From the course: Canon 5D Mark III Essential Training

Changing file names - 5D Tutorial

From the course: Canon 5D Mark III Essential Training

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Changing file names

Every time you take an image with your Mark III, it needs to generate a file name for the resulting image file, and as you have probably already discovered, those file names are a little weird. Fortunately, you can change them. If you come in here to page 1 of the setup category, you will see something called File name. I am going to open that up, and what I see here is what the current file name is. Now, yours might look different than this, because every Mark III has a unique file name prefix here. So these are four characters that form the beginning of every file name. After this come four characters that are the sequential number that the camera is generating. And then, of course, after that is a file name extension of some kind; either a CR2 extension, or a JPEG extension, or a video extension of some kind. I have two other user selectable file names that I can choose from. Right now, User setting1 is set to IMG_, so every file name would begin IMG_, and then be followed by my four digit serial number. I also have User setting2, which is three digits, IMG, plus a single letter that indicates the file size of the image. You can find a key to these file digits on page 153 of your manual. So, if I configure with User setting2, and take a picture, I am going to see IMG, and maybe a capital L, which indicates that I'm currently using the full pixel count of my camera. It doesn't tell me anything about whether it's a JPEG or RAW; I pick that up from the file extension. Now, I can edit either of these. User setting1 has to be four characters. User setting2 has to be three characters, because it's going to append that image size code there on the end. So I am going to change User setting1 here. I am going to pick four new characters to serve as a prefix. If I just select that, I come into here. Now, this is the same interface that you see if you have edited the copyright information in your camera, and we look at how to do that in a different movie. I've got two different fields here; this one tells me my current filename. I can scroll around in it. I can use the delete button as a backspace key, and then if I hit the Q button, it takes me down here to where I can select letters, and type out a new file name. So you might choose different file names depending on a job you're working on, or maybe a department in your company, or something like that, so this might be something you want to change for different jobs. So once I've gotten a new file name prefix in here, I can either say Menu to select it, or hit Info to cancel it. I'll just go ahead and say Menu, and now you can see that here's User setting1. So my file names are actually going to be LNDA, plus a four digit file number, and again, that file number is generated sequentially every time you shoot a new image, although there are ways you can edit that as well, and we'll see that in another movie. So this can be a useful way of kind of getting some file organization done even before I get back to my computer. By changing my user setting here, I can have file names generated that are specific to different projects, maybe different departments in my company, different jobs, whatever. After I've got these organized the way that I want, I can either hit Menu to go back to my menu system, or just half-press the shutter button, and I'm ready to start shooting.

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