Skip to main content

Back Side: Movie Mode

Lesson 7 from: Canon EOS 77D Fast Start

John Greengo

Back Side: Movie Mode

Lesson 7 from: Canon EOS 77D Fast Start

John Greengo

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

Lesson Info

7. Back Side: Movie Mode

Lesson Info

Back Side: Movie Mode

Well, it's time to continue our tour of the camera, and we're going to be working our way on to the back side of the camera where we have a lot of important controls back here. Alright, so on the back side of the camera We obviously have our on/off button and that's also where we can slide it all the way to the right and get it into the movie mode. So let's talk a little bit about shooting movies with this camera. So, in the movie mode, you want to get it all the way over to the right and you're going to see the image on the LCD on the back of the camera. The red dot is your indicator for recording. So, there is a button that would normally put your camera in live view, which is what we'll talk about after this section, but for right now, when you're in the movie mode, it starts and stops the recording. So one press to get it started, one press to stop it there. Then if you want to focus, you'll simply press halfway down with the shutter release. Now the Info button is a great button b...

ecause it never hurts to press the Info button, it just cycles through different groups of information. And I've got to admit to you, last night when I was getting ready for this class, I was going through, pressing the Info button and not all of the options were coming up. And a lot of times on cameras, you don't always get all the options because something is turning it off. It's conflicting with some other mode on the camera. So, the histogram option is only going to be available when you have your camera in the manual mode. You won't see it in the other modes. And the level information will not be on if you have something called "facetracking," which is something we're going to talk here in just a moment. So, you may or may not see five options cycling through the different Info modes. But those are the total number of options that you do have available. The Quick Menu is going to allow you access to a quick menu, a short menu, of features that you may want to have access to while you are in the Movie Mode. Now we're going to talk about most of these modes as we continue our way through the rest of the class on the camera. But one that is particularly unique is the AF method mode. Because when you have your camera in a live view or in the Movie Mode, where the mirror is in the upward position, the camera uses a different system for focusing than it would normally when you're just looking through the viewfinder. So let's take a look at the three different options that you have in this mode. First up, we have our Face+Tracking mode. So it looks for faces, it looks for subjects and it tries to track this. We're going to a little demo here in just a moment. We have a smooth zone mode, which is just kind of a medium, general sized area, which is very good for basic shooting of video. Now this something that you can move left and right, if you want. And if you want to get a little bit more specific, there is a one-point auto-focus, so if you have a smaller area that you want make sure that you get focused right, you can use that. And all of that is going to be accessed through the quick menu. So let's go ahead and, let me set my camera up, and, let's just take a quick look at how this works. So, first what I am going to do, is I am going to move this all the way over to the movie mode, so now we're going to get a live view of what we're seeing here in the camera. And what I am going to do is I am going to hit the Info button, so that we can get a nice clean look at what we are doing here. And so, let's reposition the camera slightly here. So in the AF mode, we have our three different options. Let's first use do the live, one-point option. And so now I can just use this dial button in the back of the camera to choose where I want to focus on. If I want to change my focusing system, I can go to the larger, smooth zone AF and I can still move this around. I can also use the touch screen as well to focus on this. So either one works just fine. And then, we have live face and tracking mode. And so Kenna has offered to help us out with this. So Kenna, if you could just stand in front of our little prop table here. And we're gonna see... Oh, look at how fast that is! And it automatically is going to track her face. Now, give us a little shift to the right, and shift to the left. And why don't you come up a little closer to the camera? And it's doing a great job. And go ahead, and... you're getting a little too tall Kenna, you're very tall. And so backup and keep backing up, and it's tracking you. Why don't you do a 360... Oh, the camera turned off here. It timed out. So you will get this back turned on. So, why don't you do a slow turn and we're going to see if it keeps track of your face. So, it's on her head. It's still tracking her. And then it's back on the face. Perfect! So it does a great job. Thank you Kenna! Round of applause for Kenna. So as you can see folks, it does a really good job tracking subjects. This is one of the best cameras for the money that you will find for shooting video and tracking-focusing. It does a really good job. I want to talk a little bit more about that. So let me go back to the Keynote. So, once again, you can access all of that through the Quick Menu in the AF method. Now this camera does, as I say, probably one of the best jobs, for the money, out on the market. And it's because of the type of focusing system it's using. So a little bit on the background: This is an SLR and it uses a mirror. The mirror is a partially silvered mirror and this is allowing light through the mirror to the secondary mirror and down to the focusing system. So, in normal operational modes, not Movie Mode, not Live View Mode, this how your camera focuses on what you see, what's going on. So, it's very quick, it's very, very accurate. It's how cameras have been working for the last 25-30 years or so. But when you put the camera in Movie Mode or Live View option the mirror moves up and out of the way so that light can go directly back to the image sensor, leaving the face detection auto-focus sensor completely useless. Now the camera has to use information on the sensor and it's judging it usually based on contrast. If it's contrasty that means it's in focus. Which means it's going to have a really tough time focusing on items that have very low contrast, like a relatively blank wall. So what this camera uses is a unique, Canon proprietary feature. And normal pixels are going to be these little boxes that are accepting lights. But this camera has a special sensor called a Dual Pixel CMOS AF system. And what it does is it actually has two pixels for each pixel, which is measuring light from different paths through the lens to help measure the distance. And the net effect is that the camera is much faster and more accurate in picking up and following focus for subjects in Movie Mode and in the Live View mode. The other benefit of this system is that you have a very large are of coverage, about 80 percent of the frame. And effective down to EV minus two, which is just really dark, alright. It's not complete blackness but it's quite dark as far as the amount of light. So it covers a wide area under very low lighting conditions. And for anyone who wanted to use this camera for blogging or shooting general video of action, it's not quite, say, a broadcast standard camera but for a consumer level camera, something under 5000 dollars, you're not going to find anything that focuses better than this. This system was brought out with the EOS 70D a couple of years ago and we have seen it kind of make its way, migrate, to all the other different Cannon cameras. And so this is kind of the last collection of cameras that it's coming down to. So it's on all of their cameras. So it does a really good job. So for somebody who is wanting to shoot stills and video this is one of the best cameras out on the market for doing that, because of that auto-focus option. Over on the right hand shoulder of the camera we have some buttons for zooming in. So if you wanted to manually focus, you can use that. So let's do a little demo here. I am going to put my camera in the video mode. And one of the things I want to do on this one is, I am going to put the camera into manual focus. So if I want to manually focus on something, what I would want to do, is I would want to zoom in to see if I am actually sharp. So I would press the zoom in button here and we could go five times, ten times. And you can see we're not totally focused here. So I can turn the focusing ring. Now this particular lens is an STM lens, which means it's electronically controlled. This is what is also known, fly-by-wire. So it's not just directly off of my finger control. So I'm going to dial this in so I can get it nice and sharp. Little too far...right about there. Press this button again, and it zooms me back. So that's how I can go in and manually focus something if I wanted to. Now if I want to focus, as you remember, I can put the lens back on auto-focus then I can hit the queue and I can go in and choose a specific area. And just in case you're wondering, because I'm kind of wondering right now, with all these subjects out there, what is the camera wanting to focus on? So if I press this, it's not picking anything in particular to focus on. It's just looking at whatever is closest in the frame, whatever is dominant in the frame. And you press it two times in a row, you're not going to get the same result. So if I zoom in... Let's see if it has a big difference when I zoom in. And so we'll get one camera, notably in the front there. So, I would have thought it would grab the one on the bottom right. Maybe if I... There it did. Just depends on how close it is to the frame. And so, very good camera for focusing in that Movie Mode. Now there are going to be a number of other movie options that we can set and that is going to be in the Movie Mode. Now this camera does have a kind of hidden menu and that is for the movie sections. What you need to do, is you need to have the camera in the Movie Mode and then hit the menu button in order to get into those. We'll dive into those fully in the second half of the class in the menu section.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Canon77D Recommended Settings
Canon 77D Slides

Ratings and Reviews

Nikita Sokolsky
 

Must have for all 77D owners. Thanks, John!

Dara Pkyprek
 

Hello, is it hand-on practice or just show how to use the menu in the camera, plz B.R Dara

John Greengo
 

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES