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Shooting Menu: Vignette Control-Manual Movie Settings

Scrolling down to the next page, Vignette control. So this is one of the image manipulation options that is in the camera where it's going to try to fix or adjust a JPEG image. And so what it's trying to fix in this case are images that have a little bit of darkening of the corners. This will happen very often with lenses like a 50-millimeter 1.4, or an 85 1.8 lens. There's a natural vignetting that happens in those lenses when you shoot them wide open. The camera knows how much vignetting there is and can automatically fix it, 'cause it reads what lens is on the camera, and it will fix it. This is one of the few features that will not work with after-market lenses like Sigma, Tokinas and Tomrons because Nikon does not calibrate this feature to work with those third-party lenses. And so in some cases where you have a skyline like this, then yeah, you would want to have that turned on. The fact of the matter is that I seem to be adding a vignette to more images than I'm taking it off. I...

t's oftentimes just darkening that corner down draws your eye more to the middle of the frame. And so there are many photos that look perfectly fine with a normal vignette or even a high vignette. And so this is something that I just kind of like to leave turned off. But you may wanna leave it on normal if you want it to kind of fix your basis JPEG images. Depends a little bit on your style and what type of images you like to shoot. Auto distortion control. Alright, so this is one of the things that it's going to affect only JEPG images, and I recommend leaving this turned on 'cause very few people like distortion. So this image shows a little bit of barrel distortion. You can see that in the horizon line. And if if go back and forth between these two photos, you can see what it looks like if it's turned on versus turned off. And I don't know of anyone that likes images that have that distortion there. So let's correct for it. Now once again, this only corrects for it in JPEG images if you shoot with a RAW image file and you are shooting with a very wide angle lens, you're gonna get whatever natural, whatever natural distortion that lens is gonna have. It's typically more common on those ultra wide lenses. Doesn't hurt to turn it on though if you are shooting RAW. Optical VR. Okay, so most of the Nikon lenses that have vibration reduction on them have a switch on the side of the lens. Well now they're starting to put the On/Off built into the cameras. And if you notice on the side of my camera here, take a look to the side of my camera, this lens is a VR lens which, if I get this turn around here, you can see it's a VR lens there, but as I rotate around, there's no switch over here. Normally, I Nikon lens would have a switch where you would flip it back and forth for turning the VR on and off. And we no longer have that on this new AF-P 18-55 lens. I think most Nikon lenses will continue to have it, but some of the less expensive, simpler lenses, they're not even gonna put that switch on the lens, it's gonna save you an extra 25 cents when you buy your lens and now you're gonna have to turn it on and off on the back of the camera. So that's why this particular feature is here. I believe, and I haven't had a chance to test this, but I believe if you have a lens that has a switch on it, that is going to be the master switch for it. If that is turned off, you, the stabilization will be turned off. And so be aware of that as to whether you have a switch on the lens or not. Interval timer shooting. Okay, so here is where you get to shoot a whole bunch of photos and the camera is gonna set up how many photos you shoot and the interval between them, and the idea is that you're gonna take all those individual images and you're gonna use some other post-production program to compress them into a video. I know there's a lot of video programs out there that will look at a group of images and combine them into a video program. So here's a time lapse that I shot in Oregon, and I did use a slider to get the camera to move from side to side here to get a little bit of foreground movement as well as some weather action. Another one of my favorite time lapses is from India. This is a picture about every three to five seconds or so over about a half-hour period of time on an obviously very busy intersection in India. And so these can be a lot of fun to do, and if you wanna create these, you gotta go out, and you gotta set your camera up and shoot lots of individual photos at that predetermined interval. So once you dive into here, you are gonna have a little control panel down here in the bottom. You can set up a specific start time. So if you didn't want it to start right now, let's say there is an event that starts at seven o'clock and you wanna start it right at seven o'clock, you could preprogram that in. You could figure out how long you want your video to be and how many frames per second it's gonna be, select in the number of shots you want. You can take a look at the current time just so that you know what time you may wanna start out with, 'cause some people will set it up in here and have the camera start in three minutes or something like that. And then the important one is the interval between the shots. This is typically going to be between one second and one minute, depending on what type of time lapse that you're going to create. So as you get into the information, you could just click the Start button and start the time lapse. You don't wanna do that quite yet 'cause we haven't made any settings. The Start options would be to go in, do you wanna start it now or do you wanna choose a specific day and time for this event to start? So maybe you're gonna do start points, and you're gonna go to sleep, and you want your camera to start shooting it has gotten dark, say, two hours after sunset. And then this is probably the most important setting is the Interval: how long between the shots when you shoot photos? And as I think about this, one of the things that you may wanna do is you may wanna turn off the playback option in the camera so the camera's not playing back images on the back LCD to save a little bit of battery space. But as I say, between one and a minute, I often am doing time lapses between one and 10 seconds. And then how many times do you want the camera to fire? And so some of my favorite numbers when it comes to this is I like 300 'cause on a normal video at 30 frames per second, it gives me 10 seconds. Sometimes I want a little bit more so I do 360. Or sometimes you might need a much larger number like 1,000. Just depends on how long you want that final video to be. Exposure smoothing is gonna go in, and it's gonna work in the program and shutter priority in aperture priority mode where the camera has control of an exposure. And it can work in manual if you have the camera set to Auto ISO. And what it does is if there's a large change from one image to the next in brightness, it adjusts the brightness of that image and try to smooths it out so that it doesn't jump around as much. And so shooting a time lapse series in an environment where the light's changing like a setting sun is a very challenging environment because the camera changes at third-stop increments, and that can be kind of large. And so for somebody who wants to kind of ease that out, you may wanna turn that on. I recommend more advanced users may wanna turn that off because they like to manually control these things when they get out themselves. Now one of the things that I haven't been able to see is that if you turn this on, the camera still records very clear third steps in the exposure, but it may very well be adjusting the exposure, but it's not telling you on each image that it has adjusted. So you won't know when and where it's actually done that. It'll just kind of do it on its own. And in the end, you're just gonna end up with a collection of hundreds of photographs that you're gonna get here, and I wanna mention that because there is a different similar one that we're gonna talk about next. Time-lapse movie is very similar to Interval timer shooting. The difference here is rather than finishing up with a collection of individual images, you end up with a movie file, one basic file completed in the camera. So if you wanted something that was ready to go, you can do it right in the camera here. So we're gonna have very similar options in here. Interval between shoots is very important. What is the frame size and rate that you want your video to be? How much recording time it's gonna show you you have left and how much memory card space to give you an idea; if you're at the end of your memory card and you're gonna shoot a long time lapse, it may not fit on the card. And so it's just gonna give you all the information that you need for shooting that movie time lapse. You can, of course, just start at here, you can set the interval between the shots here. Shooting time, how much time do you want it to shoot for? So 25 minutes in this, or 25 minutes of shooting is gonna give us about 10 seconds of final video. And so be aware that the clock and the reel are two different things: how much time does it take to shoot, how much actual video am I going to get from this? And then again, we'll have the Exposure smoothing, which I think probably, in this case, most people will wanna leave turned on just 'cause it's gonna make that video a little bit smoother and it's not gonna flicker quite as much as the light is potentially changing in there. And so the time-lapse movie mode gives you a completed movie interval timer, gives a whole collection of individual images that you're gonna have to work with later on. If you're serious about this sort of stuff, you're gonna wanna shoot in the interval timer. If you just want something quick and easy, then you'll be using the time-lapse movie. Alright, this is the Movie settings, and this is for all of the video settings that you're gonna be recording. First and foremost is the frame size and rate in here. So we have a number of different options, let's look at some of the options we have in there. Oops, I went a little bit more quickly than I expected there, I'm gonna jump back. Gotta let that build. Alright, so frame size and frame rate allow us to go in and change the resolution and the frame rate in the video. And so kind of the most common video, at least right now in time, is HD which is 1920 X 1080 in frames. And 30 frames per second is the normal video rate. Some people like recording at double that either because they wanna slow it down or they like the look of that when there's fast action. In Europe, the standard rate is 25, and then they can double it to 50. We also have a standard HD which is 1280 X 780 option. But I think that 1920 X 1080 at 30 frames per second is what most people are gonna want for shooting basic video out of this camera. Movie quality, this deals with the compression ratio of the file. The High quality will give you a larger file size, and you will be limited on how much time you can record, depending on some other settings and how hot the camera gets. And so Normal quality is probably gonna be fine for most people, you can do a little video test yourself to see how much difference you see. But it's not a huge difference, it's just a very, very subtle difference in image quality in the Movie mode. For the microphone, the camera has a built-in microphone. Normally you can leave this on Auto sensitivity, it'll do a pretty good job. But if you wanna select it to Manual sensitivity, you can go in there and you can select manually either having it a little bit quieter or a little bit louder, depending on the environment that you're in. Or you could turn the microphone off completely. If you are in a windy situation, wind hitting the side of the camera is gonna cause a really bad sound on the microphones built in here. You really need external microphones to get good sound in general, but especially so in windy conditions. And so if you do have windy conditions, and you are recording video, you don't have an external mic, probably wanna turn this on and it's going to dampen some of those horrible noises that you're hearing. It's basically, the camera hitting, or the wind hitting the camera itself, and so that's what's making all that noise. And it can do a better job of muffling that out. How serious are you about shooting movies? Some people are very serious, and they wanna shoot in the manual exposure mode, and they wanna set a specific shutter speed and a specific aperture. Other people are just using this camera as a simple video camera. And so if you wanna use this as a simple video camera, you can leave the manual settings off. If you really wanna get in there and shoot a film project with this and have very specific settings, turn this on and that's gonna allow you, when you are shooting movies, to go in there and make those specific settings. Otherwise, whenever you have the camera in the Movie mode, it's just gonna automatically choose shutter speeds and apertures for you in order to get a proper exposure.