From the course: Video Gear

"Auto focus, playback, settings, exposure control, and customizable menu options "

From the course: Video Gear

Start my 1-month free trial

"Auto focus, playback, settings, exposure control, and customizable menu options "

- The shooting tabs for both stills and video are essential that you get it right. This is where you're going to spend the most time but there are other tabs for a reason. - Oh, of course. - Including a brand new tab for auto focus controls, which is awesome. - Yeah, and you know, here we have a lot of options. I mean, I will say this. It is useful to go through the manual for all the controls that you're going to have. - Well what we have here are essentially scene files for different types of shooting and it says okay, multipurpose or tracking subjects but ignoring obstacles as they move. The icons give you some idea. The one below looks like they're playing soccer with quick, erratic movement as they run and stop and switch speeds so lots of different things here. So it just is a preset. Now, when we jump over to the next tab for auto focus, you yet beyond presets and this is where you have some control over what's it favoring. Is it Release mode or Focus mode? Now these are really for still shooting so you don't have to worry about those for video. That's just saying, "Hey, don't take the shot "until it's in focus or do take the shot "even if it might be a little soft." - Right, we can control things like are we having Auto Focus Assist, are we not, all sorts of customizable options here. - I'm a big fan of the selectable auto focus points. This lets you favor somewhere. So it doesn't just auto focus anywhere. I like to be able to control this. Now 61's quite useful but if it's focusing on too many things, you can actually limit it. This really gives you some control. - And using the area select mode lets you target what you want. Still pretty straightforward. Last tab over here, this is really just saying what happens when I go to auto focus and can I see things? Now one of the things I'm a big fan of, lot of people don't know about on Canon cameras, if you do want a manual focus but you half hold the shutter button, as you manually auto focus, it will still give you that auto focus beep when it's in focus so you could use the auto focus while still manually controlling it. - Absolutely. Now one thing I want to talk about, Richard, if we go back to that first menu, if you do press the rate button here, this is where you can kind of configure, customize these presets so I don't want people to just sort of think that like these presets are just that and you have to accept it. You can go back in and configure the sort of auto focus presets a little bit for yourself. - Right, let's explore the other ones pretty quickly, at just a high level. We've got the playback menu and the playback menu lets you review your images, lock things down, do in-camera processing, not that big of a deal, slideshows. These are all standard things. It's the third tab that lets you see what's happening when you play back the movies and if you want to see a histogram to make some judgement, mainly for stills type shooting. I do like the setup tab though. This is where you've got control over, you want to make a new folder so that you keep each shoot separate. It may be you're going to different locations in a day. You can target separate folders so when you come back, your footage is pre-organized. - Yeah, it's obviously where you can format the card, it's where you can do things like set up the time, GPS enabling, things of that nature. This one's important. Yeah, so here on the video system, we can go, switch between NSTL and PAL. You will have to reboot the camera but that will give you new options for recording. Instead of 30 and 60, you're going to get 25 and 50. So different options for recording there as well. - So if you power up the camera and you're like, "Where's the frame rate that I need?" Check the video system first. It is under the setup tab. So pretty straightforward and of course, the ability to clean the sensor, toss in your copyright info. - Update the firmware, things of that nature. - The last one here is all about exposure control. And this is if you're using the dials and you want to dial in exposure manually. Now this is going to affect things a lot more if you are shooting time lapse with the camera. Not as much with video although sometimes, you can use exposure compensation or maybe you're shooting high dynamic range. Again, this is more in the time lapse type shooting. - Yeah, and all these custom function controls are really just kind of a preference. You know, whether you want your dial direction, for example, to be shutter priority, aperture priority, that kind of stuff. And then finally, one the last tab over here, these are just your menu settings where you can save your custom settings so you can recall quickly. - Yeah, hit that. And what I like here is you actually choose which ones you want to add here so you could put things on this menu, you can sort them, you can delete them because let's face it, while it's a cleanly laid out menu system-- - Yeah, there's a lot of options. - You can be bouncing back and forth between tabs. I'd go in and make one page that has every video setting on it that I need so I don't have to go through multiple tabs to access it and I'd put some of my favorites in there to control things like formatting a memory card and that sort of stuff so it's just on one page. Makes it simple. Alright, well pretty straightforward. We headed out to the trampoline park here in Virginia, the Flight Trampoline Park, and we put this camera into action. We did some shooting. We're going to come back and review some of the footage and share our thoughts.

Contents