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Setup Menu

Lesson 17 from: Sony A6300 Fast Start

John Greengo

Setup Menu

Lesson 17 from: Sony A6300 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

17. Setup Menu

Next Lesson: Camera Operation

Lesson Info

Setup Menu

Okay, we're onto the Playback tab, which means we're dealing with the Playback functions of the camera, so you can delete multiple images, there's also a trashcan on the back of the camera, which is a little bit faster and easier for deleting; this works better if you're going to delete a lot of individual images, but I don't know that I would want to do that, it sometimes can be bad, and can cause communication problems with the card, better to reformat the card, which we'll see in a little bit. On the View Mode, you can choose which type of folders you are looking at, and the folder setup on this camera is a little bit different, and the Date View is a pretty good general one, if you need to change it, you can, but that's by far the way that most people are going to keep their camera set at, Image Index, when you zoom out, how many images do you want to see? 12 images or 30 images, by pressing that thumbnail button; if you want to see more, you can set it up at 30, but I think it's f...

ine for most people at 12, Display Rotation, in the Manual mode, it's good for anyone who's going to be doing TV playbacks, because it always keeps a vertical set, so that you can see them appropriately on a TV, now traditionally, I've been recommending people turn this off, so that you get the maximum size image in the camera, so even if you shoot a vertical image, you will get the maximum image size, you may need to turn the camera vertically to see it, but the new best option is one called Auto, and it will automatically flip the picture, according to how you are holding the camera at that time. Now, it may not work if you're in an unusual position, like you're holding it flat in your lap, but if you're holding it out in front of you, it'll automatically rotate to give you an image that you can easily see, so Auto, for most people, I can see potentially changing it to off with some funky situations. You can hook the camera up to a TV, or other device, to do a Slide Show, we can Rotate images, if they're not comfortable for viewing, because they're turned sideways, because they are vertical; you can go in and manually, individually choose photographs to be rotated, page two in Playback, we can Enlarge an image, this is just simply magnifying in and zooming in, which really isn't a big deal, we can Protect images, which protect them from being deleted, but does not protect them from being reformatted, so it's a very light level of protection. If you do want to hook your camera up to a printer, you can print directly from the camera, you would go in here to specify which printer you're using, how many prints, what size they are, things like that, and we're onto our last tab, that wasn't too bad, was it folks? Okay, so Setup menu, a lot of things that you're only going to touch once as we go through the camera; adjusting the monitor brightness in the back, you're generally going to want to have this set right in the middle, if you're trying to share images with people under bright lighting conditions, you may need to bump this up to make it more easy to see under those bright lighting conditions; the Viewfinder Brightness, normally, you're going to set this right in the middle, I prefer to keep this in manual, I don't want to have it automatically getting brighter and darker, with other light that's kind of leaking around; I like to use that to judge exposure, and you don't want it in the auto mode if you're judging exposure by it. If the color isn't right for the Viewfinder, you can change the finder color temperature, so normally, you would never need to do this, but if you think the colors are a little bit wacky, you can correct for them, alright, so earlier, we were talking about the S-Log system, so just by saying S-Log, there are certain people's ears that point up, and they start paying attention, because that's serious video stuff. So, in the S-Log video, it shoots with a very low contrast image, like the image on screen, here, and the problem with that, is when you are composing and shooting your images, your video, everything looks really flat, and it's hard to see what it normally looks like; well, what Gamma Display Assistant does, is it goes in, and it corrects for this very flat tone, but only in the Viewfinder; this is not the image you're recording, you're recording a very flat image that you're going to color grade later, and this will do it either for S-Log2, or it can automatically do it for whatever mode that you happen to be in. Volume Settings, so if you are playing a movie back, how loud is the sound on the side of the camera, Audio signals; the camera beeps when it's in focus, and this is kind of nice conformation that you have achieved proper focus, but it's also a little annoying to your subjects and your fellow photographers and everybody else around you, kind of like a ringing phone is, so this is something that you can turn off by just turning this signal off, and I would highly recommend doing that, much appreciated by the rest of the community. Sony used to use a Tile Menu for its menu system, and if anyone has one of the older Sony cameras, and they got used to it, and they want to go back to the old menu system, they can, but if you're not used to it, I would stick with the Standard Menu, because that's the direction they're going, in the future; when you turn the Mode Dial on the top of the camera, there'll be a little guide on the back of the camera that explains and shows to you, what that mode is all about, and as you are new to photography and still learning, this can be a little bit of helpful advice; once you get used to it, and you know what you're doing, you want to say, get out of here, I don't want this information, I already know what I'm doing, I don't need to look at this, there's other things that I want to be looking at on the back of the camera. So once you get used to it, and you've played around with it a little bit, then you can turn it off; Delete confirmation, alright, this has to do with how many button presses does it take to delete an image? And one of my little gripes with most cameras, is that when you hit the delete button, the camera assumes that you hit that button by accident, and you have to therefore, confirm that you actually wanted to hit the button, and then you would delete the photo, so it takes three button presses to delete any particular photo, and I think that's a little bit cumbersome, so if you put "Delete" first, it assumes when you press delete, you meant delete, and all you have to do is press once more to delete the photo, so it's two steps to delete, rather than three steps. Next up is our display quality, and this is going to have to do with the overall quality of the Viewfinder, and I would probably set this on high, just so that it's a little higher quality Viewfinder, it may wear the battery down just a little bit; I don't have any confirmation as to how much it's going to wear the battery down, but it's possible that by putting this on Standard, it would give you a little bit more battery life, but in most cases, I would prefer to have a little bit higher quality view through the Viewfinder. How quickly do you want the camera to shut down before it goes into a sleep mode? The faster time will obviously conserve more battery power, a longer time might be convenient for when you are doing certain types of shoot, so one minute is kind of the standard, you can adjust it as need be from there; page three, depending on what part of the world you live in, you will either be using NTSC or PAL systems; your camera is probably already adjusted for the country that you live in, because that's where the camera got imported to, but if you are traveling to other countries, and you want to shoot video that works on their systems, you can change that in camera. There is a Cleaning Mode that automatically happens when you turn the camera on and off, but if you want to get in and do it yourself, you can do it yourself, I would encourage everyone that has an interchangeable lens camera, to have one of these step one blower brushes, that's not the name of it, that's the process, it's the first step in there; there's a number of these little air blower brushes, do not use the canned, compressed air, that can damage your sensor, because it may have a propellant in it, so the second step that not everyone is going to feel comfortable with, is using some sort of swab and liquid system, and there's a variety of other systems that are in general, the idea is to sweep clean the sensor for any problems that may be on it. So if there's a little bit of dust specs on it, you put a couple drops of alcohol on the cleaning cloth, and then you would wipe across with a swab, right there, and that is something that not everyone is going to feel comfortable with; if you don't feel comfortable with you doing that, then you're going to have to send it in for repair, if there's something really sticky on the sensor, that just won't come off. Demo Mode is for camera stores, so we don't need to worry about that one, TC/UB Settings, this is for our video shooters, once again, this is for time code and user bit settings, and you can go in here and have some very specific control in the video function of how the time code is running, and the numbers are running, you could have, for instance, two, different cameras running with constant times, and you would film the back of the cameras, and you would see exactly how their frames are matching up if you're doing multi camera shoots at the same time. So this is something that is strictly for the video shooters out there; Remote Ctrl, if you're going to be using the wireless remote control, you want to turn on the remote signal receiving powers of the camera, normally, you wouldn't, because that's going to waste battery power unless you are specifically needing it for when you are using that remote. Alrighty, onto page four, HDMI Settings, so once again, for shooting video, you can go in and control a number of the HDMI Settings, this is for hooking it up to an HDTV set, remember there is an HD plug on the side of it, and this is so that it can communicate with the TV, properly, depending on what type of device that you are putting it to, so if you want to shoot video, one of the options is recording video on an external device, so if you do want to do that, you can come into the 4K Output Select, and go through the various options to make sure that it's optimized for your device that you are using. For the USB Connection, we talked about this in the Sony PlayStation apps, remember the apps? You need to download, you need to connect your camera up to your computer, you're going to need to hook up the USB Connection on it, and that's where, I think you wanted to have it, and I think the MTP mode, I have to double check on that, though, but you may need to adjust this, depending on what type of computer you have, and how it's connecting and what you're doing; are you downloading new software into the camera? Are you downloading your images from your camera to your computer? You may need to make this connection for that to be visible to one another; the LUN Setting is the logical unit number, and this, once again, is if you are using the USB Connection, you may need to set this to Single, I think if you are downloading new firmware for it, so that it understands where the information is supposed to be going, and once again, it's just to clarify information when connecting up with a USB cord, to your computer. USB Power Supply, so when you plug your camera into your computer, and let's say you have a laptop, a lot of us have laptops, well, this is what you would do for downloading your images, potentially, but it's also a way to power your camera, so your computer will power up your camera's battery, which is great, unless you need power on your computer, which it's going to drain the computer power. Let's say you have a computer that is at 10% power, and you just want to download or look at some photos, and you want to have it plugged into your camera to download photos, but not power your camera; you can turn this off, so that your computer does not power your camera, normally, you're going to want to leave it turned on, because you're going to want to power the camera up, because clearly, cameras are way more important than computers, but it's just for those times when you need that computer to work. Alright, you can choose different languages for the menu system, page five, we have our time and date stamp, that will have in here, choosing different areas, so if you travel to different time zones, or take a vacation, you may want to check that one; Copyright Information allows you to go in and add information about who you are, and who the copyright of the photos, taken with this camera, belong to, and this is a great way, it's a very light level of security of putting your name on your camera. If my camera was stolen, and the police picked it up outside, and I said, "that's my camera," and they said, "well, how do I know it's your camera?" I go, "well, go in here, it's going to have my name on it, "because I'm the copyright owner, I'm the owner "of this camera," now this is something that anyone else can write over, it's just something that most people don't know about in cameras. Formatting the memory card, so formatting the memory card is good, because it clears off a lot of the- well, it deletes all the photos, and it deletes all the directory files and the empty folders, now, as you can see, in this illustration, here, Sony uses a rather complicated system for storing their images, and the key thing that you need to know about this, is that still photographs are in one folder, and movies are in a completely different folder, so if you have an assistant, or if you're trying to look for your own movies, they're not stored with your still photos, you need to go look in the PRIVATE folder, MP_ROOT folder, CLIP folder, and this may vary, according to the types of files that you shoot; you may see some different names on yours. So what reformatting does, once you have downloaded all your movies and all your still photos, is it deletes all the folders and all the files, and it starts fresh, and this is something that you should do on a regular basis, ideally, every time you go out and shoot. The File Number is the number that your camera gives to each file that you shoot with the camera; it starts at 0001 and counts up from there, and it goes up to 10,000 and then it counts over again, and if you wanted it to reset down to zero, right now, you could go into Reset, but most people are just going to leave this on Series, so that they don't have a lot of photos with the same file number, and this is something that you should probably be changing in your computer, after you have downloaded your images. If you want, you can go in, and adjust the name that your files are given; to start with, they are just given a really basic number, like P123, and if you want to go in and change it to a four letter code, or a three letter code, depending on whether you're shooting sRGB or Adobe RGB color, you can change those into your initials, for instance. You could choose different folders, so you could have multiple folders that you are recording to, so for instance, if you had a business, you are doing real estate business, and you wanted to take photos of houses there, but you also have a personal folder where you take pictures of your family, you can have those photos that you take, stored in different folders, now personally, I would probably rather have separate memory cards, so everything is really separated, but if you just had one memory card, you could separate things into different folders; now, the nest setting down will allow you to create different folders, and name them as you wish, so we'll have the option of either a Standard Form, or you can do them in a Date Form, as well. Potentially, if there is a communication problem on your camera, it may not want to read the photos that you have on there, this is kind of a built-in, self diagnostic system that it has, to repair files that may have been taken on another camera, or come from a computer, or for some reason it just has a problem reading it; I don't know what it's doing inside, but it's trying to fix the problem, whatever it happens to be. Display Media Information will tell us how many images are left on that memory card, or how much recording time is left on that card; alright, final page, Version number, this tells us the firmware that the camera is currently running, and most cameras, in the lifespan of that camera, will go through a few upgrades in the software that runs the camera, so right now, we're still at early versions of this camera, 1.0, but at some point, I have no doubt that they're going to find a bug, or a new feature they want to add, and they're going to come out with version 1.1, and in order to get that new software, what you will need to do, is you will need to go to Sony.com, you will look under Support, and their Drivers, and remember, this is where you need the official name of the camera, the ILCE-6300, look that up on the internet, go to Sony's website, find the firmware for it, download the firmware, take that firmware, put it on a memory card, and then take that memory card and put it in your camera, come in here to Version, and your camera will see that new firmware is on that memory card, and it will upload the new firmware to your camera; it usually takes a couple of minutes to do so. Alright, if you have not been paying attention for the last two hours of this class, and you've just been goofing around, pressing buttons on your camera, you might want to go through a Setting Reset, and what Setting Reset does, is it's going to reset everything in the first camera setting section of this camera; now, if you want to do Initialize, it is a full, factory reset, it resets the language, the time, the date, everything in the menu system, so if you are perhaps, selling your camera, and you want to get everything off of there, then you would go through an Initialize to get it back to the factory default settings, and folks, we have finished with the menu system, check in real quickly to see if there's any questions we want to handle now, before moving forward, but as I say, a lot of stuff in the menu, but once you get it tweaked, you're not going to have to come back very often. Do you have to be in JPEG mode to transfer those images out, wi-fi? Wi-fi images, you don't have to be in JPEG, but you will get JPEG images on your phone, so you could be shooting raw, the camera will convert them to JPEG, and I believe they reduce the size of the file, so that they're more easily handled over wi-fi, because they know that they're not going to be used in the big scope of things. John, can you zoom the camera in wi-fi mode? Yes, you can; I failed to demonstrate that particular aspect, it will depend on the lens that you have on this retractable lens, which does have the powered zoom, there is a little zoom setting on it, but it won't work on all lenses. Okay, thank you. Alright, John, we have a couple questions from the folks at home, I have one from Rifat, says, does the camera automatically create a new folder for each day? No, not for each day, no; when you do zoom back, if you're in the playback mode, and you zoom back, there will be a calendar view, so it knows what day you shot them, but they're not physically in a different folder. Okay, and a question from Ron Croft, when you were showing us the wi-fi capabilities, can an iPad be used, as well as an iPhone to control the camera and download files? As long as you can download the app, yes.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Sony A6300 Fast Start Recommeded Settings

Ratings and Reviews

Cassandra Mcd
 

This was so much better than having to read a manual that often times is not helpful in terms of pointing out tips on when would be the best time times to use a particular function. Love the graphics, the recommendations provided for both new and advanced users and mostly I love the fact that I can go back and watch different segments as I get more use to shooting with this camera. Great Course and I'm really glad I bought it! Thanks John!

Priscilla Read
 

I'm still working my way through the lessons, trying out everything as I go. I like how John shows everything with great visuals and demos. Also like that he explains when to use the various options available on the camera. Really great! Thanks!

a Creativelive Student
 

Great overview of this cool camera, with some handy hints and tips from an accomplished instructor. A lot of info!

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