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Essentials for Shooting Video Part 1

Lesson 6 from: Keep it Simple: Video for Photographers

Lindsay Adler, Jeff Rojas

Essentials for Shooting Video Part 1

Lesson 6 from: Keep it Simple: Video for Photographers

Lindsay Adler, Jeff Rojas

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Lesson Info

6. Essentials for Shooting Video Part 1

Lesson Info

Essentials for Shooting Video Part 1

I really honestly thought when I was starting video that I could just switch to video mode and shoe unlike africa priority and just go with it um there's actually ideal esos ideal shutter speeds frame rates all of it so you will be setting your camera to manual you will you're you're not going to be on africa priority you're not going to be on p mode you're going to be on manual so he is going to cover all the setting you might not know I also want us to know that we're going to talk about a lot about concept today today's conceptualizing everything in theory tomorrow's practice so all of you with us on set physically working everything and seeing how easy it is to work that specific material so I want you guys to get a hands on approach and especially relevance everybody who's watching live that you see how easy it is for you guys if you haven't you something to use it as well so now we are all going into unfamiliar territory um everything we're talking about now is not the same with ...

photography so if so far you've been like oh I get this I know this came now it's new this is video the scary part I'm totally fine camera settings so frame rate and resolution how many of you have have any background frame rate at all do you guys know what frame rate is I'll discuss it but so frame rate is going to be the amount of frames that you shooting per second video is a bunch of a series of still images played together too relais et an actual video pieces what makes up the movement way back when they decipher that twenty four frames per second was kind of a minimalistic approaches the shooting video what our minds perceive his motion so anything lower than that we just see a bunch of clips of images of broken up so they started shooting movies in that same light so since then we've always been in tune to seeing things that twenty four frames a second if you ever see the difference between something in a movie theater and something is a documentary like discovery channel something like that sixty frames a second versus shooting twenty four frames a second it looks different one's really really crispin clear the other one's nice and kind of dreamy and kind of washed out it's just it's a nice effect to it and okay I just have to nerd out one of the reasons that they were trying to figure out the minimum number of frames that they could get away with not trick your eyes because all those frames running through the projectors would would jam up if he had too much so they were trying to get the minimum that could go with and they found twenty four on dh but that's like a little bit slightly separated from reality so that's why the more frames you have me we are seeing more than twenty four and twenty frames second reality so that's why he's saying like documentary might be thirty or sixty well quick more nerd from warner thing yes you're gonna hunt was coming okay how many saw the hobbit how many saw how that high frame rate you don't want to talk about that so really really fascinating we went and saw the hobbit high frame rate three d just I'm actually okay uh so what was the director did isn't sentence like we see in movies twenty four frames per second he shot and dress for the whole thing at forty eight so when you looked at it it's in the hobbit high frame rate okay when we watched it I immediately was incredibly upset I was running my lord of the rings hobbit experience of because since it had more frames you could get lost the movie magic so for example I could tell the hobbit feet were totally fake because there's so many frames it's really or you could tell the foliage on the outside of the hobbit house it was like it wasn't really because the more frames and give you more to process and so I was extremely unhappy so we had to re watch it more recently at normal frame rate for me to be happy it's just you know so that's one of the differences you would see it it seems like a documentary of the hobbit you know that's not really no okay and then what was it gandalf looked like he was like twenty feet tall yeah you could tell that they were like shooting through fake little windows to make him look tall and like you look like mr rogers basically I love okay so the higher the frame rate the more realistic choppy looking your videos we just basically just guess that this is more less how things air shot that you guys see on tv so if you're looking something like sports or high high resolution video it's usually shots of sports sports let's say like football the actual resolution for football looks completely different than what you're watching your movie you can still use the same cameras it's just the resolution which makes it different which is nice because we like to see every little grass plate we're watching football why don't know personally I like to just see where they put down the bowl I actually you know I don't even watch for its anymore yes it's online tv tv documentary thirty frames a second it's nice if you see like yes you know those kind of tv shows they come out in thirty frames a second which it does have a significant difference we'll show you guys a couple of examples and just real quick sixty frame for second on our cameras does one of two things either we can go for that super reality you see all the detail like it doesn't feel so cinematic or sixty is is double thirty if you play sixty back you recorded as sixty and you play it back at thirty it's slow motion because it takes twice at half speed because it takes twice as long so basically it's half speed slow motion and then you can use those plug ins to make that even stretched out even longer but that's it would be shooting if you're trying to do a slow motion be doing sixty frames but playing it back at half speed takes twice as long that as well so this is twenty four frames a second okay y simpler much the blur looks nice on the spectator second so what's the blurring thirty little and sixty frames a second chris and so shot with the same camera so you can tell the resolution difference just by seeing course this is outside of by the way which made it so easy to shoot a new york city so you can tell this is a significant difference when you're watching these videos psychologically this is what you're seeing you don't get to see that stop obviously but you're seeing movies shot that same way so if like she spoke about the hobbit's feet are moving you see how crisp and clear that that shot is you can tell where the makeup lines are just I sweat plate one more time just real quick because it's hard it's like easy to miss okay watch more like how fluid it feels like more let's just watch like the kind of happiness already it's like smooth to kind of smooth movement here ok nice and flowing and if you notice it's on higher speeds if you look at the people in the background yeah and you can watch the wheels okay and then watch this like this last one we switch to sixty feels like it looks a little jump here it is a little more toppy there's more blur when you're slowing it down there's more there's more frames there so just because I thought that was cool and can you myth mix and match the twenty four frame with a sixty four framed you recommend that you can't know what kind of wouldn't stylistically but that's just me because what happens is you're having something very very cinematic and then something very very documentary they did do that for like the lord of the rings were they trying to make the scenes more documentary feeling and then excuse me thea let's go the landscape scenes where you could see every little single detail two really nice and then the movie scenes on the twenty four frames a second it wanted really epic and hollywood like so so in like in for sports if I want to slow something down I would shoot in sixty frames but if I wanted to shoot the rest of the the match in twenty four frames would that be okay so that's actually could totally do that you can shoot twenty forty sixty but you play it all back at twenty four so you could say that it would be even more than a little bit half speed um so you just wanna match all your your frame rates you can shoot at different as long as it's played back at the same but if you're trying to have somebody pop the other thing is I don't know what can't hear what camera using but the find the mark three sorry this one here five mark three sixty frames of seconds at seven twenty resolution so it's completely different than ten eighty out of the twenty four so you have to also compensate for that point you're you're exporting at the seven twenty because you don't want to go down for a quality and you're slow motion when you do sixty frames a second doesn't let you record audio so then you lose audio at that point so if you mean what it kind of makes sense that's playing backs emotion no way we're gonna want you record the audio separately if you were looking for like ambient noise and wanted to play it back but you lose it you can't even recorded if you wanted to so resolutions specifically so resolutions just the pixel dimensions of videos a lot of people that go with seven times what seven twenty wins ten eighty it's literally the length and with of the specific video that you're looking at so these in different resolutions that we work with on a normal basis so for eighty is going to be four eighty pixels by six forty seven twenty is going to be seven twenty twelve eighty and ten eighty is gonna be a ten eighty by nineteen twenty the difference of going from seven to ten eighty all nurses a pretty significant difference so your question before about editing and trying to re crop that's how much wiggle room I have to reposition my my video piece just know that I lose the resolution of whatever else I had so it's nice to be able have that that wiggle room but it depends on your your client's necessity it's interesting as their cameras get better we'll be able to shoot bigger than then ten eighty but maybe the standards still online will be ten eighty so maybe we can shoot two k for kate meaning like bigger and then crop and that's one of the things that some people do for documentary right now is actually shoot with these these really big resolution cameras can crop in a little bit but that's not why we're not thieves yet I'm gonna go ahead and say something that they don't probably annoy a lot of videographers but everyone I really recently went to a trade show for cinematography and everyone's talking about four k I'm going to do for cake because I want my work to be future proof it's gorgeous it's gorgeous resolution but who's shooting work that's going to be future proof like really sort of a man if you're shooting something that is going to be a documentary and it's going to be an epic documentary that twenty years from now they're going to see and they're going to say this is awesome this was like the tip of the top of the crop that's that's great but ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of us don't need that I mean it's not a necessity it's really just for a term so don't feel that because of photographers excuse me a cinematographer saying I'm shooting for kay it means that they're doing something better than you are because how many of us are shooting our viewing images on four k on a screen like that half of us were still on like facebook looking at video files or youtube files or you know whatever it is no one's having the time or the equipment toe look at that for casey don't be ashamed of saying I shoot ten eighty so think of resolutions frame size and again with the five day mark three it shoots the what's called a sixty frames at seven twenty it doesn't do it at ten eighty so the larger the resolution a larger the frame size cnn final size okay whatever you decide I'm I'm just going to quickly go into this I know it's it's a creativity standpoint whatever your client's necessities are I want to get too much into business by any means but know what their expectations are if they're publishing something at a seven twenty you can still shoot it ten nato have that wiggle room for editing you can still downgrade but if they're looking for something ten eighty just know that you're gonna have to constantly shoot that don't shoot at seven twenty check your camera before you go shoot and make sure it's set two ten eighty I've done that by accident and look at the back of my cam and I'm like cross section and a thick density of raw grass so well than that resolution aspect rations I love the fun here aspect ratios with so you lose resolution the second that you go into video okay if anybody hasn't told you that you're not shooting four thirds any more you're shooting sixteen my night you're cutting off information off your screen so that's why when you're going to live you it minimizes too about this on a candy five day march for the second happened you switch this is the information that the loose so just know that if you're trying to frame up a shot the second you see those two black bars there is no information there there's that's not gonna be reported this is what your cameras recording nothing else so if you're trying to crop the top of somebody's head don't get too the little black part the top you want to make sure that you're shooting in the frame so shutter speed this is I have ok for that because clearly the video is slightly it's cropped in top bottom if you're doing fusion what do you do in that case because your would you cropped from the top just top and bottom of your photo get dropped yes so if you wanted it to match up exactly and have the same cropping throughout the fusion piece then you would have to cross this still but then there's things like let's say you were putting it together piece and an emoto like the video plays and then there's like transitions and then the photos display so a lot of times your you might have like a vertical photo anyway which won't fit so it's like it depends on what the look you are what you're going for but speaking of fusion if you want to go to shutter speed real quick uh so we're gonna talk about how shutter speed effects video but it's still kind of acts like shutter speed it instills so just for example if for some reason you were trying to grab some stills out of your video if you're shooting at a fiftieth of a second and the subject's moving you try to grab it still it'll still be blurry so just keep that in mind now you can't really get you mean you're not getting that much resolution anyway to grab stills I'm just letting you know if you look at the individual frames an individual frame at a fiftieth will be blurrier an individual frame at one to fiftieth but when it's played together you know one fifty is much more cinematic where is the one to fiftieth is really choppy so it's yeah just a quickly off topic with the four k thing I mentioned before you have a lot of videographers tell you I just taken image right off whatever screen on plane that's great that's like shooting and spraying and praying because ultimately you just shooting a bunch of video to hope to have a frame so make sure that you're composing your shots accordingly as well so so misconception misunderstanding on my part video number one way I mess up huge big time in the beginning huge this's the number one um I thought that like normal what you have access to for your exposure is your center speed your app return your s o no not really completely true in video because if you were trying to go for a cinematic look there are very specific shutter speeds that you want to be at so you kind of lose a little bit of your ability to use shutter speed to change your exposure if you wanted to feel kind of movie like so the movie like ones are one fifty seconds or one sixtieth so don't explain that so one fiftieth of a second gonna be the two these just might contain this back in the day just trust me and do your research so you viewers online just google this you had one hundred eighty degrees shutter right so I'm going to go into the technical google it just trust me and say that this matches up to what you're trying to shoot anything maura's gonna look smearing or any hires gonna look smearing kind of like saving private ryan if you ever seen saving private ryan it's really like flowy they shot at more than double the frame rankin's per second which is if you want to discuss okay so what I have here these are your suggested shutter speeds so we're going to put up a cheat sheet on the end that you want to take a picture of you want to write down but when you select your frame rate so let's say twenty four frames per second the recommended shutter speed is twice your frame ring so twenty four frames per second is one fiftieth of a second for your shutter speed the recommended for a cinematic look for shooting at thirty frames per second you double thirtieth sixty and so if you want to go to head to do sixty frames per second to your slow motion or to get that kind of realistic documentary look you'd then be a one one twenty fifth of a second I don't want anyone to think that you absolutely cannot shoot it's a one five hundred thirty one two thousand it'll work it will work in your camera but if you start piecing together where you shot some of that out of fifty is some of that one to fifty it doesn't match it doesn't have the same field so if you're really trying to go for what what it looks like in the movies that's what you want todo this's us standard it's not like the uk they'll use the p a l system that's totally separate so they like twenty five they actually have settings on here if you did your camera has pale or he'd switch in your camera based on where you are so I would write that down first and foremost if you're looking for the cinematic if for example you're doing like a fight scene think whatever you don't fight saying and people are punching each other and you want you want to see all that detail because if they're moving fast in your shooting out of fifty if all the frames look blurry that's true like it will look blurry if they're moving quickly then maybe you would go to one one twenty fifth even at you're slower frame it's just it won't necessarily match but maybe you pump up the music at the fight scene part and then it gets really crisp so like it looks like it's not supposed imagines you guys kind of see what I'm saying like you khun creatively change these this is what I recommend you understand so this is the differences of frames per second so one fiftieth of a second nice and smooth or how long it's purposely long on a nice little screen one hundred twenty seconds like lose a little bit more it's less smooth and I go back and show you guys look at the drops of the bottom you can actually catch the drop and one fifty fifty two hundred all those little so that goes back into sports if you're shooting at two hundred of these a little considerations that you need to have when you're shooting and you could go higher than that for some reason you're trying to catch every droplet you could get that so so I said something okay so there's gonna be a bunch of form argument I'm gonna go ahead and say that now about what's your native eso charts charts charts there's arguments there's references is this is that there's a lot of what's it called controversy behind sos overall what's the standard isos for people because it's it's the native it's the cleanest iso settings out of your camera's gonna be increments of one sixty so the one sixteen three twenty six forty eight hundred six hundred twenty five hundred etcetera those air you're clean estates everything else is just basic basically compensation off of these native isos that's what that's what people are saying our standard again people are going to argue that just go with this because this is what people are using for video so if you're working with somebody on set this is probably what they're gonna wind up doing if they know what they're doing you'll see you'll love the cheat sheet world explain this out but how I would think of it is that ok it is a lovely in late room when you shoot a uh hi s so if there's a little bit of extra noise or green you get rid of it light room's gorgeous video grain is there and you don't really mean there's some ways to kind of reduce it but it's not for us photographers without big budgets for all these plug it you can't really get rid of it as much so what you're trying to do is pick the isos that'll have the least amount of noise or grain built in and just if you look at all those charts and things like that like the one sixty three twenty six forty years are the best ones so if you're shooting with somebody and you're two cameras just make sure you have the same s o because I want to look a little noisy in there I look at all these settings is a standard for you guys to work together so I'm looking everything in use and you can change things up you could do whatever you want by all means you can look at everything that we did today scrap it and do your own thing that's fine but the second you go on set with somebody they have to do it jack same thing you're doing so if they are a film student if they are a photographer if they've watched this class and they use our cheat sheets they're gonna look at the different standards that you're using you're gonna be completely off so tryto work in unison if you decide to do that okay remember how we send that video is like shooting j peg not raw so if you mess up your white balance you're in trouble you're done you know for rice you can fix it and sample can't do that on video so you've got to make sure that you get your white balance right eh so you are not going to have your wife balance on auto white balance the only the only time I'm just inside the only time that I would save its maybe applicable is let's say you're in a wedding hall were like the colors of the lights are changing and like you're trying to adjust for that it's crazy you can't just it's not even they're not even real color I mean they may not really like a real color on your white balance so if you're trying to do that like maybe that's the exception but if you um if you leave it on auto it'll change in the footage and then if you wanted to color correct that you'd have to break apart your footage it's because in post processing you have to fix all these little issues right so if you use fluorescent tungsten on two different scents you have to color great all fluorescent and all colin all tungsten completely and emerge them together so they look similar very difficult so I'm continue one thing that you could consider doing is you can set cost the white balances and so if you want to know how to do that um one of the tools that we have is something called an expo disc and to do a creative live plug uh my conquering crappy lighting class that I thought this august goes into detail about setting custom white balance for cannon and nikon they actually work a little bit differently but just to give you an idea um what you do is you would say that she is my subject okay looking at her you try to pay attention to which light sources air hitting her so I dealing I go over there maybe actually go over there all right so what you do I'm gonna shoot the back my caramel but I'll explain it you take this little thing okay and you point towards the light source is hitting her face so you're going to take a picture and what you get when you're holding this expo disc in front of your lens is you get a picture that looks like you did it totally wrong because it looks like a grayish white ish nothing what it's really doing if you look at the detail of this here it's trying to gather all of the different light sources that you haven't been kind of give you a comedian so I'll go ahead and take that picture and for cannon what you do is when you go to white balance there's an option for custom in your menu you say set custom white balance and you select that photo you just took and it will custom white balance for you um nikon it's actually good your custom white balance mode and then you just take the picture and it sets it why this might be a little bit more important is a lot of times what I do is I throw in a color checker which you can still do that in video to get precise but it's no problem and ross I'm way off I've got my color checker boom I click it it's like a j peg so if you were way off on video your color shocker isn't gonna do you any good so what I would I mean if you if you have a wacky way bounce and you're trying all of your white balance settings and it's not looking close maybe an expo disk would be a good idea to get you closer and experts say this is actually gonna be part of our giveaway excellent so quick question from strict so since frame rate and shutter speed should remain fixed is the recommended way to adjust exposure than on ly by changing eso um I s o and aperture and so here's is that we're coming up on that and I'm just gonna get thie initial density filter okay yeah it was like they were coming from that yet okay perfect so let me explain the situation you may run into as wedding photographers or sports for example so you go outside and it is a bright sunny day you know how brian's pick high noon have weddings okay so so I like to do fashion you know anyway so you're you're outside high noon and okay you want minimal grains may be shooting it I am so one sixties you know as low as you can get it to go but it's really bright and then you set your camera at say one fiftieth of a second so that's for a pretty long exposure for high noon a sixty one fifty or sixty eighth of a second and so you go ahead and in order to make it actually expose correctly sometimes in that high noon no you're shooting at like eight o r six three and that background isn't tack sharp focus and it looks amateur because that's not what the movies look like in the movies that background out of focus and its beautiful blur so well since we took way took the shutter speed out of the equation for a for the closure what do you do okay so we have it toe so we'll go really really end up this about this a little later but I just want to just quickly they make new neutral density filters that you cannot utilize we use an old school filters the cocaine filters they're really really nice filters the only thing is they fit up to three different filters on the specific mouth so if I wanted to just do a neutral density filter and maybe do a warm color tone if you guys want to focus on that I could do both I can literally just stick this in here and warm up my video cool it off depending on what I'm trying to do just great and it looks like a neutral density filter is basically a neutral gray piece of glass that goes in front of camera in darkens down the entire scene so they come in stops usually one stop to stop three stuff maybe some of us film shooters maybe did I did a lot of landscapes way back in the day I had one stop to seven through stop you should then see that it carried with me like this and what it would dio is it would allow me to shoot at wider apertures because all right so it's really bright I make it darker and so I have to open up my aperture so now maybe with a to stop or three sevenths you've instead of shooting it you know eight point oh no I can shoot at four o or two point eight which is which is great so this is one of the least expensive options right neutral density filters you can probably find these on ebay now they're very rare and hard to come by they would probably important in the eighties but maybe you had them already for a student like I had them from shooting so if you have them like sitting around in your attic you khun still utilize them for video which is great um however you can't shoot this wider than a thirty five so if you're going for like twenty four you could buy bigger places a glass so you can actually buy a new this is a p filter so the pee filter shoots up to thirty five millimeters they have a bigger version that one's more expensive so it's like one fifty for the for the mountain itself so if you were gonna warm up the video with the warm filter would you do it for all of the spots in your video I was trying to make everything consistent yeah unless like all of a sudden there's a sunset scene at the end of the video where the couple kisses and you wanted to be the crescendo in love and they would so the other more expensive option they do make nd filters that go three lines the ones that aren't variable which is that they're a fixed amount of stuff that's what I had I just had the screw on ones that were like the hoyas of the tiff ins that were just once up to some threes up that's what I had left over from when I shot film so now they think he's healer pence's mean that a zeiss glass that's an adjustable it's called a variable andy filter so can you see that major that camera so when you when you rotate it it takes it from one to six stops darker six point six stuff so six point six stops so if you were if you're shooting at high noon and you want to shoot one point four you can thie price point on this is about four hundred fifty dollars age there are other ones so it's expensive but there are other options as well this if you guys feel it's very heavy very durable and it's mad a zeiss glass this will last you forever so and I guess I would advise if you are going to go ahead and get in into density filter if you just kind of like sticking a really bad filter in front of your camera degrades the quality of the image the same thing so if you did want to get andy filter and do a little bit of research maybe the cheapest isn't the best you don't have to go with the four hundred dollars each option we just like it cause it's crispin clay and it's all the way to six point six that's often so I'm gonna get out and get what you pay for I mean that's that's really the thing about video in photography right too it sounds expensive but when you're talking about crisp clear video every single time and having something that's a little more kind of like with sheen or a little less focused I'd rather have this if I'm going to work with a bunch of clients that goes back into what she mentioned earlier just making sure that you yeah make it shoot enough to justify buying this first of all let's see terry from earlier in the segment do use image stabilization when on a mono pod yes absolutely yes and others the when you're using it when you got a camera on the tripod you don't want to use image stabilization because it gives a little blurred you do it on a monitor if you're completely stable I wouldn't but if you're in a situation and this isn't sound really funny we were on tour and one of the assistants decided to put inside the rv his mono pod while we're driving at sixty five miles an hour turned the seventy two hundred assan and it's nice and clear so depends on your uh on what you're doing all right question from lloyd we talked about the export dest do you have one that you recommend it's so it is the company the company's name is expo imaging and you buy it based on your filter signs what you can also do it doesn't have to screwed on take the picture so you could just get the largest filter size and hold in front of your camera in front of you your lenses so um and they have they keep there's like there's different versions of it just get the newest one

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Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

This great workshop helps me to start a new experience with video, Lindsay and Jeff are so clever with a teaching very easy to follow, now I know the basics to work with movement, I got a new vision on how to take advantage of many years of photography experience, this is a new medium but image itself is the same, I recommend this to any newbie interested on getting a solid base to start.

Elly Alenka Dream
 

Fantastic class! Watching it in 2019 - and still finding relevant. Excellent way to ease photographers into the scary waters of video footage and production... and perfect for somebody who already has some basics to take it up a notch and challenge themselves quite a bit! Loved this class, very helpful.

a Creativelive Student
 

I bought this class because, I recently bought my first DSLR with filming capabilities. But when I start looking at it and after watching a couple of instructionvideos on YouTube I kinda got overwhelmed. This class broke it all down into clear pieces for me. Lindsay and Jeff have nice and clear teaching style. They covered everything but didn't get to far into the nitty gritty details. They always told how important something was and if you have to do it in a certain way or that is your artistic choice. I certainly can start off with making video with a lot more confidence now. The course is packed with information. It took me much longer then 3 days to watch and take 37 pages of notes!

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