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Set-Up Menu: 1-6

Lesson 35 from: Sony A7 Mark II Series Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

35. Set-Up Menu: 1-6

Next Lesson: Camera Operation

Lesson Info

Set-Up Menu: 1-6

We're in the final setup menu and these are a lot of things that you're not going to come back to and change on a regular basis these air set up type items that you're going to set once in move on and probably not come back to it to open with one or two exceptions in here first one is controlling the brightness of the monitor and you can change the color and the brightness if it's not the right color they're not the right brightness for you and that is also true of the viewfinder itself. Normally you're probably not going to need to make any change and I would just leave these zeroed out at their normal setting but they are available to change if need be the temperature not only the brightness but the color temperature can be changed as well in in both of them. So this is unique on the a seven s and if you recall back when I was talking about the s log this is this very flat non contrast the image that you get from shooting s log and it can be very hard to compose image and get an idea...

of what the final image might look like so this gamma display assistant if you turn this on it's going to bring back the color but it's on ly going to do it in the viewfinder in the camera it's not doing it to the image that's being recorded that you're goingto edit with later. And so, if you're shooting video and you are using the s log, you're probably going to want to use this in most cases, but it's going very from person to person, but I would certainly appreciate being able to see what you're shooting at in better color when you're playing the movie's back, how loud is the sound signal on it? And so this is just simply the volume settings in there. The audio signal is that little chirp chirp remember when I was focusing earlier focuses gives you that little chirchir. I think once you've had the camera for a week and you figured out how it focuses and listening to it, you should turn that off just because I always like to be as discreet as possible in taking photos. It's disturbing people will be looking what's going on over there, what's he doing on dso just keeping your cameras quiet, it's possible, I think it's a good technique, all right, paige, too. Back in the older sony cameras, they used what's called a tile system, which this example on the top is showing you and it's the same options in the menu it's just laid out in a different form, I would I highly encourage you to get used to the standard menu you'll be able to look and find things a little bit more quickly because you don't have to go through kind of a welcome window every time you're at a new tab for going into information but if you do like the old one you can set it to the tile menu if you want to the mod dialled guide gives you a little bit of guidance when you are changing the mod dial to the different settings that you might be making and so as you change from programmed aperture priority, it tells you a little bit about this and this is kind of fun and interesting when you buy the camera but once you get used to the camera especially if you've made it this far in the class you probably don't need this sort of help and it's just I want to get on with things I want to see what's going on get away get the screen away from me so I think for most of you folks out there let's turn that one off delete confirmation all right, let me ask you a question when you press the delete button on your camera or c when you when you want to delete a photo how many button presses do you want a toe press to get rid of that photo one two, three normally this camera is designed when you wanted to lead a photo, you hit the garbage can button you select that, yes, you want to delete the photo and then you delete the photo, which is three steps to delete a photo, you can reduce that to two steps, press the garbage can button and then it just says, are you sure once not twice? And so I prefer delete first because you have to go through less hoops to delete a photo. I don't want to delete a photo on one press I think that's a little too short for you too short a fuse to have on that, so I think to presses is about right, so that just saves you a lot of little button presses display quality display quality has to do with the viewfinder in the camera. It has a video signal that goes through compression settings the same way jpeg images go through different compression settings and having looked through this in the high setting and the normal settee, what I've noticed is a difference in sharpness on the edges and in the detail of the subject I'm looking at now I'm very big on visual display and I am examining my image as closely as possible and having this set on high is using up just a little bit more battery power but it's getting me a little bit more sharpness in the viewfinder which is enabling me to check focus a little bit more clearly than without it. Some people you may not notice a lot of difference, depending on the type of subject that you work with. But if you are wanting the highest quality visual experience for composing your images, I would set this on high. How quickly do you want the camera to power down to save battery power? One minute is a pretty good standard, probably better to have this on a fairly short number if you want to conserve battery power. If you are hooking this up to tvs, this will enable you to select it for the different types of systems available worldwide. The camera has its own cleaning mode that it will automatically go into, and you can just have it clean itself on its own. If you want to clean the camera yourself, there are a number of devices out there. What I use for most of my cleaning. First off, everyone who has this camera should have an air blower, and you should have it around your camera on a fairly regular basis, so if you're going if you're just going to go out for the afternoon and shoot, you probably don't need to bring it if you're going to take a week long vacation, you should definitely bring this because if you get dust on your sensor, you don't want to stick your finger in there and try to rub the dust off you want to try toe, blow it off with one of these air blowers if that doesn't get it off the next stage. Some people don't feel comfortable with some people do, and that is using a sensor cleaning system and there's a variety of him out there. One of the ones that works the best is this swab and liquid system you will put a couple drops of alcohol on this squad and you will swipe it across the sensor, cleaning off any dust that might be on there and that is one of the most sure ways of getting this stuff off, but you do need to have a careful, steady hand so that you don't do any other damage to the camera. The demo mode is something that we're not going to use if you were in a store there's a wayto program the camera so that it goes through a demo moz, what looks good on the shelf is people are handling the camera t c b u r was one of the features that I'm not going to go into in great detail, this is going to be for people who are shooting video, this is the time code and user bit. This is the information. For instance, if you were working on a movie set and you had multiple cameras shooting at the same time, you might want him running all at the same time counter so that they can cut and they know where to go from one camera to the next, when those cuts are happening. And so this is something that if you were shooting, as I say, a movie, you could go in, you can calibrate all your cameras and go in and set this information, and I'm not going to go through all the different settings here. And so this is a little bit more for your more intense video shooter, the remote control. In order to use the remote control, the camera has to be sending out a signal, or at least turned on for receiving a signal from the remote control. How long do you want to leave the camera on looking for remote control? That is gonna wear your battery down a little bit? So unless you have this remote control, we're gonna want to leave this turned off hd my settings, this is simply for output settings if you're going to be connecting your camera up using the hd my output port, you can control specific settings on how this is going to be received by an external recording device or a monitoring device. We're not going to go through all the options on that one, but all right, so four k output select on the r and the s models, which have four k, and this is going to dictate how four k information is sent out of the camera. You might be using an external recorder. You might be using it on external external viewing device, and this just explains as faras what frame rate you are using and whether it's recording on the external device and the memory card or just the external device. Okay, page for usb connection. This is one of the modes that I had to go in and change it to the m team p mode when I was changing or when I was downloading the apse for the camera. And so in theory, it should have worked in auto, but for some reason it had some sort of communication problem with my computer, and by putting it in the ft mode, it was able to find that connection a little bit more easily. And so, if you are connecting the camera via the usb connection, this will dictate what's going on on the camera. You can use the camera. Tethered, in which case he would use pc remote, but normally you can leave it in auto unless you're trying to do something else specific. The london settings stand for logical unit number, and if it's having a problem trying to connect up with the usb connection, which is what I was having by setting this to single, I was able to isolate the signal coming in and out through the usb so that I could make that download. Normally, you can leave this in multi, but for me in that download with the app, I had to change it to single usb power supply so you can hook your camera up to your computer for downloading your images. You can also get up to your computer to power your camera to charge your battery. The problem is, is that when you charge the battery of the camera, you are going to deplete the battery of your computer. And if you were trying to download images from your computer to your camera and you had very little computer power lap, you could turn the usb power supply off. So it's on ly trading, eh image and not power supply to the camera. Normally, we can leave it turned on, unless you specifically need to turn it off different languages for the menu's set appropriately. Dating time set to your current location they'll be a lot of different saving our, uh, time settings you khun do zones you can also do daylight savings time in here as well and we have different area setting so when you travel on an airplane go on vacation you can move the area setting mohr quickly and easily than changing the date stamp on it probably all right page five copyright info this is very cool and so this is a way for you to put your name in your camera for two different reasons photographs that you take will then have your name attributed to the metadata and if your camera was ever stolen and returned to a police station if they're smart enough to look in here they could look up your name and potentially look up your information to tell you that you found your camera and my guess is that most thugs who would steal your camera I don't know enough about this so this is a way for you to prove that yes, this is your camera all right formatting the memory card. This is what I talked about as opposed to deleting the images because when you put a camera a card in this camera this camera creates a structure that is a little bit larger than on any other camera system I've seen it creates multiple phone photos and the videos are stored in separate folders then the still images and so be aware of that when you were downloading and looking for your images. When you plug your memory card into your computers, you're going tohave to go into different folders to find your still images versus your video when you delete image is all you are doing is deleting those specific images, and all the other folders and directory is still on the memory card. When you really want to clean a card, which you should do on a regular basis, you want to form at the card and it deletes everything, and it starts fresh again and so deleting or formatting the memory card is something I recommend on a regular basis. Just make sure that you have downloaded and backed up your appropriate images. Next up is a file numbering system you khun reset this if you want to, most people are perfectly fine, leaving this in siri's it just counts, has a counter and automatically counts up as the picture. As the camera goes along the way, you can select different recording folders that you can use, you can create folders. For instance, if you had business photos and personal photos, you could create two different folders and direct the camera to either shoot photos to that folder or look at photos from a particular folder so that you don't get the two of those mixed up you can change the folder name in there if you want to, you could have either a standard form you can go in and change it to a date form if necessary. Most people are going to need to bother with this. All right, folks, final page, I'm excited, we're almost done with this. I've never needed to use this, but occasionally there could be some sort of digital problem and the camera will repair digital files if there is some sort of corruption issue. I hope you don't need to use this, but if for some reason you've taken a bunch of photos, your camera doesn't read them, you can try this and it will try to clean up those files and see if you can get them to work again. Displaying the media info is kind of handy to show you how many pictures you have left, how much time you have left in the various recording modes that you might have said on your camera just to see how much you have left on your memory card. The version is something we checked at the very beginning of the class, which firmware version. I have no doubt that sony is going upgrade the firmware on this camera because this is something a lot of the manufacturers are doing on a regular basis I'm already inversion. Two point oh, the camera came out at one point. Oh, they added in new features on the camera in that time, and so look for this you need to go to sony's website in order to download that information. If you are interested in that, and so what you would do, you go to sony dot com, look for their driver's software support, and then what you'll end up doing is connecting your camera up to the computer and downloading software that you have downloaded from sony's website on to the camera. Give yourself a little bit of time to set this up because it usually takes about five minutes for to download or upload the software to the camera. If you want to reset the settings, the camera settings in the camera, you could do that. You can also initialize the camera, the differences in the camera settings. It goes through that first tab of information and resets it back to the factory default. Thie initialized takes everything back, and just last night I had initialized my camera because I wanted to have a fresh camera for today's class. And I realized that when I initialized my camera, I deleted all the camera apse that I had downloaded. So I had to go back to the camera app and download the camera aps again, because I wanted to have those in the in the class today. So be very careful about initializing your camera, something you might want to do when you sell your camera at the end of your life with it. Big sigh, everybody wear done with the menu. Let me just check and see if there's any questions that we can address at this point before we jump into the next quick section on the class. Craig markham has a really good one, wondering whether there's a way to save all your camera settings toe a card as a backup. That is a feature that is available on another brand of camera. But there is no way of doing that on this camera that I know.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Sony® A7II Info and Menu List
Sony® A7RII info and Menu List
Sony® A7SII Info and Menu List

Ratings and Reviews

Diane Schulman
 

INCREDIBLE Class! I couldn't find anything on the internet that truly explained this camera, explained what it can and can't do and what accessories would work with it. I have had my Sony A7II for awhile now, but was so overwhelmed by it, I rarely even took it out of its case. It was just easier to use my Canon 5D III. After this class, I am so excited to finally practice with and use my Sony. John is an incredible teacher. He is thorough, professional, fun and knowledgeable! Buying this class was the best investment!!! I feel like I just got the gift of a new camera because I can finally use my Sony!!! Thanks John and Thanks Creative Live!!!

Enrique Vega es
 

I stored my Sony A7II for more than a year since I've been Canon's user for 7 years and I felt unsure of taking this new camera which implied a different menu system, different functions, a little bit intimidating. Finally, I took a bit of valor, put my camera next to the computer monitor for then start watching this guide and I spent a great time actually. I'm amazed at how helpful and clear is the sequence of the chapters. It was enough to get to chapter ten to know all the basic controls and start taking pictures with an equivalent confidence of my good old Canon, or even better since in the chapter 8th I learned how accurate and easy to use is the focusing system, either, manual or auto (For stills I've always used manual focusing). Very informative, enjoyable and now I became a new fan of the mirrorless cameras, at the point that I'm considering to buy another two :D

VeraInAlbania
 

John is an excellent teacher! In fact his Fundamentals of Digital Photography 2014 was the first ever class I watched on CreativeLive, and since then I'm in love with his teaching style as well as with CreativeLive! I bought my Sony A7II in March 2015 and when I found out that John is giving a class on it I was very excited! As I expected I learnt many secrets about my camera which I had been using for 9 months already. For example about the option of focusing on the eyes, setting the buttons, making panoramas etc. The camera is still smarter than me I must admit. I am enjoying my Sony even more now since after the class I feel much more confident. Thank you John and CreativeLive for such an opportunity! I would recommend to everyone who has a Sony a7II camera and the other cameras in this line to watch this class. It's a concentrate of useful information, very detailed and to the point. I spent two days just watching the class and practicing new knowledge with my camera straight away. I had to postpone all the other life chores. And I would be ready to watch the class again after some time as it's a professional camera which needs a lot of practice!

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