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Setup Menu

Lesson 11 from: Canon 5D Mark II Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

11. Setup Menu

Next Lesson: Custom Functions

Lesson Info

Setup Menu

Okay, so we're moving over to the next major section, which is the setup menu and these are things that you generally are not going to need to go through again after this one time through it. First off, how long does your camera remain until it powers down? One minute is usually a fine setting auto rotate now this one's kind of tricky and I would recommend changing it to it to the symbol that you see here on computer but not on the camera. What happens now is when you shoot a vertical picture it's going to stay vertical on here? What happens if you have that turned on camera? You'll suit of vertical and then it'll come up about half size on the screen and that's kind of annoying because it's not a very big image to look at and most people don't mind turning their camera to see a vertical image back there, but it will continue to rotate them when you download into your computer. For matt, this is if when you want to delete the images on your card and you want to get a fresh start and ge...

t everything off the card eso one of the things that it's kind of standard procedure for a serious photographer professional to do before they go out and shoot an event is to prep their camera and reformat all their memory cards so they're clean and ready to go and I will give you one additional secret tip, and that is, is that when you reformat your cards, the pictures were still there. And so let's say you went to a concert and they don't allow photography, and the guard comes around and says, you have to delete your pictures and he says, no, I want you to reformat your memory card, just say, okay, don't take any more pictures on that memory card, and then you can go through rescue software through sand. S and lex are, and I can't guarantee it, but chances are with the right software, you'll be able to get all the pictures back on that card, and so the pictures are really going to be gone when you start taking new pictures and writing over that data again. But in general, reformatting the card is a good thing, especially if you're going to switch from camera to camera, especially from brand to brand, because different cameras have different communication protocols that they use with the memory cards file numbering, I would leave this on continuous, but you can manually reset it so that every time you put a new memory card in or when you reformat, your image sequence number starts back at zero, but for most people, it's probably best just to leave it in the continuous mountain. You can create different folders on one memory card, so let's say you have different clients and you want to put all the pictures from one client into one memory card and all the pictures from another client into another memory cards so that when you do slide shows or prince or you play back images, the clients don't see the other clients images you can do this. Another technique is to have two memory cards, but you can do it all on one one card if you want, by just making creating and selecting different folders, all right, continuing our way through the setup menu. Next up is the lcd brightness, and this one I'm going to recommend a change you want to go in and turn the auto off because the problem is is on the back of the camera. There is that light sensor and it's automatically reading light and adjusting the brightness of the sensor. So change that to manual and just leave it in the middle. Unless there's a problem with your sensor or your lcd screen, you're probably not gonna want to adjust it from the middle just leave it at the middle it's really quite accurate, in my opinion, I will base some pictures just solely on how they look on the back of the screen. Here's, where you want to put in the date and time, be aware of times when you're travelling and you're going to new time zones. Reset it when that stewardess on the other flight attendant on the airplane announces the time the local time, get your camera out and change it so that it's, right? When you start taking pictures in that new location, daylight savings time also changes. Make sure you make that change, then, because that gets attributed to every photograph and then the language what language you're going to set it to your local language? Does anyone recognize this language when recognized these characters at all? I know that there's somebody out on the internet who's going to be able to recognize thes, and somebody is just having a giddy, good old time right now here because this is actually cling on, which is not one of the languages that your camera can actually change, but I thought that would be fine if I could change it to klingon eso change it to your native language. Of course, the video system changes depending on what parts of the world you're in. A lot of europe is in the pal system north america's in the ntsc system, eso said it for the local video system that your country uses sensor cleaning this is normally going to be kept in auto cleaning enable, which basically means when you turn the camera on the camera goes through a cleaning cycle. There's, a little ultrasonic pz electric motor that shakes the the surface of a glass plate just in front of the sensor to knock off any dust. And so there's. No real problems with leading this turned on all the time. Your camera automatically goes through that cycle at the turning on or off camera. You can also go in and manually clean your camera now there's two stages and I think everyone is qualified for stage one, but not everyone is qualified for stage to stage one is getting an air blower. These bold blowers are something that you will just blow air into the sensor. So what you need to do is you'll need to take the lens off the camera, and then you would go into the sensor cleaning mode, which would bring up the mere open the shutter and expose. Oh, actually, we got one in the audience right here right here, so here we go and so blows a little bit of air and you don't want to use compressed air because that has propellants in it and it could damage the sensor, and so this is a popular size one, and I did hear about the guy at the airports thinking because somebody was traveling to an event some photographer was traveling to an event where he was giving these things away and he had like fifty of them and they look like grenades and so what you do and this is just generally good for cleaning the camera and so what I'll do is I'll hold the camera upside down and I'll blow it around in here to knock off any dust but then I would do this with the mere locked up teo clean the actual sensor and then you turn the camera off and it turns the mere down so thank you very much props nothing like props all right, what do we have next? Oh, step two step two is if you've got something gummy, you got a goober on your sensor that won't come off with a little bit of air normally the auto sensor will take it off and then the air blower will likely bring it out and if not that you need what I call the really fancy q tips she actually has him over here we're not going to come out. You're fine you're fine uh that's why I have it on the key note I have a slide for that don't you see uh and so these very fancy little moistened swipes or something that you would physically swipe across the censor and you do have to be a little bit careful about doing this because you I need to have a full battery charge you need to be very careful about swiping the sensor clean but that's how eventually you may have to get the goobers off and that's how they would do it if you turn it back into the cannon service center, which if you don't want to do it, you don't feel comfortable doing it, turn it into a repair facility, they might charge you fifty, seventy five hundred dollars to do it, but they'll generally do a good job. Okay, so every once in a while we'll be stumbling along on the menu system and all of a sudden there's a rabbit hole and it goes down and down and there's all sorts of things inside there, and this is one of those little places it doesn't seem like much, but it's got a lot of different settings in here, so this is the live view movie function setting, and so we're going to need to dive into this little setting here, which opens up into a whole nother menu system, and the first thing is the general setting of the live you options. Now first off you can disable it so that that little button on the back of the camera doesn't do anything you can't shoot movies, you can't go into a live view, then within that you can set it up for either shooting stills or shooting stills and the movie mode and there are various options in here now my personal choice is that I like to be able to have my camera available to shoot both stills and movie with exposure simulation which means it's showing me if my exposure is too bright or too dark and I will also have a cropped frame which will show me what the movies is going to see and so I think this is a good general mode to help now if you on ly shoot movies you would have it just under movie display rather than exposure simulation if you were on ly going to shoot stills I would probably leave it under stills on lee and exposure simulation and so you can play around with some of those settings but I think the one that I have underlined right now on screen is going to be a good general one for most people as you get to know it more you can make your own personal adjustments now while you have the camera in the live you mowed one of the things that you can have on the lcd screen on the back is a grid view and some people like this to keep the horizon level some people don't like it cause it clutters up the view so it's your personal choice I personally have mind turned off next up is silent shooting and this one is slightly complicated in some ways in short, I would recommend mode one and what's going on here is that when the mirrors in the up position, the camera uses an elektronik first shutter curtain to take the picture, which means there is no movement virtually no sound when the picture is taken and this is really good for macro photographers because they have their cameras very close to the subject and any movement from the camera might cause a vibration during the picture even the mere coming up for the shutter movie and in this case it's just electronic hurt now the mod to isa special mode where the camera doesn't reset picture taking until you take your finger off the release it's a very quiet way but it's sometimes awkward in the way it works now one of the problems with mode one and mode too is that it will not trigger a flash, so if you have your camera hooked up in a studio you're using live you on the back of the camera and I've had this and I actually didn't know this for about the first year that I own this camera and I was hooking the strobes up and it's like why can't I use live you and strobes and it's because the strobes are triggered by the mechanical first curtain in the shutter and so if you want to use this with studio strobes, you would disable the silent shooting now there's a slight bit more vibration but that's not going to bother a studio shooter with strobe lights because there's an actual mechanical shutter working so for most people mode one if you're working in the studio mode to or excuse me disable all right? Next up is the meat oring timer when you're in that mode sixteen seconds is a fine length of time the auto focus mode now we talked about the auto focus earlier and here we have three bad choice is the least of the bad choices in my opinion is the live mode there is the face detection mode which can work reasonably well I haven't really played around with it too much to be honest, there is the quick mode which is very fast but it's very jarring because the mirror's moving around a lot so personally I would go with live mode for most situations and be sure not to auto focus while you were actually shooting your movies. All right, next up we have our recording size. So what resolution and what frame rate are you going to shoot your videos at the most people with a good camera like this, they're going to want to shoot at the highest quality possible, so this would be the full hd nineteen twenty by ten eighty some people like the cinematic look of twenty four frames a second and you can also shoot in a lower resolution mohr for direct upload to youtube uh the smaller six forty by four eighty, but I have mine in nineteen twenty by ten eighty at thirty frames a second. We can also control the sound of the movie that we're recording. We can leave this on auto, we can go in and manually control this or we can disable it if we want to depends on how you're using this camera if you're professional video, you're gonna want to get in there and probably control it manually for rest of us who just want to take a quick little video from time to time. The auto works pretty well, all right, so moving our way through to the next one, which is battery information, so we're in the last tab of the set up this one's really nice you can go in and check exactly how many shutter firings you've taken on that battery, you can see how good your battery is and this is one of the items that I keep in my menu, so when you go into my menu, which is what we're going to talk about in just a minute here you can register a bunch of different things and this is one of the things that I come back to on a regular basis how good is the battery in this camera information button you recall in the back of the camera there's an info button when you press that what do you get to see and so in this in this case I'd like to have both options available to see so I get the normal display as well as thie camera settings and the shooting functions if I got that right dive into my camera quick and make sure to see if this camera is set up like that so actually I would set that at dinner to get to where we're going I would set it at normal displays because then it goes to both or you can choose just one if you only use one external speed light control uh this is gonna what's this gonna do forget sometimes well you're gonna have to have an external speed like controlled on this because I rarely have a speed light on the my camera and I never go to this feature but if you have a speed light you can basically control the speed light through the controls of your camera you'll be able to do it in your speed light as well but just gives you another option for controlling that all right remember the c one c two and see three months well this is where you would actually go to register those setting so you set the camera the way you want it to yu come into user settings and then you would register one, two or three whatever mode you wanted it to register to you could also go in there and just clear the settings. You know, if you bought a used five d mark two from somebody upgrading to a mark three I'd probably want to clear those sort of settings out and then talking about clearing settings. Another way to clear the settings on your camera is basically if you go here it's going to set said everything back to the factory defaults on the, uh on the camera and then there is firmware version. All right, this is the software that runs the camera and from time to time night cannon said the wrong word there like I did, uh, cannon will update the software in the camera and in this camera they have updated it numerous times. So for our students in the class take a look. Does anyone have something different than two point one two and their camera? Uh, just go ahead and call out the number. I'll repeat it for you to point one one two point oh one. Wow, you really need to update years and so they make small little adjustments from the very earliest firmware version. They started adding manual controls for the movie so that you could manually select shutter speeds and apertures in the movie. They basically gave us new features for free, which is really cool, and they're constantly fixing little problems and making things a little bit better. So what you do is you gotta cannons website, for instance, you could go to cannon, use a dot com, and you basically find the five d mark two on there under cameras, digital cameras, wherever it is and on the page for this camera is going to be drivers and firm where and you would go to firm where and it would tell you what the most current software is, and it would give you instructions on how to download it. Basically, you're going to download the new software from cannon onto your computer, you're going to put a memory card into your, uh, card reader, or you could connect your camera to your computer and you're basically going to transfer that to your camera and there's there's more information at the website exactly on how to do it, and basically you put a memory card in your camera, you'll go to this setting and update the firmware, and actually they had a pretty recent update, and so I checked this just as a few weeks ago, so if you're watching this at home into the future, you know, ten years from now, it's probably like version four point eight or something. Do be doing much, mitch. Many more things with it. At a certain point, they kind of stopped updating the software. But right now, they still been updating it with new firmware, probably every six months.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Fast Start - Canon 5DMII

Ratings and Reviews

Mike Swartz
 

Having used an XTi I was familiar with the basic Canon layout, but when I bought my 5D MKii used from my wedding photographer who updated to the MKiii, I knew there would be a ton of features I'd never really understood. This video series is fantastic. I've learned so much about my camera, many tips on best practices when planning shots and I've seen an increase in the quality of all my photos as a whole vs. just taking a ton of pics to try and capture one or two that turn out nice. I'm excited to try out so many new things I learned from watching these videos. I'd recommend these videos be the required guide to anyone who owns a 5D MKii.

Mia Linguia
 

Amazing class, I walk away feeling like I've made this machine my own. Like getting a new car and adjusting all the seating and mirrors and radio stations to your comfort, then giving it a name because its officially yours. My camera now feels more comfortable to use and I can't wait to use it again with these new found tweaks. Thanks John, always a great class!

Nelson
 

Excellent instruction. The instructor is very knowledgeable and a very effective communicator. Great photo examples and "SLIDES for that". Creative Live and John should both be commended for providing in depth and pertinent information. The Canon 5D MkII is a great camera however without a body of knowledge to fully utilize it you might as well have a low end point and shoot. I would recommend this class to anyone who has a 5D MkII, no matter your skill level. Great job!

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