode in there. So we're gonna start with the kind of top left, we're gonna work left to right and the first up is our Camera Settings, now real quickly, the tab next to this, which has the gear on it is gonna be more of your Setup menu and there really isn't much of a difference between the two and so the complaint that I have and this probably isn't a great place to voice this complaint, it's just that the menu is not real well organized, I like to have things in order and so if you feel like you have a hard time finding and remembering where things are in this menu system, it's not you, it just seems to be a little bit disorganized with where certain items are and we will see various examples of where there's two things that you will go back and forth to change, but they are in different pages, but this is one of the great things about the camera is that it does have a lot of customizable buttons, you have the Function button, that you can also record 12 different places in the menu, that you would normally go, so despite the fact that it's less than ideal, I think there's a lot of workarounds and there's not too many things, that you'll be coming back to the menu over and over and over again, that you can't put someplace else on a shortcut. Alright, having said that, let's deal with what we have to deal with, starting over in the Camera Settings, page one, first item is probably the most important item, so this is very well placed, nice job, Sony, this is the Image Size, do you wanna shoot with a 24, a 12 megapixel or a six megapixel image and obviously most of us are wanting to try to get the largest size possible, and so that is gonna be the 24 megapixel and that is just for JPEG images, we'll be getting to RAW images in just a moment. For that JPEG image, you can shoot it in either a three by two aspect ratio or 16 by nine, which matches up with our HD TVs, most of you are probably gonna wanna be in the three by two aspect ratio most of the time, unless you're trying to match that framing of a video. Next up is the Quality and this is where we're gonna be talking about RAW or JPEG images. So the top option, of course, is shooting straight RAW images, the next one is RAW and a JPEG, so you get two photos each time you take one photo and then we have our three JPEG options, which have to do with the compression size of that file, you're getting the same resolution, so you can get 24 megapixels off of the Standard, Fine and Extra Fine, but the file size will be compressed to different sizes and you'll fit more images on a memory card, so for most of us in photography, quality is very important and so if you are gonna shoot JPEG, you would probably want to choose Extra Fine for the finest quality detail, only if you were in a real dire need to save space would you want to go down to the Fine or Standard, because when you do go down to the Fine or Standard, you are essentially throwing data away and photographers never know when they might need that data again and so if you're gonna shoot JPEGs, I would choose Extra Fine and if you're gonna shoot RAW, well then, you can shoot RAW. Alright, as we go through this class, you'll notice that I am making recommendations for general users as well as advanced users in red and so you'll see this on the PDF outline, as well as on the keynote and so this is where once again, I'll mention, if you didn't see me talk about it before, with purchase of this class, you do get the PDF, which has the entire menu system laid out on one page, so that it's easy to scan and find all the items in here and it has my recommendations on it as well, as well as some following pages that will help you out in the settings of your camera as well. Okay, continuing on in the menu system. Next up is the Panorama Size, we talked about this towards the beginning of the class and we were changing the direction that we were panning the camera with the arrow on the top of the camera, but this is where we can choose either Standard or Wide and this might be great out in your camera, but if you can't get to it, you need to turn the Mode dial to the Panorama setting on the camera, otherwise you can't get in here and change this. The other option in here is the Panorama Direction, this is something that you can change with the dial on your camera, so you don't need to do it here, but you can do it here, if you want to. Okay, we are on to page two in the menu system and here we have File Format and as you can see the little movie symbol beside that means that we are talking about shooting movies and so we have our 4K standard, which some of our higher end cinema buffs are gonna wanna shoot with, we have an XAVC S HD format and then an AVCHD format and then an MP4 format, so some of the differences between these, the XAVC S is a 2012 Sony standard, it's an eight-bit system, the AVCHD is an older 2006 Blu-ray and so if you wanted to shoot a movie and send it straight to Blu-ray, it's gonna be a little bit easier with the AVCHD and the MP4 is a more basic video, if you said, "I just wanna shoot a basic video "and upload it to YouTube," you'd probably wanna choose the MP4 option, but if you do wanna get the highest resolution and the most data to work with, that's gonna be the 4K option. Next up is our Recording Setting and this has to do with compression of the file format. Now when you shoot video, you don't have the option of shooting RAW or JPEG, it's shooting into a movie file and it is compressing the data and this is the frames per second, so either 30 or 24 frames per second and then the other part is the megabits per second, so how many megabits per second are you recording and you can either have a larger file or you can have a smaller file and so it depends on what you're doing with your videos, are you editing them, do you wanna keep the file sizes down as to what you're going to need to do there. One of the options is that you can shoot Dual Videos, which means you get two videos for every video, that you would normally shoot, you're gonna end up with a higher quality, as well as a more basic video quality format and so if you knew you needed a higher quality one for editing, but you needed a quick one to post right now on the internet, you could shoot these Dual Videos, now in most cases, this is something that you're not going to wanna have on, 'cause you're gonna use up a lot of file space recording those two videos. HFR Settings is a high frame rate setting, so if you wanna shoot and it's kind of called overcranking, where you're shooting more frames per second and then you play it back at a slower frames per second and it thus becomes slow motion, you can choose whether you're gonna be playing this back at 24 or 30 frames per second and so there's actually a different place, and it's somewhere else in the menu and this is one of those settings, where there's two menu settings, that are very important and the other one is located very far from this one and this is just recording, or this is setting how it is gonna be played back at either 24 or 30 frames per second and so the other part of this scenario is going to be in Custom Setting on page seven called Movie HFR Setting and we will get to that eventually, as we page our way through this. Next up is the Drive Mode and once again, if this seems familiar, it's because we've talked about it at least twice before in the Function menu, as well as the button on the back of the camera does this, same thing, just a different place to hold it, put it in here, this means that as it's listed here in the menu, you can assign it as a shortcut to one of the other custom buttons on the camera. Next up is we have the option for Bracket Settings, first off on this, you can choose whether to be using a Selftimer and a lot of times, I like to use a Selftimer, when I'm doing bracketing, 'cause the camera's on a tripod and I don't wanna touch the shutter release and so I can set a two-second Selftimer to trip the shutter. The other part of this is the Bracketing Order and the order that Sony shoots its bracketed images is a little bit awkward, because it shoots the normal one and then a stop underexposed, a stop overexposed and then a two stops underexposed and then two stops overexposed and so you get this real mishmash between light and dark of your images and so for a lot of photographers, they prefer changing this, so that it is dark, normal and then light in the progression of the images and so it just logistically, visually makes more sense for most people, so that's a good one to change from its natural setting. On to page three, we have our Flash mode, this is something that we saw before in the Function menu, so we don't need to go through this again, but it is here, so you can assign it to a button. And the same thing is true of Flash Exposure Compensation, this powers down the built-in flash, I recommend minus one, if you do a lot of people photography, it's gonna be a little bit more of a natural look on your subject's face. Next up is Red Eye Reduction and so there is this very annoying flash, that fires off like a disco strobe before the photograph is taken and it's to reduce the pupil size of your subject's eyes, so that you get less red eye. Well, from one technical aspect, it works, it really does physically get photos with less red eye, but it's also very annoying, in it delays the timing of your shutter, so if you're trying to take a spur of the moment shot, it fires this and it delays the shutter by about two seconds and since it's so easy to fix red eye in post production, it is something that I would normally want to turn off. Next up is the Focusing Mode and once again, if this seems familiar, yes, we've talked about this a couple of times before, normally I would leave it in Single-shot, so it focuses once and stops and I would change it to Action for the Continuous Focusing, but I do also like the way that the camera manually focuses, so that could be an option for many people as well. We have our Focusing Area and once again, we've talked about this quite a bit earlier in the class and for, I think the more discerning photographer, who's choosy about what they wanna focus on, that Flexible Spot at M is a good choice, because you can move that focusing point around and it's not too big and not too small, it's a very good choice for a lot of different types of photography. Next up is the AF Illuminator and a little like the Red Eye Reduction, what happens here is this camera sends out a beam of light, like a flashlight to illuminate the subject and from a technical standpoint, this is kind of a cool little feature, it'll illuminate the subject. From a subject's perspective or another photographer's perspective, this is a little annoying and so this is something that I like to turn off, I think if you know how to focus your camera and you know how to guide the Autofocus system, you probably don't need this in most any situation and so turn that off and you'll be a little bit more stealthy with the camera.