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Gear Basics

Lesson 4 from: Keep it Simple: Video for Photographers

Lindsay Adler, Jeff Rojas

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Lesson Info

4. Gear Basics

Next Lesson: Gear Breakdown

Lesson Info

Gear Basics

using what you already own everybody be happy you don't need to find the thing is if your digital camera does video don't by anyone you need a better one the biggest difference is there are some cameras that were going on about resolution some only seven twenty some do ten eighty I mean obviously ideally you'd want hdd ten eighty you'd want more resolution but it's not serious we'll talk about that actually question right break to do with that for seven twenty and ten eighty I'm wondering when you go from full frame teo cropped sensor what's so if I get a c noah seven twenty full frame is it going to be better picture than a cropped ten eighty um good point no it's the same thing okay the resolution like the information that it's capturing is the same on either one so for example it would be shooting let's say that he has a twenty one megapixel full frame and I have a twenty one megapixel crop frame the file size is still the same like what it produces the only difference you see and t...

his is like a technology thing but if I have a crop sensor in a full frame and I have the same lens on both and I frame it up so your head is exactly the same in both frames the full frame will have narrowed now we're depth of field than the crops answer well just because of your you have to get closer to fill the frame and stuff like that otherwise there's no difference so you're fine with crops answer all right let's go into the solo stuff you already own the right camera okay so if it has video capability you're good don't stress it out it's okay uh there are some benefits you get with a better camera but for most of us if you're not producing feature films it doesn't you're fine so we'll talk about those things we both shoot cannon not for any I mean that's what we will started with such a way that we're comfortable with by all means we're not biased it's just my first canada my first camera fifty four fifty day like a small small tiny tiny camera and then this just seemed toe kind of worked my way up so and mine was a canon rebel two thousand rent flash film camera that's scary yeah he never shot film that's good crazy okay so just real quick just you know we will shoot five mark three's um the mark too is your great there are a couple improved benefits mark threes you're gonna like issued er slow motion sixty frames a second um there are some benefits for the quality of video that it does have the ability to output if you're okay it doesn't really matter you don't need it I mean they have a whole bunch of less expensive ones like sixties and sixty days and all of that stuff it'll still be fine but that's what we shoot with so there's we'll discuss the benefits and kind of the bad things about shooting with a dslr in a bit all right a little bit uh so let's talk about it so I wouldn't just discussed that the benefits of this is its light and portable the bad things about this is it's light and portable the weight of this shows every single bit of vibration in the camera when you're shooting video so if you're trying to hand hold it because there's no weight behind it it's moving with your hand in your constantly having this shape which seems weird cause you think like have here would be harder to hold but actually makes you more stable long story short don't ever handled I'm like not a never person except for in this case you never want a handful of your camera ever so we'll talk about the options that you do have uh for a little bit uh you know before it here okay so this is the point that I want to make all right so in this next video I shot this four years ago I just shot this and at that time there wasn't really affordable ways to shoot slow motion and so this piece is shot with a uh kanan five the mark too so what thirty two hundred dollars camera something like that at the time right whatever it may be and one hundred fifty thousand dollar camera they're mixed together and the only reason you can tell the difference is because the slow motion one the expensive ones in slow motion so in other words like you don't need a lot of expensive here so I'm gonna show you this peace this is a fashion piece that I directed er nowadays okay nerdy people issue closure yours if you want to hear this nowadays airways to shoot your dslr and use a post processing plugin called twister if you're curious go look it up and what it basically does is you shoot slow motion and you shoot high frame rate uh and you can basically through di animation tweens it makes up the frames in between so it'll fake slow motion and I'm not talking a little slow motion faking like a thousand two thousand three seconds so it looks like gorgeous slow motion it is a plug and that you purchase and so now what I needed one hundred fifty thousand dollar camera to do four years ago I could do with this even a pro you can use a gopro duties with awesome so yeah he's won fifty thousand three hundred bucks for hundred bucks so like yeah no thiss this is the piece that my editor said you should go learn what you're doing because they made it really hard to actually build edit at that point uh but has anyone ever seen katy perry's e t video like the its music video with kanye west and she's like an alien and floating around and stuff like that that model is actually the alien in that music video and he approached me saying like what you do I want to do a video piece that was really cool the reason that I included that as I wanted you to see like I'm sure you could tell some differences between the super expensive camera and not but you know and the special effect at the end where it looked like he disappeared curl up in a ball and it's a two bags of mulch and covered him in it and so I had him jump up like this and then you just played it in reverse and then basically that tweeting thing where it makes up the middle frames is how we made it disappear but yeah he was very dirty there are some questions in general about how to mix video from different sources so from a dslr from a gopro and a lot of people are doing that these days do you have anything in particular that you do while shooting to account for multiple sources one of the considerations would be what's your resolution because if they're different resolutions then you'll definitely be able to see that so for example if you should shoot slope motion on of on a camera so for like my five mark three when I shoot sixty frames per second my camera actually requires me to shoot a lesser resolution in order to do that so when you put those two together you can tell so it's trying to keep the same resolution um for shooting with multiple cameras for example us we're always trying to make sure our shutter speeds match because the shutter speed is where it gives a completely different stylistic look so for example if I shoot at what we're going to recommend in a second if I'm shooting at one fifty if they're one sixteenth of the second that's what we're going to recommend that has like a cinematic look so it seems like the movies versus you actually can shoot one five hundredth of a second one to thousands of a second it won't look like movies it looked really choppy on very rigid instead of what you see in the movies which kind of close together so the biggest thing is if you're shooting with a gopro where you're shooting with other cameras and they have totally different shutter speeds it'll be obvious and if they have different resolutions it'll be obvious and then there's also when you're importing it it's your importing them with similar like codex which we'll talk about later basically just their compression formats to make the match and then if you have if it's multiple cameras keeping the picture style the same because if one has a lot of contrast and one I have shooting flat trying to match those two imposes not fun at all um so we're just trying to get them a similar as possible all right so let's talk about lenses real quick uh so a benefit of course of shooting this is in the past if you think you said that you shot video cameras right you did not get the cinema movie look at fall you did not have the depth of field the background looks incredibly and focus and it wasn't the feel of the movies okay it looks like the movies now and there's plenty of movies that have actually been shot with five mark twos and five mark three's on dso part of that besides how the camera functions is we can use our one point four lenses are to you know to point whatever it may be so real quick we're gonna talk about the lenses that we use uh really as long as your camera shoots decent video you'll actually get a better quality of video not buying a better camera is buying a bitter lands correct so I wouldn't say like I have a video is first generation do I need a new one probably not you probably would need better glass so we recommend for that movie look shooting trying to purchase lenses that air two point eight or wider I use a person has a lot of primes when I'm shooting just cause there's less class it weighs less and I will have to worry about his focus don't worry about anything else I step forward you step back if I don't have to worry about zooming in her out and finding more or less with the right capabilities so we're gonna tell you real quick what we shoot with and how you choose that there is no right or wrong answer for what lens you used but this is what I want you to know I love like I have this crazy lands that does the signal twelve to twenty four and ate like makes spaces look huge and distorted up its this one thank you just this one it like bends the edges and I can I can wrap a scene around mean it's really cool and artistic it will not look like a movie when you put it together because they wouldn't do that for movie look if you want the cinematic wide angle feeling and shoot like a twenty four millimeter lens and back up for example or maybe a thirty five so just know like there isn't a right lens that you're supposed to use but you won't get the same feel if you're if you're shooting something like that uh and even like a super long lens for example maybe like a four hundred millimeter to eat maybe looks like some romantic movies with a background just hold early blurs out but if it supposed to feel more like reality that won't work either so it's what you trying to go for so let's take a look you just by fast glass if you can if not rented lens vertigo is a great place to rent lenses especially if you're shooting let's hear shooting a wedding and you get that second shooter that assistant and you want them to kind of match you and so you have all your fast lenses but they don't that would be a good time to rent uh so that you can match your feel uh so let's take a look um cinematographers and jeff for example in general yeah general use primes we photographers one of the reasons it might be beneficial to use a zoom lens because it gives you flexibility like if I don't have time this is not like this is in addition to shooting stills I don't have time two foot lenses and I can't move that much that maybe a zoom lens is going to be a better option but cinematographers use fixed focal length prime lenses and they use fast they buy fast lenses so one point for two point oh something like that uses the same state lines this one significantly lighter than the twenty four seventy eighty five no the fifty you should have eighty five on there the fifties a lot less weight and I still am within that twenty four to seventy range so aiken you know move movie um okay so yeah so they're also much sharper just prime lenses are sharper than zoom lenses in general so if you're going for image quality and you want that movie listen it would be right is less glass pieces I shoot my twenty four to seventy like all the time I should be seventy two hundred all the time I'm just saying as a guideline prime lenses generally have a crisper more cinematic field to them so that you might not have known is that image stabilization actually can work in video uh so is you might have seen for example a seventy two hundred on the side of it depending on which one you purchase has image stabilization option which would be sigma is os canada's iast night kind of br have their own technology but what that does it actually helps stabilize your image from camera shake so if you are maybe on a shoulder rig where you're filming it can actually help to stabilize your image you'd want to turn it off if you're on a tripod because sometimes it'll fight like have you ever been on a tripod with a nice lines and it jumps it would do the same thing in video but if you are trying to hold it with the shoulder rig using I ask can actually help you so if that's something you know maybe you know that you'll be doing a lot of event running running gun video so you've got your shoulder ring and you're moving around and I asked lens might help you have set your video and also there are plug ins for premier that actually hope you stabilize your video just so you know that that exists helps out a lot if your shooting hand health or shoulder held uh okay so going to this so why those air the wide angle inches that we shoot the one that I personally like love is the thirty five millimeter one point for that sigma has that is a really nice wide prime um and thirty five okay so even though fifty millimeter one point four is technically no distortion thirty five is more what you like what we see like more of a field of view that we see without distorting on the edges for me shooting and twelve to twenty four so if you're trying to get a wider field of view and more like if you just walked into a scene and you want to capture let me introduce you to the scene a thirty five would be a good thing closest because the fifty supposed to replicate your actual natural eyesight so it's a closest thing you can get to the thirty five which is nice excuse me fifty I was wondering about like when you're shooting a portrait shot right you want to shoot longer let's do not distort space special how close you are for video is it the same like if you're shooting at thirty five you don't want to be like close to the face right cause then you're going to distort and so what you would use a thirty five if you want to be close up would be for creative effect to make something feel awkward and uncomfortable but it would yes you would shoot in eighty five for a close up where some news too perfect all right continuing standard standard lenses this's like fifty is probably what you would want to start off with if you have no lenses like if if you were trying teo just shoot some video because of fifty you can move in and get like tight shots but acceptable shots that allow you to introduce your subject and then you can back up to get a scene so that is going to be the primate recommend but if you're looking for is much versatility as possible you could get one lens to go film an event twenty four seventy is gonna cover your bases um for the most range of shots uh telephoto lenses that we use seventy two hundred having image stabilization is really useful and that's great for tight headshots on then also the eighty five I love the eighty five and that this really gives me a cinematic look close of head shots so that would be a recommendation and then lastly just one prime that don't it's not really a cinematographer lens but I use this probably more than is healthy like he harasses me all the time for it my one fifty macro because I feel like I can produce something that no one was just a regular video camera camera produces because I can have a boudoir video where it just flutters on her eyelashes or the focus rakes across her lips and so I can get intimate with details which I think makes a viewer feel like they can think and feel they could touch like they're they're they're seeing details that you could only see if you were up close and personal looking so this is actually a lens that I use all the time he didn't doesn't really eighty five no that one fifteen fifty yeah he doesn't touch I use it all the time so it was back to shooting styles yeah exactly so shooting styles

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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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