Lessons

Lesson Info

Live View and Movie Mode

There's kind of a new collar that's kind of the standard of switching between these modes on all the nikon cameras and so you have a color that switched up and down depending on whether you want to be in the live you or movie mode, they're related very, very closely, but they are different as to whether you want to shoot still pictures in the live you mode or you want to shoot video in the movie mountain and so first off select the use the live you selector just select which one you want and then you would press the button in the middle to activate it and kind of turn it on. So let's, talk about these two modes in more detail. All right, so you hit the live you mode and suddenly you get to see a little tv view of what is right happening and happening right in front of you. Now one of the first things that you can do is play around a little bit with the button right below it, which is the info, but some people like to see lots of information about the shutter speed aperture, other recor...

ding data that's going on. Other times you just want to see the image that you're actually pointing the camera there's a got a framing guidelines so if you want to level the horizon there's also a virtual horizon kind of looks like something an indicator out of an airplane help you level the horizon from left and right to make sure your camera's not tilt it. If you want, you can go back to that I button, and you can start controlling some of the features about whether you're in live you or movie mode, and so that'll act give you quick access to some of those menu features without having to jump back all the way into the menu setting. Now, the thing that we need to address about working in live you and movie mode is that the auto focus system of the camera is different here than it is under normal circumstances. In the normal shooting motor, this camera, the main mir, is what is known as a partial mirror it's partially so silvered in the middle, and this is where the cameras going to be focusing. You can see through the mirror if you take a very close look at it, and the reason it is partially silvered is so that it can let some light through, bounces around on a couple of meers and goes down to an auto focus sensor in the camera. This is how your camera focuses when you are looking through the camera, right? In case you've ever wondered, I'm looking through the camera, how does it know what to focus on? Well this is how it's doing it now here's the problem when you put the camera into the live view mode the mere goes up the shutter curtain opens and light goes straight back to the sensor and look at that auto focus sensor how much information is a getting it's like it's completely in the dark as to what's going on and this is why cameras can't use their traditional very fast focusing system in the live you or the movie mode all right so it's got to use a different system for focusing and what it does is it takes the image landing on the sensor and it uses contrast to figure out if it's in focus or not if it's contrast e it's in focus if it's all fuzzy it's not in focus and it changes the lens and it's not as quick at figuring out how to fix the focusing of the lens and so focusing in live you and movie mode is different than the standard mode on the camera now by pressing the button on the side of the camera forward side where the you would press the release button on the winds there is a button that we haven't quite officially talked about yet but by pressing that button and turning the sub command I'll out in the front of the camera you will change what is known as thie f area mo this is where your camera chooses to look to focus an option number one is it'll choose faces and it's going to look for a face and it actually has a pretty good job at recognising faces it's not my favorite mode because what if you have two people at different distances and you don't want the one that it's choosing? If you're just choosing a single person, it might work okay. Next it has a wide area and a normal area and these air just different size boxes and you can choose to move these boxes left, right top and bottom, moving around the frame with the little multi selector in the back of the camera and those are my favorite. I prefer the white area just cause it's a little bit larger area to work with on the subjects now the camera also has a subject tracking system that looks for subjects that are moving and tries to track their whereabouts as they move left and right and this might be pretty good, let's say if you have a kid that's kind of running around and unpredictable about where they're going in the frame. It's a little subjected the cameras using some algorithms to try to figure out what's going on so it's a little hard to predict exactly what the cameras going to do, you can experiment with it, but most people I think often keep to the wide or normal area by pressing that same button and turning the back dial on the camera, you'll be changing the focusing mode and this is not this is choosing how it focuses rather than where it focuses. The first option is a f s for single, which means the camera will focus on a subject and as soon as it confidently figures out which subject that is and where it is, it stops focusing and this is pretty good. It also has ah full time focus f f where the camera is constantly adjusting and this is kind of the way traditional movie cameras have worked there constantly adjusting, so somebody walks closer to the camera it adjust for it. The problem is, is that in the full time mode, the focusing is kind of slow even in the single mode it's kind of slow and it takes a while to acquire its subject. The people who are using a camera like this for shooting video are often manually focusing they focus on their subject ahead of time they shoot their little shot five ten second clip and then they stopped recording and then they set up for the next shot it's a little bit cumbersome, but because of that focusing problem I talked about before focusing is not really fast and accurate on this for changing and so don't plan to shoot let's say, a basketball game in full auto focus with subjects running towards you and away from you in the camera tracking every their every movement it will try to follow it but it's gonna lag behind and it's going to be quite slow there's nothing wrong with the camera a ce faras defective it's just not built for that type of auto focusing system john really quick michael in socal ass how do you turn on the face detection feature? Is that the same thing as the face priority? The face detection for live you is turned on right here so you press the focusing button over on the side of the camera as you have your finger down on that so I'll do it right here on this camera's all press down on this button here and then you turn the front mode right here and actually turned the camera so our other cameras can see it I'll need to throw this into live view we don't have a very exciting scene in there but that's not the point right now and so I got to make sure that my camera is in auto focus that always helps and so if I press that button and you'll see a couple things in yellow on frame and I can change it to face detection mode and it will look for faces and you'll see the little happy face there and so that's how you get that turned on all right, so if you do have it in the movie mode somethings to be aware of as faras the movies that you shoot or what are called dot movie files, they're pretty common. You, khun watch them very easily on pcs and apples were running modern software. So you, khun, you can use them for just about anything these days. Let's. See what else we got? We do have a limit four gigabyte file, after which time the camera will stop recording and a thirty minute limit at full resolution. And so you can only go thirty limits in just in case. Anyone's wondering. Night gun could make it thirty one minutes or sixty minutes, but there's extra taxes that are employed on cameras that go over thirty minutes because they're considered video cameras and they have special taxes and the camera would cost more. And the cameras I also have a sensor that would heat up, which would not do well for more than thirty minutes, and so that's why they cut it at thirty minutes. One of the gripes about this camera in about other nikon cameras is that when you are in the movie mode and you have engaged the movie mode, you cannot control the aperture, and this is a big feature that a lot of people shooting video want to be able to do is they want to shoot a two point eight and shoot this one at faa. What you have to do is you have to exit the movie mode, change the aperture and go back in. People aren't happy with this there's nothing technically wrong with the camera, but that's the way it works. It's just been a bit of a great and it's not that hard to work around, but it could be better. You have different resolutions and frame rates for the camera. I'll get in later on how and where to change it, but just be aware right now nineteen twenty by ten eighty is known as full hd and so that's the highest resolution it'll shoot at it has different frame rates that you can shoot at. Some are common to different parts of the world than others. For instance, twenty five p is common in europe. Thirty p would be coming in the united states. You will be able to get into these through the shooting menu called movie settings. You can go in and you can change the frame rate and resolution now you can shoot at sixty I if you are shooting with the one point three crop there's a crops, we haven't really talked about that, but you can crop the sensor down to a smaller area and it can shoot that at sixty I but that's the only one that you can shoot at sixty I everything else is going to be limited the using the entire frame on this camera is known as the dx sensor you can also shoot with a smaller one point three crop on the sensor if you need to get in a little bit closer let's just say you don't have a big enough telephoto lens that's an additional way to get a little bit closer to your subject, you might say and so that's a choice that you'll be able to make in the image area option now this is primarily a still photography machine, which means if you're in the video mode if you're in the live you motor doesn't matter you want to take a picture, you press down on the shutter release you will get a still picture. The downside is is that if you are in the video mode it's going to be a sixteen by nine aspect ratio and it's going to crop off a little bit of the top on the bottom with each frame that you shoot and so it's not the best place to be shooting still pictures but you could do it nonetheless if you want, you can go back into a video and you can pull a frame out of it into a separate file it's not a super high resolution image it's not twenty four mega pixels it's the resolution of the video that your shooting but you're able to actually extract that frame within the camera when you review the when you review the movie if you want and so I can't stress this enough if you want to shoot video with this camera, focus first, get it down and then do your shooting stop the shooting focus on the next shot it's not the perfect video camera that's not what it was designed for, but that is just a standard problem that we've been dealing with and with some newer generation cameras were just starting to see some potential changes around that where the technology is catching up to our demands on the camera but for for this camera not the greatest video camera in the world but for a lot of people it makes for a very nice video camera with very high image quality just a little work around on the auto focus a few questions before we leave the movie man yeah, a mango seven in washington, d c says when I shoot video and it is that the isa jumps around depending on the light around seemingly automatically how does one manually control that it sounds like there s o is set in the auto maya, so city right now, and so they just need to go back in and hit the esso baton. Hold it down and I believe it's turning the back dial on the camera and get out of the auto I s o mode and the one with the camera. S can you change the aperture and movie mode? If you have a lens with an aperture ring, you could physically change it if you have one of the older nikon lenses that has a physical rain on it, yes, because it's there's nothing electronically stopping so that's the that's, the one way to make it work.