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Button Layout: Top Deck Part 2
Continuing our tour of the top of the camera, we of course have our direct record button and on this camera at any time that you want to record video, you can do so by simply pressing the record button even if you're not in the motion picture mode. But I would recommend going to the motion picture on the dial that we just talked about on the top of the camera because it's going to switch your viewfinder over so that you have the correct aspect ratio and you can see exactly what you're going to record if you just hit the record button, it has to switch over into that mode and you don't get to preview it before you start recording. And so let's just talk about some of the basics of recording what I was just mentioning is normally you're going to be looking at a four by three aspect ratio and you're going to be recording a sixteen by nine crop within that frame. And so as soon as you go into the movie mode, then that will fill the frame and you'll see exactly what you're going to be getti...
ng in the final movie and you can control that exposure mode once again in that motion picture menu setting one of the things that you can do while in this mode is hit the display button on the back of the camera and this will pull up or take down and basically cycle through a different bunch of different view screens sometimes when I'm shooting video I want to see all my settings I need to see where my shutter speeds my aperture and what other things are set on the camera once I get those set I often want to turn off the display and concentrate solely on composition and that way you could just take everything down and look straight at the image a few bits of information about shooting motion pictures on this camera there are two different formats of video that you can shoot in pif four is going to be a very compressed and small file it works very good on computers if you were looking to say upload some into youtube thie mp four would probably be the preferred system for shooting it's just not going to overshoot it with too much data you might say if you were looking at making a higher quality dvd or small little video production that was bound for something beyond a a simple cat video on youtube for instance a v c h d is going to give you more options for editing and it's going to look really good on hd tvs but is larger in file size the cards that you have in your camera are fairly important it's not really that difficult to get good video out of this camera all you need is class for or faster cards there's very few cards that are slower than that, but just be aware that faster cards will enable that video writing to continuously stream data to the to the memory card. The recording quality can be controlled in the motion picture menu will get to the menu setting on this a little bit later, but just a preview of what you're going to have options on. You have different resolutions and different megabits per second that you're that you are recording so most people are going to want to record hd quality, which is nineteen twenty by ten eighty there is a sixty frames per second option that is generally not necessary for most video, but if you do plan to slow it down it's high speed action, that would be a good one to shoot with. But for most people nineteen twenty by ten eighty at thirty frames per second is going to be your standard video. There are some lower resolution rates as well if you need smaller file sizes direct from the camera theeighty chd also has similar options where there is a sixty p option. Most people don't need this because we're only watching video on our tvs and computers for the for the most part at thirty frames per second and so the nineteen twenty by ten eighty sixty I what the sixty I means is it's an interlaced which looks very much like thirty p we're not going to get too far into this thing output is in thirty p on it uh, and what that means is that if you want out put out of the camera it's going to be in thirty p but recorded in camera it's sixty isil if you're recording on an external device, will it be thirty p but those are my two recommended settings for image quality when it comes to motion pictures resolution rates most of the time, as I say, you're going to want to have full hd resolution nineteen twenty by ten eighty there is the smaller twelve eighty by seven twenty, which is gonna be much smaller and file size easier to deliver over the web, for instance and then there's a very small six forty by four eighty option as well the frames per second talked a little bit about this there's going to be progressive and interlace progressive is pretty easy to understand it's a image one right after another each image is fully independent of the other image interlaced was developed much earlier than progressive in order to try to save whip band with you might say and so what it does is it shoots two frames and it uses every other line so that with two frames it looks like one solid image and it's a little bit lower resolution it's a little bit easier on bandwidth as faras getting a smaller file size it doesn't look as good and generally for most people they're not going to shoot interlaced if they can afford to not do it. The only reason you would shoot inter laces if you're trying to match up something that already that goes with something else that's interlaced or you need that smaller file size, most people are going to prefer progressive because it's gonna have a little bit more natural look to it some general information about the motion pictures there will be a recording light up in the top right as you are recording the time that you are recording in the amount of time left on a memory card, it will also show up and to get that you may need to hit the display button to see that you do have a limit on how long you can shoot video it's thirty minutes or four gigabytes whatever comes first you can shoot a still photo anytime you want, but what happens depends on what you have chosen to do in what's called the picture mode in the motion picture menu settings and you can put your camera in a videocamera priority or a still camera priority if you put your camera and it's still part still camera priority, it means it's valued values still images over the video and it's going to shoot a twelve make a twelve megapixel picture if you put it in the video camera mode what it's going to do is it's going to shoot a small j peg but it's not going to stop the video and it's just going to be able to continue shooting video but you end up with this lower resolution still image which is kind of an interesting option I haven't seen on it in the any other camera we also have a touch screen for focus racking or focus changing so if you want to change something from the foreground to the background focus you can do that in camera and that might be worth a little demo if I can risk of that let's see if we can get this to work so I'm going to put the camera into the movie mode and if we are on yes we are on yields noticed that when I switched to the movie mode the aspect changed to the narrower sixteen by nine aspect ratio I'm going to turn off the displays cause I wanted leave it down here and if I have this in auto focus you can see how I can change focus actually I may get it up there and I can actually start recording video actually that we come back here it's a little bit easier going from the background of the foreground interesting so I'm going to see if I can change focusing areas to a smaller area there set that in okay just trying to get this dialed and so that I can go back and forth I'm actually see if I could do it with a pinpoint a little bit better okay so I'm gonna have to go back to twenty three area focus on the background some reason it's picking up that winds in the foreground ok so I'm going to start recording right now so you can see I'm recording up here there's my like the recording I hit this over here it should focus come on it's not doing it for me I love it when it doesn't do it for me okay well I have something set up that I'm not even going to play with right now one of the great things is that it has image stabilization built into the camera so that if we don't have it in the lands like I do not have an image stabilized limbs on this now I consumed pictures and the sensor stabilizes the movement but it doesn't work when you're shooting video so there is no stabilization when you are shooting video on this so take precautions tripods and other sorts of steady cam devices right in front of that is a little marker that indicates the image plane if for any reason you need to measure the distance to the sensor in the camera on top we have stereo microphones we have a built in flash as well as a hot shoot to add on a new additional, more powerful flash unit.
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a Creativelive Student
I bought a Panasonic G9 camera and couldn't find a good visual user guide anywhere. I've hunted through YouTube and online, only to waste hours scrubbing through off topic babble just to find bits of useful information, but there is nothing complete out there. I found John's Panasonic G7 presentation, and it's been immensely helpful. Though the camera button locations and handling are different from the G9, the menu system, and camera functions are mostly similar. I try reading user manuals, but it's easy to get lost and sometimes hard to relate to. John presents everything so clearly, logically, and in terms easy to relate to and follow. He puts in so much time to make everything look professional and make sense. I really appreciate all his hard work, and his love and passion to share his knowledge. I'm so thankful he creates videos like this, as modern cameras have so many features now, that they can get overwhelming to learn how to use. Watching him demo cameras is also really helpful. I've also taken his Fundamentals of Photography class, and it's phenomenal and foundational. It's helped me learn a lot. Thanks so much for these great quality classes.
Nhahanh Nguyen
Simply wow! Worth every penny. The whole course is totally professional and delivered in a classroom-like setting. The visual presentation and live demos are flawless and so helpful if you have your camera on and play along. I would never buy another expensive camera without taking a course like this! I've looked everywhere else online for camera-specific information like this in one place (I have no time to browse the poor manual that came with the camera). John also gives great information on basic photography. Highly recommend the class to all newbies to this camera. I will be much more comfortable using this little beast after finishing this course. Thank you!!
Guy Holt
I have had the GX7 for some time, and never fully understood how to use all the settings. This course was brilliant, clear and precise and easy to follow and interesting. Brilliant!
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