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Movie Settings

Lesson 12 from: Nikon D5 Fast Start

John Greengo

Movie Settings

Lesson 12 from: Nikon D5 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

12. Movie Settings

Next Lesson: Focus

Lesson Info

Movie Settings

Moving into the movie mode which is kinda related to the live view mode because the mirror's up, the shutter's up, we're looking at the back of the camera but obviously we are recording movies at this point. So I'm gonna go ahead and flip my camera back into the movie mode 'cause we're probably gonna do a demo here I guess at some point. But we have our record button up on the top of the camera. Of course we're gonna hit that once to start, once to stop. You don't have to hold in on it while you are recording. We have picture controls which allow us to go in and change the different profiles that we're kinda shooting our images at and this is a little bit more important in video because with still photographs a lot of people are shooting raw and this camera does not shoot raw video. It's compressed into a file format and whether you want more contrast or less contrast or saturation that's something that you should be making a decision on before you start shooting your video. For checki...

ng focus we'll have the same options to zoom in and out and check focus either automatically or manually. You'll be able to navigate where that focusing point is with your joysticks or the multi controller in the back of the camera. Now the preview button in the front of the camera turns into a new button called indices and what these do is they mark little index marks where perhaps something happened. Let's say you're photographing or you're videotaping a basketball game and every time your team scores or your player scores a basket you could hit that little index and when you get to the videos you can quickly jump to those moments of the video and you can add as many of these as you want. Now this is kind of a Nikon proprietary thing so you may not see this and it may not be an option depending on the other video programs you use. But at least in the very back of the camera you could jump to those marks with just the flip of a dial very, very quickly. Once again, the eye button will be a shortcut to a number of different features in the camera. We'll be talking about most of these as we go through the rest of the camera, as always, but it's a short cut button to frequently used features. We also have the info button which enables us to turn on horizons and grids or turn off that information, depending on what you want to see on the back of the camera. So for focusing we have the same options we had for live view and the same technique for setting them by pressing the AF mode button on the back of the camera and we have single and full time focus. I think single focus is better because the camera is not real good at adjusting focus while it's shooting video. It's a little jumpy. It's a little bit on the slow side. I think you're better off as a technique to focus before the video shot begins, shoot your shot, and then either manually focus, you can pull focus yourself, or then stop recording, refocus on the new shot, and then shoot that shot. We do have the same options for shooting either with face priority, wide, small, or a subject tracking system, which you may wanna do your own tests on to see if they meet your needs. The subject tracking, it sounds pretty cool in my mind, but in actual practice it's a little slow and a little jumpy and is not going to meet many people's needs for focusing quickly on subjects that are moving around. But give it a test yourself. See if it works for you, 'cause if it does that's great. That's gonna save you from to either manually focus or move that focusing point around. We can also move that focusing point with the touch screen so you can choose different areas to focus which might be an easy way for pulling focus in certain types of video shots. In video playback, you're gonna hit the playback button. We have the same garbage system. For playing back your images you'll use the center button to play back and then you'll press up to stop or down to pause and then left and right for forward and reversing through images. So you can pause it and then you can kind of go through one frame at a time if you want. You can jump ten seconds by moving the back dial or you can jump to those different indices or index points by turning the front dial on the camera. Now one of the great things that you can do with this camera is that you can pull a frame of video out of the camera. So what I what I wanna do is I'm gonna shoot a little video here and I'm gonna pan past Drew and then I'm gonna take that and I'm gonna play it back but I'm gonna see if I can pull that particular frame. So I got my camera in the video mode. I'm gonna hit the live view button to activate the video feature. You'll see that we're in a little bit more narrow format, the 16x9 format on this case. And I'm gonna start over here on the right hand side with the cameras on the stand. I'm gonna hit the record button. We got our record light up here and I'm gonna pan on over and there's Drew. Hey. And now I'm gonna stop recording. Okay. So let's go ahead and play back. And hit play. We can hear me talking. We're panning. I'm going to pause it right there. And then I'm gonna hit the information and I am going to save the selected frame. And so that frame has now been saved. And I can continue playing the video if I want. I can jump around if I need to. If I go back to playback I have, let's pull up some more information. No, that's not the information I wanted. Let's go with this screen here. And so this is the video and oh, did I not get that right? I think I may have done that wrong so I'm going to try it again. So let's get back to Drew. There's our wave. Okay so now we're gonna go in and save this selected frame. And, up, did I forget how to do it again? Let's back up. Sorry folks. Let's just try this again. Try this again. I think I needed to press the okay button, which I always forget to do. So there's our frame. We hit info. We go to the selected... Frame. Uh, did I do it this time? I still did not do it. Okay. One last time. I'm forgetting a certain step here. And so I gotta hit the fr- I go to the right and I'm gonna try okay. Oh, I forgot. It's right there for me. See folks? See how dumb I am? I didn't even look at the symbol. There's a scissors on the top and now I'm gonna cut that and say yes. Practiced this last night. I forgot about it. Okay so there's our video and there's our new still frame. Now granted this is at a much reduced resolution compared to the 20 mega pixels because I think we just have this set on HD right now. So it's a smaller frame but we got that one frame there. So yes, you can save the frames. We also have volume up and down with the plus and minus so that kind of changes modes what that does. And what else do we have. The I button as we said for going in and doing some edit to the movies as well. You can clip and you can change the start and the end points as well. I'm not gonna do a demo on that. I would probably mess that up. So that is your video playback functions. So some just general information about video. It is shooting in MPEG-4 files, which is a very common format these days so it should be easy to work with in all your editors and so forth. So the time limit on this for recording is 30 minutes. That's kind of an arbitrary time limit that it's done for (mumble) reasons that we're not gonna get into but you can get up to 30 minutes. Now you do need firmware 1.10 or later in order to get that time limit for shooting in 4K time. When the camera originally came out there was a three minute time limit for shooting 4K and we'll talk more about the firmware and how to get that. But there have been some changes and for some reason virtually every D that I have got my hands on has not been upgraded to the new firmware. And so you'll wanna check your camera. We'll talk more about it as we go through the rest of the class. So we have the preview button for those little indexes, any types of edit points or things that you wanna know. The camera shoots in three different resolutions, HD, which is 1280x720, full HD, the 1920x1080, as well as 4K which we're gonna be talking more about. For those into video they often wanna know the bit rates that the camera shoots. When you are shooting 4K the bit rate goes up quite a bit. If you plan on shooting a lot of 4K I hope you got the XQD option just 'cause it's gonna write a lot faster to those memory cards and it'll be just easier on the system to work with. So those are your bit rates that you're gonna shoot with down there. More information. What else do we have here? So you can shoot a still photo anytime albeit it's gonna be cropped with a 16x9 frame and it's gonna be a JPEG, not a raw image. But it will be relatively full resolution. So when you are shooting in HD or full HD format you are getting the full width of the camera, the HD area indicated there in the red box. When you are shooting 4K there is a 1.5 crop area in the camera and that's because that's where those 38x40, 21x60 pixels are. And so for wide angle purposes, 4K is a little tough to shoot with. You're gonna need really wide angle lenses, the 14 to 24, for instance, if you wanna shoot with a modestly wide angle lens. So great for telephoto work, not so good for wide angle. There is one other option that you can manually go in and crop the HD or the full HD area to a three times crop, and that's just using the 1920x1080 pixels there in the middle. And so if you are a wildlife photographer, that is a great way to shoot with a more telephoto lens you might say, with a narrower field of view, but still getting very good HD quality imaging out of the camera and off the sensor. And so those are our three different areas and there'll be some more information about that as we go through the menu system because to change all of these types of features there is a whole set of controls in the camera under the movie shooting menu and we will be going through that in the second half of this class.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

NikonĀ® D5 Recommended Settings
NkonĀ® D5 Fast Start Class Slides

Ratings and Reviews

Michelle Mealing
 

As usual, John Greengo has provided me with a wealth of information, this time to decide on my next Nikon camera purchase. John has a talent for explaining technical aspects in a simply to understand, yet intelligent, language. I feel very lucky to be able to tap into the knowledge of such experts and thank the day I found out about Creative Live. Unfortunately I had to miss a little part of the live broadcast due to international time differences. I will definitely be watching the class again and again (there's so much content). Thanks John and Creative Live. Looking forward to my next class.

a Creativelive Student
 

Already set the Fn3 button for Voice Memo - easy peasy thanks to this and so many other "buried" ( in the manual ) treasures. Notwithstanding three years with the D4 and one year with the D5, I am substantially more familiar and comfortable with the available tools / features of this amazing camera, Nikon's D5. Thank you, John, for the relaxed, easy-to-follow yet informative, professional instruction - well done!

Dave Safley
 

John Greengo does a fantastic job of going over all the great features of this camera. Yes, there is a lot of information, but the format of the class enabled me to drive right into the features I needed for an upcoming shoot. I am new to Creative Live but this class is showing me the fantastic value of this platform. Happy Shooting!

Student Work

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