Lessons
Introduction & Basic Controls
06:10 2Top Deck: Mode Dial
12:55 3Top Deck: Other Functions
03:28 4Back Side
05:18 5Back Side: Function Button
21:08 6Back Side Other Functions
05:46 7Left Side, Right Side & Movie Options
04:07 8Bottom & Card Reader
03:47Lesson Info
Menu Functions: Setup
All right, so we're into our final group of menu items here and this is the setup menu. And so, a lot of these items are things that you're not gonna be coming back to, something you would just set once and move on with it. We can control the brightness and the color of the various different viewfinders. And so, this is gonna control how bright or dark the back finder is. I wouldn't leave this too bright because in most cases this is gonna be reflective of how bright your final image is gonna be so I would normally leave it at the zero setting. Viewfinder brightness can also be adjusted if necessary but once again, just leaving it at manual in the middle of the spectrum is a good choice to start with. If the color is off you can tweak it, hopefully not necessary. Playing movies back or it's not, excuse me, not playing movies back but the general sounds from the camera. For instance, little beep beep that turns on when you're focusing. If you wanna turn that down you can turn it down he...
re. And so, those audio signals this is actually where you can turn the beep beep off. And so, this is gonna be on the focusing and the self timer, recommend being as discreet as possible when you're shooting. Page two, Sony has the old tile system from their menu kind of archived in here and so, if you prefer that old tile system that Sony's used for many years before they switched to a more modern menu system you could switch it. But I think the standard menu system is a little easier to navigate. As you change from one mode to the next on the back of the camera it will tell you more information about what that mode does. And it's kinda helpful at first but once you get to know that mode it's kind of irritating and you just wanna get back to looking at the framing of your subject. And so, you'll probably wanna leave this turned off once you get used to it. Just not necessary. All right, theoretical question for you here. How many buttons would you like to press when you wanna get rid of an image? And so, three buttons is what you currently need. You need to select the garbage can and it assumes you made a mistake and you did not intend to hit the garbage can button because the confirmation is ooh, you made a mistake. Do you really wanna delete this image? And you got to say yes, I do and you got to say okay, now delete it. So it takes three button presses to delete an image and if you wanna change this you can have it delete first where it says, yes, I wanna delete this first, I confirm that I wanna delete this image so it takes only two button presses. And so, this will save you a lot of button pressing if you ever have to delete an image. Next up, Power Save Start Time. To save power how quickly do you want it to shut down? And so, in most cases one minute seems like a reasonable amount of time. Some people might need a little bit more time but this is the sleep time or how quickly will the camera go into its sleep mode. As I mentioned before, when you turn the camera on and off it automatically goes through a cleaning mode and if you want to manually get it started right now you could go ahead and do it here. It's just as easy to turn the camera on and off but this is what that mode does. The Demo Mode is for people who work in retail stores and wanna have the camera on some sort of automated loop. Remote Control, if you buy the wireless remote which sells for about $25 I believe, you can activate this. You'd normally leave this turned off because that's a signal that would be turned on that would be using battery power. And so, it's something you would only use when you know you're gonna be using the remote. If you're gonna hook the camera up to a TV you may need to adjust the HDMI settings so that you're getting the right picture, quality out of your camera projected onto your TV. And so, normally, auto will do it but sometimes you need to make a manual adjustment if you're doing a live slideshow for instance from your camera. Control for your HDMI, this would allow you to use your TV with remote to control the camera going forward and backward in its slideshow. Not necessary very much of the time. HDMI Info. Display. This will display information that you are sending out on the HDMI. If you're trying to record video from the camera you'd wanna turn this off but for general purpose it's fine to leave it turned on. Unless you're hooked up to a device you'll never see anything from it. Page four, USB Connection. This is one of those things that you may need to change when you are doing a firmware upgrade, connecting your camera to your computer or you're downloading an app from your computer to your camera. You may need to put it on the mass storage selection. If you're doing a direct download to your PC you may need to put it on PC remote and that would be for tethering for instance. The LUN settings is a logical unit number and hopefully you will not need this but this would be only in some sort of connection issue that you are hooking it up to your computer and it's not getting the communications done properly. Language is the language that the menu is presented to you in and our date and time. Get that set properly because it does record it on all your images. Area settings, what part of the world do you live in? West Coast for us here at CreativeLive. Format allows you to delete all your images and all the extra information on the card. As I mentioned before it's a little bit of a complicated folder system that this Sony camera creates because it does create a DCIM folder for the still images, both the RAW and the JPEG. But when you shoot movies it puts into another private folder and another folder for the M4 Root folder in the case of an MP4 file I believe. And then a clip folder and then you actually have your movie, movies within there. And so, if you do record a combination of movies and stills make sure that you've investigated all the folders so that you have got all the data off of your card and on to your computer. And when you format it, it gets rid of all of that and starts with a whole fresh new directory system. And you really do want to format brand new cards, so when you get a brand new card, put it in your camera and format it. The camera automatically assigns file numbers to each of the pictures and you can manually go in and reset the numbers if you wanted to. Normally, I would let it continue counting in its normal series so that you don't have overlapping file numbers in the same folder potentially. You can create and select different folders on your camera. For instance, if you only had one memory card you could have business photos and personal photos stored in separate areas on the card so that when you do a slideshow you don't have your personal photos mixed up with your business photos and you can just kind of keep those two worlds very separate by selecting and creating different folders for your different assignments and jobs for instance. And you can give those folders different names. You can use a date form or you can use a standard form on it. Most people would just have multiple cards but if you need to do it on just one card it can be done. If you were to take an image with another camera and somehow transfer it onto this camera, for instance, you borrowed a memory card from someone else's camera or you had an image that was on a computer, you transferred it onto a memory card and then you put that memory card in this camera, and the camera didn't really understand it. You could do a recover image database and it would try to repair the files so that you could see it in this device. And so, it's just a way of helping you see an image that was recorded in a different type of device. The media info is usually the card information. How many images are you gonna get on the card by an estimate number. How much time are you gonna get on the video that you could shoot. And so you can see here I've got 901 images left on the memory card. The version is the firmware version of this camera. And so, we are currently up to version 3. as far as the recording of this class. Sony may very well have future firmware updates. Most of these updates have been fairly minor updates for small little bug issues or language issues but they have improved the performance of the camera a little bit. They've improved the autofocusing on it. And so, if you don't have version 3. you can go to Sony's website and you can download an application where you'll need to connect your camera up to the computer and then your computer will update the firmware in your camera. Now I actually did it fairly recently in the last week on this camera and it took several minutes. It took about 15 minutes for it to run through its program and install the new software on the camera but it's free and it's pretty easy to get. All you have to do is to go to the Sony website to do that. And so, go to sony.com. Look for their support, their drivers or their software. You do need the camera connected up to your computer so you'll need that USB device that came with your camera, the cord, in order to do that firmware upgrade. If you wanna reset your camera you can do a camera settings rest. And if you do that it's going to reset everything in that first tab of options, all the camera setups. And if you wanna do an initialize that's taking it back to the factory default standards and you're even gonna have to reset the time and the date zone where you are. And so, if you really want to completely flatten the camera so for instance if you are buying a used camera or you're about to sell it, you might wanna completely get rid of all of your custom settings in the camera by doing an initialize on the settings here.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
user-f49136
You've invested in the Sony A6000 so let John help you discover and understand all it can do with his terrific video class. I'm a visual learner so this was perfect for me. I printed his class materials for easy reference. Thanks to John I'm a beginner with the confidence to go out and play with my new camera!
Debbie Walker
MERCY!!! this was excellent for me!! I am not familar with cameras so this definitely helped me understand better how to use my Sony A6000; I was honestly ready to give up!!! Great explanations ! well worth the time!!!
JulieannaD
I learned more during this class than I did in 4 months of owning the camera ! Finally able to use the focus options properly, including my favorite; Back Button Focus. John is a fantastic teacher, I enjoy all of his classes and his excellent teaching style. Watched all 3 hours of this class in one evening. From now on I will always purchase his classes when I get a new camera. 2 thumbs up !
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