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Menu Systems - Basics

In the menu system, like all the other cameras on the market, there is a bunch of tabs or pages where things were kind of grouped together and sony decided to break things up in a little bit more groups and other people. But we're going to go ahead and start diving through these right from the very beginning, so if you get your camera, hit the menu button, get over to the left because we're just going to go through from left to right, starting at the very beginning image size, this is for anyone shooting j pegs large, medium and small, twenty four ten megapixels or four point six megapixels highly recommend getting the most you can out of this camera, so I would set this at large aspect ratio. Normally, this is a three by two aspect ratio. If you want, you can change it to sixteen by nine, you're not getting any more. You're getting a wider angle frame that matches in hd tv, but I would leave it in three by two quality. This is where you get to choose either raw or j peg. Now there are...

three different versions of the j peg at different quality levels, and this is compressing information and it's throwing out color highlight shadow information potentially. And so if you're going to shoot j pegs I would shoot this at extra fine I highly recommend shooting raw though to get the most out of the camera so he would set it too raw and there of course is a setting for raw and j peg so you get two images with every picture that you take and you can direct those either two different cards or the same card so dependent on your workflow you can really customize the camera next up panorama size and with this one you saw me shoot a panorama earlier there is standard size which I will demonstrate for you is roughly do do do do do do do I don't know it's like one hundred fifty degrees and then there is the wide, which is one hundred and eighty degrees so you'll need to go completely from side to side with the wide setting you'll see there wass tio and then you have second on this is you have the direction you can go up down left, right? I'm just very used to shooting panoramas to the right uh that's just a me thing but I think it's good so you should do it too all right next up camera setting to group number two clear image zoom okay, this gets into that hole so anything that I'm not totally on board with where it zooms an image and takes the twenty four megapixels and you take a little section in it zooms in and and so I just leave this turned off I don't like to do that sir ah and this is another version of it digital zoom digital zoom is where it is really just digital zooming in what clear image zoom is it holds the resolution you're using a smaller portion of the sensor you're blowing it up and making a twenty four megapixel image out of it you didn't start with twenty four megapixels and it's had to make up a lot of information to make up that ground I don't like doing either one of those long exposure noise reduction is if you are shooting with long exposures one second and longer that's a long exposure the camera will go in and try to fix up some of the noise problems I prefer to do this later on in software where it gives me more control individual control over the particular image hi I esso noise reduction same thing when you shoot it high I esos let's say if you shoot it sixty four eyes so sixty four hundred you're going to get some noise you can reduce that later in software where it will give you more control but you can do it in camera if you want to flash control controls if you have a ad on flash how the flash works a d I flash stands for advanced distance integration where it uses distance information from the lens to figure out how much flash power you need and that's a really good system to have but not all their lenses is have it and so you're gonna have to do a little check with compatibility I would prefer to do that but if it doesn't have it you will have to use preity tl and if you know on the key note I have my recommendations on the right hand side the ones in red are kind of for the more advanced users or there's something more advanced about it the general grey ones or my general recommendations and so sometimes I will have to recommendations depending on twice the auto focus eliminator that's this little light right here in the clips or here in the front of the camera I like to turn it off just cause I don't want a beam going out when I'm trying to focus I try to be a little bit quiet when I'm shooting and so I like to be visually quiet when I'm shooting for a beginning photographer they could leave this on and it will help them focus under low light conditions but once you get to understand how and where to point the focusing points, my guess is that you won't really need it in most dark situations next up camera section number three steady shot so the camera has a built in stabilization and the sensor is mounted on an x and y access so that's moving with really fast fine tune motors up and down left and right monitoring your movement and it does a great job and so I would generally leave it turned on if you are working on a tripod it's claimed that it knows it's on a tripod and it won't move around because if your cameras on a tripod you don't want that sensor moving around. I've done a little bit of testing and I would say I think if you're doing a lot of work from a tripod, I would turn it off just to be safe just to make sure that everything is completely locked down a f dr speed, you're normally gonna have this on fast very is a reason for macro photographers to put this in slow that way the lenses and changing so quickly because of the distance that it changes with macro close up it can change too quickly and the camera doesn't have a chance to grab on to something, but for most everyone else I'd leave that in fast color space I would simply put this in adobe rgb it's a slightly wider color gamut silent controller alright, the silent controller is this little knob in front of the nabe and this is where you get to decide what that knob does by default and so by just pressing the button and turning the knob what do you want that to control and I tend to like to control either the auto focus area I'm or the auto focus mode whether it's like single or continuous mt but there's a couple of other options exposure compensation you can do your eyes so up there as well as your meeting notes there's a lot of different good options depending on what you need camera setting number four all right so exposure steps cameras normally in third stops you can change it to have stops if you want I'd leave it a third priority set up normally the camera when it's in the auto focus single mode has to be in focus for you to take a picture and that's generally a good parameter if you don't like it you can change it auto focus with shutter on this is for back button focusing so if you're a photographer like myself who likes to focus not with the show to release in front but with my thumb in back I would turn off the auto focusing on the front cheddar and I do that so that I can focus on a subject I could take all my fingers off the camera recompose and then whenever I feel like it take a picture and when I take a picture the camera's not going to refocus and it's a it's a system that takes a little getting used to if you just do this and head out on a new assignment. It's going probably drive you nuts. But it's, something you need to practice with. But if you try it, I haven't heard of anybody who went back. And so you gotta give it a little bit of a try. So more advanced users turn that auto focus off and use the back button focusing. Do you want a lot? The exposure with the shutter release button in general, most cases, you don't want to do it, so leave that one turned off. The camera has three memory banks. Remember on the top of the camera, the mod I'll one, two and three. Well, this is where you would set the camera up exactly the way you want it to come into memory. And then you would save all those settings as either setting number one, number two and number three. That way you can quickly get back to all those menu and function settings. All right, the next group of settings deal with specifically when you put the camera in the movie mode. And so this is when you flip the dial into the movie mode. What takes place? There are a couple different file formats that you can get to. Mp for is is a really simple basic video, like if you just want to upload something to youtube, you probably want to shoot an mp for video. It's it's a nice small file size that youtube's going deal very nicely with and the more advanced a vc hd is one of these acronyms that gets video geeks excited because it's a lot of different ways, and I'm not that in the video, and so I'm not going to get into the technical side of it, but if you're really into the higher quality video, if you're going to do be doing video editing, you're going to be working with a professional video editor, whether that's a program or person, you're going to want to shoot this higher quality video, so it depends on what your and uses on the video record setting. This is where you get to go in and record the exact parameters, and so you can shoot at sixty ppi, which has kind of been a holy grail for people to shoot sixty frames per second. The sixty I is thirty p basically it's the same thing that other companies are calling thirty or thirty p, and they have a couple different sizes. The first number is indicating how many frames per second, so is you can see here sixty and twenty four of the options the next letter is indicate whether it's interlaced or progressive the next number has to do with its file size, which is also what the letter fx, f h and p s stand for. And so if you want the largest file size, it would be sixty p twenty eight a m p s boy, they just have these numbers and letters that roll right off the top. And so for kind of the the hard core user, you want to use it at the highest resolution possible for more moderate user, you could scale back some of the residents the the file size so that you're not wasting quite as much. Space depends on your needs and what you're doing with your movies steady shot, steady shot is something you can leave on. You can turn off if you want to. Now steady shot in the video mode works differently than steady shot in the camera mount remember and steady shot in the camera mode where it's moving the sensor around. Okay, well in steady shot in the video mode because it's on ly using nineteen twenty by ten eighty video, it is doing it digitally so the sensor is locked down in its recording, different pixels and it's using a digital. Steady technology which sony has been using for many many years in their camcorder industry so that's a completely different technology than any of the other companies are doing but it does a really good job allows you to hand hold the camera and get steady video shots with every lens that you put on the camera they have tracking duration you could makes him fine tune adjustments high mid and low according to the tracking needs of what you're shooting in video started mid see how it works you may need to adjust it depending on what you should auto slow shutter so this is where the camera is going to kick to a slower shutter speed somebody who's really professional about it doesn't want the camera changing modes or features on them so they're going to turn this off more of your mom and pop just shooting a casual video and leave it on and the camera will accommodate for darker situations and then you can go in and customize the silent controller just for use in the movie mode. So whether you're in the movie mode or the camera mode the silent controller continue can do two different things second part of the movie mode and so audio recording you can have the camera do it automatically you can turn it off if you want to if you're going to be using external recording external sound, you may not even need it you can do away with it if you want. If you dealing with windy conditions, you can turn on a wind, mike, which will get you slightly better sound in a wind windy situation. Ideally, though, you'd want to go with an external mike in that level, if you want to get in to do the audio recording levels, you can do that and that's. What this little dial here was designed for was adjusting the volume levels because you could hold the camera with your right hand really steady and then kind of put your left hand down here and just adjust this super smoothly. Two tweak up the volume or tweak it down so it's in a great place, it turns smoothly with just the right amount of dampening. It feels like butter. If you want to see the audio levels displayed, you can have that in the screen. Sometimes people don't like all the clutter is sometimes people want the information kind of depends on who you are kind of nice to have them. Audio output timing weird option on here I've never seen lip sync is a camera option. What has to do is that the video that you're getting off the screen is slightly delayed from what you're actually shooting maybe a quarter of second half second, do you want the audio that you're listening to match to rhea world or what? You're getting on the ever so slight to slight delay. And, for most people, live it's, convenient and works. But some people might want something different.