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Lesson Info

Menu Functions: Network

So we are now getting in to the network settings. And so this is basically for connecting up to computers and phones and other devices using the various Wi-Fi and non-wired ways of connecting up with this camera. So first up, send to smartphone function, and so, if you've already got your camera set up, you can have this set so that you can send photos over to your phone. Now there's actually other areas that you have to set up first before you can come back to this but this would be kind of a shortcut once you have everything set up. You can also send information via a wireless system to a computer if you don't have any wires for it. Now, the wired system is actually much faster than the wireless system, but the wireless system might be convenient, but it's gonna use up more battery power and so most people aren't going to be using this option but it is available to those who might need it. We're gonna be running into a lot of letters that don't make a lot of sense to some people, so ...

this is the FTP transfer, File Transfer Protocol. This is a sub menu that you can dive into. We are not going to spend much time in here. And so, this is if you are using the Super Speed USB 3. connection to a computer. Next up, we'll show you the result if you have been transferring images to the computer. Did all of those images get actually transferred over there. You can select which server you are going to if you are connecting up to a large computer system, you can have them sent to different servers. And then for each server you can give those servers name and designations and this is generally speaking far more than most people are gonna be doing with this camera. But if it is something that you need to do, you can get in here and do that. If you want you can actually hook this up to a TV via wireless Wi-Fi communication as well. You can connect it up using the HDMI cable as well but if you want to do it Wi-Fi, yup you can do it. Alright, this is kind of our main one here. This is controlling with the smartphone. So if you do want to use a smartphone to connect with it, which is what we're gonna try to do here, you're gonna want to come in here and turn this on. Now I'm gonna walk through some of the settings and then I'm gonna go through a demo of it myself. But let me walk through some of the keynote of this first. So, normally you would leave it turned off 'cause it uses excess battery power when it's turned on. But if you do want to turn it on then you go in and turn it on. When you get in to the connection info, there'll be two different ways that you can get it registered with your phone, 'cause they have to be linked and do a little handshake before they will proceed. One option is to do the QR code and use the camera to photograph this QR code and then it will kind of synchronize the two. That has actually not worked very well for me. I've had to just manually input the password and so that's what we're gonna do today. But on your device, it might be different than my device and using the QR code would simply be a lot easier than typing in their passwords, which can be a little bit cumbersome to deal with, but they are just two different ways of dealing with the same issue and so here's my little graphic on how you have to walk through the whole system. You have your phone, and you have your camera, and there's things that you need to do with both of them. This first thing you need to do on your phone is you need to download the Sony app, which is Play Memories Mobile. This is, of course, a free app from Sony and this is gonna have your controls on it for your phone to control your camera. On the camera itself, you're gonna be doing what we're doing right now in the menu system, you're gonna need to turn on the control with smartphone and then you're need to go to the connection, that's gonna start a Wi-Fi signal from the phone, or excuse me, from the camera, you then need to go to the phone to make sure your Wi-Fi system is turned on. Selecting the Wi-Fi signal from the camera, and then enter the password and then open Play Memories Mobile. So that's what we're gonna do right now. So I've already downloaded the Play Mobile's Memory and I'm now going to retrieve my phone and let's go ahead and look on the back of the camera and we can kind of walk through this together. So let's go into the menu system and we're gonna go over to the network connections. Right over here. And we're gonna go down to control with smartphone and we do want to have this control with smartphone turned on so that's good. Next up, we're gonna go to connection, and now it's starting it's Wi-Fi signal, and so now there's a Wi-Fi signal going out. And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna connect with password and we hit the garbage can to activate that little aspect. And so now there's my password for this time around. Now I'm going to need to go into my phone, I'm gonna hit the settings here, I'm gonna take my phone out of the airplane mode. And I'm gonna go look at the different Wi-Fi signals that my phone picks up right here. And right here, this Direct7rm3 is our camera. Now I apologize for this but I'm gonna have to type in this password and it's always a little bit difficult at this angle. So just give me a second. And they do have a difficult word to get in here as well. Riveting television right now. Okay, I think I got it correct so I'm gonna hit join. It looks like my camera has recognized what's going on. I'm gonna throw my camera into the program mode just to keep things super simple right now. And so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna close out of my setting and I'm gonna go into where my Wi-Fi apps are and I'm gonna pull up the Sony one. And hopefully we're gonna see what the camera sees on our phone right here. And so you can take this and you can flip it sideways and you can take a photo right here and that should take a picture. Little bit of a delay. Quite a bit of a delay. Obnoxiously long delay. But it did take a photo. Perhaps John set the motor drive to self-timer and it was Johns fault, or it was just a really long delay on someones else fault. And so there's our image, let's go back and see if this works now. Let's see, let's make sure that this is... I wanna make sure that we are in a normal mode for... Let's just leave it on auto-focus, and our drive is on single, go back here. There's a number of different ways that you can go in here. You can select and you can change from continuous to single on the phone you can go in change the auto. I wanna change it to 6,400, I can do that. Take a photo and so now the idea is that I can use this screen and I don't have to be near the camera. I can be somewhere else. I can be over here and I can actually get in the photo myself, right over here. And now I can take the photo myself. There is just that little subtle delay in there. But that's the nature of working in Wi-Fi. And so this is really helpful if you're trying to get to an unusual position or you're trying to mount the camera in an unusual place and you can't be there behind the camera taking a look at it, you can use this. And I know I've done this, mounting the camera down on the ground, which is just... I mean I can get down there but it's inconvenient. And I can be here shooting photos with it. And so it's a great system. It is a little bit limited and I'm sure that the app is gonna change from time to time so I'm not gonna go through showing everything on the app. But it does allow you to basically make the most simple and basic adjustments for it. And so I'm just gonna close out of that and so I'm done with that. And then on the camera you can turn it off, if you want, that's the simplest way of just getting it out of that system at all. But we got it to work which is a good thing. Some camera companies make it very difficult. It's not too bad here, it's pretty easy. It's just entering in that password I think is the most difficult thing. Alright, so that is our connection info that we press to get the Wi-Fi system started. Now there's going to be some more things that are in here. How long do you want it to stay connected here. So if you always want it connected, even when the camera's off, your phones gonna be trying to communicate with it. And with any of these wireless options on the camera, if you're not really going to be using them very often, shut them down. You're gonna get better battery life. If you leave these things turned on, it's gonna be constantly draining on your battery. Alright, so that is controlling with the smartphone. And so with the airplane mode, I recommend leaving this turned on most of the time. Because most people are not using their camera in a Wi-Fi mode. And so in this case it just shuts everything down and makes it the most efficient when it comes to battery. When it comes time to use it, that's when you turn this off. Okay, on to the second page dealing with the network. We have some Wi-Fi settings and we're gonna dive in very quickly and just walk around to see what some of these tech terms are and what's going on. So there are certain devices that Wi-Fi PS allow you to simple press a button on a computer and it will automatically push information from the camera to your computer. And you can set that up ahead of time if you want. You'll need to control the access points as to where it's connecting up to pull this information from. You can display the address of that computer network if you need it. And you can also set a password for that as well if you are connecting up with one of the other computers. Most people are never going to use this, I would say. We also have a number of Bluetooth settings, I'm just going to quickly walk through some of these. It's very similar to the Wi-Fi settings. Bluetooth is different device, very similar to Wi-Fi but doesn't have quite as wide-range. It's good for a little bit closer up. And so if you want you can turn this on, go through pairing to match it up to your device. Which would work quite well with tablets and phones as well. If you do have a phone, one of the options that you can have is you can have information from the phone shuttled over to the camera. So for instance, if you have location information which pretty much all phones have, that can be added to the metadata of your photographs, which can be kind of nice, but once again does take extra battery power. You can have the time on your phone, which is generally picking it up off the internet which is correct all the time. No matter what time-zone you go to or day-light savings time and that can fix the time clock in your camera which can drift a little bit more easily and something that not everyone stays up on as far as getting set accurately all the time. You can also have it set which time-zone you are in automatically and just picking that up from your phone. Which is kinda nice, if you do use that feature a lot it is convenient to have but I don't normally use it 'cause it uses extra battery power. If you want to edit the device name, you can change the official name of this camera as far as the way it shows up in Wi-Fi devices. Generally not a big necessary thing to do but if you do have multiple cameras then that might be a smart thing to do. And if you need to import some sort of certificate, 'cause you're hooking up to a network system, you can get in here and get that certified. And then if you want to reset all of the settings because you've been messing with them you can go ahead and reset all of the network setting together. Kenna, you had a question about some of the network. I do. A question had come in, I'm not sure if when you were talking about the Play Mobile app, about sending images to your phone from the camera over Wi-Fi. Are you gonna cover that? There was a questions about whether the camera sends a raw file or a .jpeg when you do that. No it's not gonna send a raw file, it's too large, takes too much time, and so it's gonna send a smaller .jpeg file over to the phone. I don't recall off the top of my head as to what size that file is. It's probably around 2,000 pixels on the long end. But that's just a guess, that's not based on knowledge.