Lessons

Lesson Info

Segment 5 - Live View Mode

Next up is our live view movie switch so you can either have the camera set up for live you which allows you to use the back of the camera for composing your images or you could do a movie mode which you have to use the back of the camera for composing your images and just depends on where you have that lever turn once it is turned into that position you will activate it by pressing the button in the middle of the camera and that throws the camera into a whole different mode that's very different than its standards set up so let's talk a little bit about live you and moveem out so hit the lv button to activate whichever featured it is that you I happen to be switched into you can of course hit the info button and just as a little demo here let me go ahead and set this camera up and we're going to put it into live you put it in the l v mode don't have a lot to shoot here other than the creative live logo here but that will work just fine so if we hit the info button you'll see that we c...

an get more or less information and one of the things that I think is quite cool is thie level horizon level and in this I don't anybody who watched the original star wars will kind of remember this from the the ending sequence on the death star are you level? Are you straight? Are you tilting the camera? And so this is ahh fun little way of getting the correct level and this is just by hitting the info button that we can cycle through grids or horizon information mohr information or less information depending on what's important to you in that scene so that's, the first thing to know about is hitting that and that works with both live you and in the movie mode as well. Next up is going to come the ability to change a lot of functions, so if you press the eye button and let me go ahead and press the eye button here and you'll see along the right hand side, we have a bunch of options we can go into, we can change the image area. This is something we'll talk about in the menu system active delighting elektronik front curtain shudder and so this is where the camera is not using the physical shutter blades to open up for the front cheddar they're using electronic shutter, which is going to reduce vibration when you're shooting around shutter speeds around one sixtieth to one idiot of a second and in that general range what happens is the camera is so sensitive and has so much resolution that even those blades that are moving in the new dampening system that they put on still can have some some vibration to them to the to the whole camera system in that regard. So I've mentioned more about this later, but if I just recall off the top of my head it has a limitation off one two thousandth of a second so it's not going to be good for four thousand or eight thousandth of a second and there may be some ghosting issues when you use older nikon manual lenses when you're using the elektronik front curtain shudder next up down the list is monitor brightness weaken brighten up the monitor if we want and then we have a photo live you display white balance and what this basically means or it's for its it's for for instance, they say a studio photographer who's got some nice strobe set up that has color corrected lights on them and they want to get their cameras set to flash setting with the white balance for the lighting on that. But the ambient light in the studio the lights, the hot lights are tungsten balance light by balance light and so what you look on the back of the screen is all orange, so you khun custom, you can set kind of a custom white balance for the live view screen that's different than the final picture you're taking, which is really helpful or just sedates hugely helpful but it's very convenient and it's a nice little thing to be ableto have for somebody working under a flash system that has kind of two different lighting systems working at the same time and then we have a split screen display mode and this is a new and novel way of judging if your horizon is correct so let me see if I can go ahead and activate this and let's go ahead and I'm just going to use my notes here on the table and what it does is it splits the screen up in left and right let's just focus this just to make it a little bit more tolerable and you'll see that as we tilt what's going on here is that we can adjust where the left part of the frame is looking at and then if we hit the lock button which is over here we can go to the right side and we can compare which side of the frame we want to compare and so you can see when that paper is perfectly level right there we've leveled the camera out and so this is a little bit like the uh star wars horizon that we were looking at earlier but it just implements it in a new and novel approach that as far as I know nobody else on the market is doing this and so that's by hitting the eye button it's called the split screen display zoom and so those are six different options that you can control in the life of you mode now, if you have the camera in the movie mode and let me go ahead and flip this camera into the movie mode right now, it looks very much the same. You will notice that it is a wider format because we are going into an hd sixteen by nine aspect ratio here, if we hit the I button, we're gonna have many different controls over on the right hand side, controlling the image area. All of these things are things that were going to see in the menu system it's just kind of a shortcut. While you're in the movie mode, you will want to exit and go into the menu mode. You're able to adjust these things right here for a sound quality's levels which card destination turning on your highlights your little secret patterns, you're blinky is there also known as adjusting your headphone volume and so nice? Quick controls for anyone working in video and once again, that's just activated by hitting the eye button once you're in live you or in the movie, not so great controls in there, you can also zoom in and zoom out to just focus on what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna put this camera in manual focus, and I want to focus on our creative live logo here on the wall and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to zoom in and now I'm gonna just focus I want to re position so I'm going to use little touch pat on the back and I'm going to get it in a sharper focus as I can manually which is going to be right about there and then I'm going to zoom back out to get the whole frame and so this is an extremely accurate way of focus and this is something ah lot of landscape photographers will do they'll set the camera on a tripod once again this works best if you're on a tripod in fact I wouldn't even try it hand held put the camera on a tripod put it into the live you mowed zoom in a just focus till it's as good as it can possibly be let's do that again zoom in you see we're super close it and so now we can really tell if we're in focus or not and if it looks and focus at that high magnification you know it's in focus for the final picture and so that's a very handy feature to have on there and let's see if there was going to be one more thing oh yes there was one more thing and I was really frustrated because I was playing around with this camera learning it and I'm like where is my exposure information I would like to know if I'm over exposed or under exposed because it's just showing me this nice well corrected and it's not well documented but if you press the okay button and let's go ahead and press the okay button hey let's make sure that we're back in we got to be in the live you mount and so this brings up our exposure indicator over on the left hand side and so let me go ahead and flip this camera into its manual mode and you can see that we are under exposed so I will make some adjustments to my shutter speed and even out the exposure at zero setting so you can see it's right middle of zero one stop over exposed is right they're two stops and we can go further than that and so that is brought up by simply hitting the ok and so what's going on if you don't see that exposure indicator on the right hand side of the frame the camera is adjusting the image on the back of the screen for your viewing convenience so it's nice and easy to see and if you're not paying attention to your light meter you could be taking over very overexposed or very underexposed image and so my recommendation in most situations would be to hit that okay button if you are in the manual mode so that you can see not only the exposure levels on the right hand side, but the screen will also adjusted here will show you a representative example of what the final picture is going to look like. And so this goes by different terms with other companies, but it's basically simulating the final exposure for you and I think that's much more beneficial, especially to a landscape photographer, a general photographer. If I was working in the studio, I probably wouldn't use that if I'm going to have strobes that are firing off, I wouldn't want to have that because the strokes air not on and everything would look really dark and I couldn't compose and so it's a nice quick setting change, but play around with that and get it set up for your style of shooting. Okay, so a little bit more in depth on the movie playback mode. When you are playing a movie back, you're going to be using the touch pad on the back of the camera to either pause, advance or rewind your video that you recorded, you can also press up to exit out of it. If you use the back dial the main command, I'll on the camera, you'll be able to skip either forward or backwards ten seconds in the video. One of the other options that you can do on the camera is noting indices or just kind of indicator marks while you're recording for instance say you're recording a two or three men it's segment and you want a highlight or go back to one section you can press one of the buttons on the front of the camera to kind of mark that point just has a little reference mark and to find those index marks you can turn the front dial and you can jump very quickly to those sections in the video which makes it really easy to kind of play back your videos and find all your stuff and so just two different ways of going through and finding advanced or sections behind if you want to adjust the volume levels the plus and minus over on the left hand side will be adjusting the volume level and that's just for what's playing back through the speaker in the camera and once again if you want to hit the I button this allows you to go in and edit your movie now there's limitations of what you could do here I'm not going to go into the full board uh features of this it can be done but it's it's highly highly limited if you are shooting any type of serious video, of course you're going to want to have a really video editing program that you're going to download too so one of the things to note about shooting video with this camera is that the focusing system is not as good as the standard setup. And if we look at the cross section of cameron, let me explain why is the camera has a neared system in it for viewing right? Well, that mir is a very special type of mere it has a partial, partially silvered mirror in it, which allows light through it. Okay, so you put your finger behind it, you could see your finger behind it, and the reason it lets light through it so the camera can have light in which to focus on. And this is where the face detection autofocus sensor is in the camera. This is what happens when you hold the camera for taking normal photos when you put the camera in the live you mode or the movie mode that mere needs to get up and out of the way the shutter opens up light go straight back to the sensor. That auto focus answer is now rendered useless, and the camera can't use it for focusing, so it uses another system called contrast based focusing and what this does is it looks at light on the sensor, and it tries to determine if it's contrast, you're not. So if I was to point the camera at a blank wall a little bit of what we have here, the camera will not be able to focus on it. It needs contrast the letters, the logo that we have up here on the wall, that's got a lot of contrast and it's going to be able to focus on that quite easily. And so, just as an example, let me throw this camera into live you and we'll do a little test, and I'm going to throw the camera back into program just that it's a nice, a simple little thing, and you can see we have a red focusing brackett up here, and if I press the auto will, I gotta have my limbs and auto focus that always helps. And so the camera is having a bit of a problem focusing over here, but if I focus it on the letters l it does a very good job by pointed where it's very black it's having a bit more of an issue on, so it needs a little bit of contrast in which to focus and it's not as quick as the camera is under normal circumstances for focusing and so there's kind of special focusing issues to deal with in this case now a button that we haven't got to yet. Controls the focusing its over here on the left hand side of the camera as you were holding the camera there's a switch and you want to leave that in auto focus I would say all the time unless you're using an older manual focus unless you're using let me say that again and older auto focus lens all the current auto focus lenses will have a switch on it and that's where you should probably do your switching so with this there is a button right here in the middle of it and that button when you press it does nothing like most of the nikon buttons you have to press it and turn a dial so if you press this and turn the front dial my button, turn the front dial you will see that there are four different options we have faced priority auto focus which will focus on faces it looks for faces and it doesn't vory good job focusing on I don't really like this because you I have a hard time controlling which face you're going to focus, so if you're focusing on people that are different distances to you it's hard to control where it's going to go on focus sometimes it chooses the clearest face sometimes it's the closest one sometimes it's the one with the biggest head it could go off a variety of things, so I'm not a big fan of face focussing unless you're having a single subject in front of you, there are two boxes you can choose you can choose either a wide area or a normal area box and I think either the wider the normal box from my favorite ones depending on the type of shooting that you're doing for auto focusing when you're in live you or in the movie moment the final fourth one is a subject tracking system so this is where it looks for an object and it tries to track it I think if you were in a fairly simplistic situation let's say you have a child who's playing around on a grass field out in front of you and there's not a lot else going on I think it would probably do a pretty good job tracking that but when you start throwing multiple subjects like a group of kids playing soccer it's not going to know which subject to track and so I would recommend using others ways of focusing and so you can play around with subject tracking I think it works well and simplistic modes but it's not going to be very good once started starts getting more complex so those are the four different ways of focusing of course there is the fifth and that is manual focusing and so with focusing we do have the choice of flipping it over two full manual focus and within those other types of a f area mode focusing options we do have two different choices of single focusing where focuses and stops, or where it's in full time focus and it's constantly focusing the whole time. You know if you're shooting video and you have subjects that are moving towards you and away from you full time focusing with the white area might be a good set up for that word of warning on the f f option in full time focusing the camera is always focusing whether you are shooting or not, whether you're taking still pictures or whether the video is running or not, which means you're using up a lot of battery power, and one of the things that does not look good in video is a scene that's constantly changing in and out of focus, and so the people who are serious about shooting are often going to be shooting in manual focus. They're going to figure out what is the sharpest focus set the lens manually they're going to shoot their clip there going to be done with it. They're going to go on to the next scene readjust focus, shoot that one and they'll just adjust it manually with the lens in manual focus, but for quick little clips, I would probably say a f s for single focusing and probably the wide area for the bracket would be pretty easy to work with once again to change those focusing options, you have to press and hold the button in the front for choosing the type of focusing, and so let me flip this around here so you can see what it looks like on the back of the camera, so when I press this in, you'll see the yellow indicator, which means that's the highlighted area I'm changing and I'll change the front one. I'm going to go for wide, which is right there for the back one I'm going to choose it f s for single and then when I pressed down for focusing it's going toe lock in pretty quickly right there and so that's live you focusing, which is similar but a little bit different than standard focusing which we haven't got to yet. How about focusing questions? No, no, it was not a good time way we'll have a full section on regular focusing is it does it pertain particularly to life and you think it's regular so lit and let's do it let's keep going, but I do have a live you question that particular, too that what percentage are you using live you for movies as opposed to stills that question again as far as like using your live mode for shooting stills, as opposed to movies like are you using it? Well? See, I still don't understand the question is are they talking because if you have if you want to shoot movies you have to have it in the movie mode correct it which is looks the same as live you and I thought the question was how often am I using live you versus non live you correct? Okay, well I don't use live you the only time I use live you is when I want to try perfect that's the kind of answer we were looking for, ok? And so if I'm doing a shot where I have this set up and I'm kind of doing this thing where I wonder if this looks right you know, sometimes the tripod set up and it's kind of hard to get right up close to the viewfinder if I sit back here and I look at the back of this, I get to use both eyes and I think I'm better composing when I have two eyes to look at it with its not as good for judging sharpness, which is why I gotta zoom in with the magnified buttons exposure wise it's not too bad it's pretty good, but I'll use this when I'm shooting landscapes, stuff, product photography, anything on a tripod I start using live you because I often want to be using mere lockup and live you is kind of a shortcut to mere lockup great and then just one more just in case the green indicator light is that in live motor is that when you're in focus or is that in regular focus mode that's in live view mode okay so in the green box means we're locked in great we got focus so al mansour is having issues with that and it says it it doesn't seem to be turning on is there a programming option that needs to be addressed or is that a problem he's just not in focus I cannot think of anything where that can be adjusted okay and so I would recommend pointing your camera is something that has a lot of contrast black and white lines doorframe where you have the actual door frame edge of the frame you can see try putting the box on that area as I mentioned before it has problems of areas of low contrast so if you have a white wall or a black wall or something you know just all red continuous tone it's gonna have a hard time focusing on that thank you, john. All right, so for those of you interested in shooting movies sires a lot of little notations about shooting movies it does shoot it into our recorded into a movie file not movie file the spec sir up there for you who are interested in that we do have a limit of a four gigabyte file that you can fill up which is going to be thirty minutes at full resolution on this. If you are shooting at thesixty p option sixty frames per second, you will have a limit of twenty minutes that you can shoot if you want to mark indices or little kind of index marks. There's a preview button on the front of the camera. Let me refresh my memory on the top button up here on the front of the camera. If you press that button while you're recording a movie, it just records and invisible little index that goes on the markers that you know to come back at that point, for instance, somebody says something very notable that you want to come back to and get that clip out of it. You might press that button at that time. We have various high definition resolutions nineteen twenty by ten eighty is called full hd twelve eighty by seven twenty is known as h d, so we can shoot in either of those two resolutions. Depending on what tv system you have as your standard in your country, you'll be able to set this up at twenty five, thirty, fifty and sixty frames per second. For those of you who want to shoot and mimic that hollywood look, that's been around for quite some time at twenty four frames a second. That is also an option this device is not a video camera is primarily a still camera, so they allow you to shoot a picture at any time even in the middle of a video. However, one little caveat is that you are not getting the full image sensor area that you are on ly getting the sixteen by nine aspect ratio so it's going to be a very wide shot were very, very tall shot you can set as I mentioned before, white balance for live you and a separate white balance for the actual photographs that you are taking. This is very helpful for anyone working with studio strobe lights. In any situation, the dx recording area is a smaller recording area, which is still going to get you the nineteen twenty by ten eighty or twelve eighty by seven twenty resolution. So if you were shooting telephoto video and you wanted to reach out a little bit further than your lens normally reached out, you can put your camera into dx and you're still getting that full hd or hd recording. Now this is a special little notation under the normal recording mode under the fx recording area, it is slightly less than the full image sensor area off course. You're getting the bars on the top and bottom, getting it into the sixteen by nine aspect ratio, but you are not getting as much area side to side the frame is technically thirty five point nine millimeters, and you're only getting thirty two point eight millimeters. And so when you put on a really wide lands there's, a little bit of frustration, at least on my part, that you're not really getting the full area that you would normally get in a still photograph. It isthe slightly cropped in, so there is a very, very slight telephoto effect when doing this, I don't know what the magnification ratio is, but it might be one point, one or something, a little less than that. So those are a few little notes on the movie mode.