Lessons

Lesson Info

Camera Sides and Bottom Deck

So we're continuing on our exploration of the back of the camera, and we're going to take a close look at the cluster of buttons in the bottom right hand corner of it. You will notice a couple little holes in the side there that is for the speaker. When you are playing your movies back, you could hear what's going on. We've talked a bit about our display button and there's lots of different options in there. One of the other options is the tilt sensor. You might have seen that in theirs. I cycled through it nice for getting the horizon line straight. We have our other controls that we have spent a great deal of talking about the controlled ill, the menu set button the function number two button right now to start with on most people's camera is also the quick menu button, which I find very useful for jumping in and changing a lot of the more common features that you might want to get to on the camera and talk a little bit more about this in the display section that'll be coming up here...

in a little bit, and in order to make these settings, you just simply hit the cuban, and then you get to navigate using the back controller all around you can also use the front dial as well. One of the cool things about this camera is that you can go in and you can create your own custom quick menu by going in and adjusting that, and I'm going to talk more about that a little bit later, but you can create your own collection of things that you go towards if you want to re program this button to do something else entirely, you could do that once again in the function buddy button setting right below that we have the function number three button, and what this does is it controls the focusing system on the camera, which is pretty important for a lot of people and something I like to have quick access to and there's a lot of different options, so let's dive in and talk a little bit more in depth about the focusing modes on this camera, this camera is using a contrast detection system so it's using the information that is hitting the sensor in which to focus s and it can focus over about probably about ninety percent of the frame, everything except for the very border of the frame. And you can see the five different options on screen that you have. You have a face detection system if you use that it'll show you different colored brackets, whether the faces detected or if it's actually in focus and kind of confirmed at that point which works quite well with a single person it does get a little bit confused sometimes if you have multiple people and so I would be careful about using that one in the wrong place but if you have like a single child in front of you and you wanted to try to keep track of that focusing is they're moving around that would be a pretty good system for using they have tracking system what it does is it looks for a subject and it tries to lock on like a fighter pilot in a jet plane and locks on is that subject is moving around and there are different colors to indicate whether it's ready whether the subject's detected whether it's tracking it or if there's a problem with it and in theory this looks awesome on paper in reality it's a little hit and miss and so you want to see give it a try see if it works for the type of subjects that you're working with. I found that for a lot of the action that I shoud it's a little unpredictable and a little wonky at times and it doesn't quite nail it quite as often as some of the other systems that I might want to choose here in the middle is the twenty three area you can see the twenty three boxes on screen what happens here is that the camera just looks at all twenty three and just tries to take a really good guess as to what it might want to focus on, and that box will turn green and maybe that's another good time to do a little live demo so let me turn on my camera and point it in front of me and let's make sure that I have it in the right mode, so I'm gonna press the function three button, move it over to the twenty three area and make sure my cameras in auto focus yeah, not making that mistake again. I'm going to flip out of the movie mode and go into the program mode not that that's going to make a huge difference, but let's, press down what we think we're going to focus on. I'm guessing it's going to grab this little slide projector in front of me and it did it was it just the camera a little bit now it did still got it it's still getting it now? And why did it not get it the first time? And so this is one of the reasons why I don't like the smoke gets a little unpredictable, what it's going to grab onto? Very, very selective depending on exactly where the cameras pointed at as to what it goes on to and so this is a good general mode if you don't know what you want to focus on and you're just going to point the camera out in front of you but as you can see in that example sometimes it'll grab it sometimes it will go with the foreground sometimes the background depending on how much of the frame it's filling up and how significant it is and so simple mode but not very precise next up is the one area and this is this is one of my favorite modes because it's just it's simple and it's easy to work with you could adjust the box let's go ahead to a live demo on this one as well so I got to change this mode press the function three move over to the one area and if I want I can use the touch screen I can also use the touch pad on the back of the camera I can change the size of the box and move it around and that's where I'm focusing and so if I just want to move it up there I can focus up there the touch really makes it fast to move around and I think I could even change the size of it yes I kind of like this medium ly small size here not too small and that's actually assist if I can make any other adjustments is so it's mainly just with the touch pad that you're going to move this around? Let's say I am now now there's other control so we can help move it around. And so that is one of my favorite systems for focusing now the final option is the pinpoint focusing and what this is doing is it's looking over a very small area, and so one of the options when I was trying to dio, which I can't do because I normally have the camera program gone back on one area is that you can turn on the touch pad on the back of the camera to control where you are focusing this something that has to be turned on, and I kind of like so that I can have direct control over where that focusing bracket isthe all right, moving back into pinpoint first off this doesn't work in f f or a f c mode, it magnifies that focusing point, so you can really make sure that it's practice then it's placed in the right area like to do a live demo with this as well, but I believe I can't have my camera still in a f f so I need to get my camera out of f f back into a f s I'm then going to change to pinpoint focusing and let's focus on our little camera here close to us, and you'll see how the camera really zooms in, and if I want to use my finger, I can move the can't move it around a little bit and be very careful about where I'm focusing. I want to get it on the lens of that camera, or maybe I want to get it on the title of the camera, and I could be very, very precise. Now, this is a very, very picky setting, uh, scenario and it's a little bit difficult to work with handheld if you're moving around very much or if you have a long lens, I find that it works very well on a tripod is a little too fussy for some people in the handheld works, so just be aware of that. Now you notice that it had a magnified image for a short period of time, you can control how long that comes up it's either a half second, one second or a second and a half in how long you get that magnified view of your subject before it kicks back to the full view of what you are shooting in frame. And so those are your five different focusing systems and there's a reason for each one of those. I tend to like the one area the most and the pen point is kind of nice when I'm doing may be careful tabletop work or landscape work from a tripod but there is reasons for using all the other ones as well so that is the focusing system russ you look like you're just hankering to ask a question I am you read me well we have look mcfadden who wonders which auto focus mode is best for the earlier example of burst shots with running subjects so fc obviously but which specific focusing mode so in the shot that I had which had a pack of runners coming towards the camera with nothing else in front of them I was using the twenty three area because it gave the camera the most opportunity to figure out what to focus on and in general the system is is that it always focuses on what's closest to the camera so as those runners air coming towards me it keeps refocusing on where they are now if they were in a small portion of the frame then I would have probably have done the one area and adjusted the box according to the size of the group that they were in that sounds great thank you all right all right so that is the focusing system and we're going to move on and what do we have next multipurpose buttoned down here number four the function for you can re program this for something else. Normally, it is the delete button when you are playing back images, but it is also the return button, and so when we're in the menu and you go into something in the menu and you're like, ok, I'm done, I want to get out of here. This is the button you press and so just hit this one toe back back out. Usually you're hitting the menu and set button two enter and enter and to enter a new sub menu and you press the function forward, back, back out. All right, looking over on the side of the camera, we have a few little ports to talk about up at the top. We have a mike sock it so that you can plug in an external. Mike uses a standard three point five millimeter jack, which is different than the g h two, which had this kind of many two point, five millimeter jack and there's, a lot of different microphones that you can get. I'm only going to talk about just a couple of them here. Panasonic has won the d m w him has to. This one sells for how much two hundred forty bucks, and it includes the little windjammer sock on the outside, the sign izer. In k four hundred is gonna be one of the smallest mike's you could get to it, and it's got a little muff on there for forty bucks, and that is the one that I have here, so I'm gonna go ahead, mount this up on the camera just to show you what it looks like. The muff can come on and off it's nice to have on their to muffle the sound of wind, and then I just come over here to the side of the camera and plug it in it records in stereo sound, it has better quality sound recording them, the built in camera part of the ones the microphones on the camera is that you're going to hear all the sounds of you in these little strapped things if you haven't taken him off or moving lens or anything else that you're doing on the camera that transfers a little bit more easily through the built in microphone. This has kind of a rubber shock system on it so that there is no physical metal connection with the camera, so it's going to do better and it's not going to have its much noise as the built in microphone. So if you want to record better video that's a nice, really small microphone that sells for about two hundred bucks, the extra little muff here is going to be forty dollars another very popular one is from road video mike pro this sells for two hundred thirty dollars and I love the name of their muff or there windjammer they call it a dead cat, so purchase yourself a dead cat for forty dollars if you're going to get your road microphone so you can work out in windy conditions as we go down and keep opening doors on the side of the camera we have a headphone socket so you can plug in some standard headphone scene could monitor the sound and there's going to be a number of controls with sound as we get into the set up menu there's an hd my socket so that you can send a video signal out of the camera you can have it with information or you can have it clean without overlays of information of shutter speed and aperture. So there's a variety of reasons for using it either as a remote monitor or using it with a remote recording device. Because you can get the full hd display off of the camera with an external recorder and then you have an eighty out button. This is how you would download images or movie to your computer it's not the best way to do it, but it is a way to do it it's a standard usb two point oh connection, which can be a little slow with today's, larger flat files russ another question as we mentioned audio, we did have a question from our gunter photography do you happen to know if you can monitor audio levels while recording in video mode and can you change audio levels and aperture while recording you can change audio levels? Yes, a cz faras changing shutter speed and aperture while you are recording I don't know I will throw it into a quick movie mode actually there's I may need to go in and change too many different things here to make this a worthwhile live demo, but let's just see what I could do, so I need to get in here and change to manual mode exposure mode to manual ok, so now I'm in manual let's get set here let's just start recording and I can change apertures while I am recording, I can change shutter speeds ltd down to a thirtieth of a second because I'm probably shooting at thirty frames per second, but I can change apertures I can't guarantee that now, unfortunately for sound let's see don't have that in here I don't have that said is a custom actually I actually aiken increase the recording levels, you can see the level in the lower left, I am increasing it with the touch screen, you know let's see if yeah so is actually pretty quick and easy to work with you just kind of got to get used to where all these controls are and so inside the touch screen in the video section there's a number of controls that you can get to return this on turn that off we can do that on the back of the camera here without turning the dial so you can see I'm changing the aperture wow, that was a great question because I didn't show this before and so that should be pretty silent cause you're just touching the screen so let me stop recording. All right? There you go, that's fantastic. Thank you for remembering that that's grand glad that worked out. All right, well, continuing on we're gonna move around to the other side of the camera where we have yet another report this time for a remote socket. So if you are wanting to trigger the camera from a distance without touching the camera that's not that far a distance is a few feet maybe thie d m w r s l one should sell for around fifty dollars, enable you to do long time exposures or simply fire the camera without actually physically touching the camera. The camera uses sd memory cards be aware that there is a right protection switch on him. If you cannot read information or right information to a card, you've probably flipped that switch accidentally or purposely down to the bottom so be aware of that little note, we have different types of cards, they're all sd cards, they're just different sizes of cards that you can get in here. If you're going to shoot a lot of video, you're obviously gonna want fairly large cards once again, we talked about this before the writing speed is very important when you shoot video because it's writing data constantly to the card, and if you are shooting in those higher bit rates, you're going to probably want a faster memory card and so most of the cards on the market or class ten or higher now, but there's a lot of older cards out there that or slower, so make sure that you have the right card for the way that you are recording with the camera. You know, on the other side of the camera you recall that you could download by plugging for your camera into the computer? Well, that is about the slowest way to get your images to your computer. A better system is to use a card reader it's going to be much faster, and the fastest way is if your computer has an actual card slot in it that you can just plug your card in and so if you have lots of data, you don't want to waste time transferring it, keep that in mind. Working our way around to the front of the camera we have a pc sink so if you want you could hook external strobes up to the camera be aware that the top shutter speed once again is one one sixtieth of a second len's release press that down to about a quarter turn to take the lens on and off we have our contacts which are connected up to the camera that real important other than just be aware that they're there and they're not damaged or blocked in in in any way there is a little tiny door that opens up it's a little flap more or less and this allows a cable to come out of the battery compartment if you use the d m w a c eight which sells for about forty dollars if you wanna have continuous power supply to your camera he might have this in a studio environment or perhaps in a scientific environment where the camera is going to be left on for a long period of time you can power it up constantly and I will mention that this camera has been specifically designed for shooting long term video. It has basically a heat system heat dissipation system built within it so that you can shoot for much longer periods of time than other video cameras and so it's not that big a deal to shoot a half hour or hour long video with this camera inside, you can see our sixteen megapixel sensor we have our lens mount mark, which will match up with lenses for mounting on and off on front we have a little light. This is a self timer lamp lets you know when the picture is going to be taken it's also a very weak flashlight that turns on when the camera can't focus and works as an assist lamp. Now this is something I personally find kind of annoying when somebody points a camera at me with the assist light shining a bright light in my face. In reality, I found that it only works over a few feet of distance and is very limited of use, and so if you want to go into a stealth mode, you can turn this lamp off that it will never turn on. I think if you know how to manually focus or you know really what to point you're focusing brackets at you generally don't need this under most all situations, so that's a decision you'll be able to make when we get into the menu setting looking towards the bottom of the camera we obviously have our big old battery compartment takes the d m w b l f nineteen battery this battery sells for around sixty dollars and comes with a standard charger too little plug in travel charger nice and small in size as I said before, I would take about three and a half hours to charge your battery. You'll get about five hundred stills about two hundred fifty minutes of recording time. You'll have a serial number record that for insurance purposes, standard tripods socket so it's going to hit on all the tripods, model pods and other types of accessories. There's a little rubber door that pops off, and this allows you to hook up the dmc b g g h three battery grip. This allows you to hold the camera much more comfortably, vertically. If you're the person who shoots a lot of portrait. Sor sports photography can be very handy, but if you shoot video, the big advantage is that there is two batteries that you can now put in your camera, so there is less time. If you're going to be shooting a long video event, you'd have two batteries powering up the camera, and it would just be twice as long before you needed to replace batteries in that scenario.