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Application and Play Menus

Lesson 34 from: Sony A7 Mark II Series Fast Start

John Greengo

Application and Play Menus

Lesson 34 from: Sony A7 Mark II Series Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

34. Application and Play Menus

Next Lesson: Set-Up Menu: 1-6

Lesson Info

Application and Play Menus

All right, we're into the application setting, and when you go into this on your camera, you're not going to see very much there's going to be a very short application list and if let's go to my camera because I just the other day just for the purpose of being able to have some show and tell, I went and I downloaded some apse, and this is something that is a bit revolutionary for meeks. I'm not a very big apple guy, and so let's get over to the ap section and the application list. And so what an app is it's it's, a program that you can download from the internet onto your camera to add features to your camera? This is also a way for sony to make more money because they can sell you aps, in which that the cameras should probably already be able to do that, but they now force you to buy those additional laps. Where this might get interesting is if other people, third party manufacturers start developing apse that sony didn't come up with, then it might get a little bit more interesting a...

nd so let's go into my application list and you need to go to sony's website, and I'll give you more information about where to go and how to do this. And so I have a few extra things in here now one thing that we all have is a smart remote control and I'm gonna show you how to use this in a little bit but one of the things I went in and I purchased I paid my ten bucks and I bought a time lapse option in here so now I can shoot time lapse in this camera where it did it originally have time lapse built into it and so I can go into this application and it's going to open the app takes a moment now this is information that is stored on the camera and come on takes up a little bit of memory in the camera and there's only so many absent so much information that you can store on the camera and now we're going to get to a whole menu same system where it has different setups for different types of time lapse that I might want to shoot and I've only played with this a little bit so far let me see if I can go down and she was just more of a standardized one and then I can go in here oh come on it's chosen they set up for me I'm I want to I don't want to add it the application there is a limited menu when you are in these applications here and so it is not allowing me to do so I will have to come on exit this application exit. Okay, a little bit slow on this and so we could go back in let's, try this again. Time lapse. We'll have to open the app again and you can go in in this and you can set different shutters or you can set different time links. I did this the other day. Where is it? In here. So right now it's set on one second intervals at two hundred forty shots and I got to hit the garbage can to goto options. We'll hit the garbage can and now we can go in here and we can choose different file formats that we can shoot movies or individual still images. We can shoot different intervals of time. How often do we want a picture every eight seconds? Five four let's set it every three seconds. How many shots do we want to shoot and it's helping us do a little bit of math here we're going to shoot for eleven minutes and we're going to end up with ten seconds of video or we're going to end up with let's go for twenty seconds of video that's going to require twenty three minutes to shoot this and as we go up and change the shots. That's going to change all the math for us and so for anyone who wants to do interval ometer time lapse is this is the way that you could do it in camera without any additional advice her devices and so this is all in the app for time lapse, which is one of their more popular ones. Let me get back to the menu let's exit this application and so that's a fun one to get into. We're not going to go into any more details on how that one it's set, but let me just let you know that there is a touchless shutter app it's currently and it's a beta form right now, which means it's free and so if you want to go get this, you can get it it's free and what it allows you to dio not going to set it up right now, but allows you to set the camera up to take a picture. And rather than pressing the shutter release to take a picture, you would simply just block the eyepiece and basically trigger the sensor display and it would fire the shutter for you. And so you don't have to touch the camera, which I think is a fantastic idea and I'm all foreseen that type of innovation with an app there is also one that I downloaded that was another free one called sound photo and it wasn't what exactly I thought it would trigger a photo on sound, but what it does is it records the sound a little bit before and a little bit after the picture is taken. I don't know if you want to hear everybody saying, geez, not quite as useful, I think the time lapse is a little bit more interesting, but the main one that comes with your camera is the smart, remote control, and so we're going to come back to that let's go back to the keynote because there's additional things that we're gonna look at here. And so the smart, remote embedded is the app that is built into your camera, and this allows you to hook up your phone with your camera and so let's, take a look at a video at how you might want to use this. All right? Sometimes you want to get a camera in an unusual position, and for me, I want to get it down tucked under here, but I haven't already hooked up into the wifi mode, so I can see what the camera's looking at here and now I can direct lips, I can tell right now that there's a block in the way of this, so we're gonna move this. There we go now we got a clean shot so now I want to get caitlin in front of this playground here and I can have her now caitlin don't look at me look at the camera over there and let's have you move over to the left and now lacey's in the shot all right now let's does have you step a little bit closer to the camera there you go. Now if I want to shoot a photo here I could just hit the camera button right there and shoot the photo and it takes the picture it's sending it back to my phone right now let's have you step a couple steps over to the right hand side a little bit more right about there okay a little bit closer to the camera all right that's good and give us a little pose there we go and we shoot that picture excellent. Now we've got it so here's our photo and let's say we like this and we want to send this out well, I'm just going to go jump in to my photos and it will have these photos that we just took and there's our photo of caitlin perfectly framed as we wanted and I didn't have to get myself all cluttered up with sand and dirt by crawling underneath this boardwalk so various will feature in a lot of different ways a lot of fun to use as well okay, so some of the settings on how to get this set up there is our photo. Yeah, kaitlin, nice job. Ok, so something's on setting this up once you are in the wifi mode, the camera is not going to have access to the full menu system, so you're going to have a limited menu system that you can get to to changing other features the cameras so in order to go in and change some of the other functionality of your camera, you would need to exit this mode, go set it and then come back in. But within here, there's going to be some basic camera control changes that you can make in here, and so these applications are called sony play memory camera aps and basically, if you do a google search for sony p m c a, you'll hit their website or you could go to play memories camera, aps, dot com and there's going to be a full list of all these different app, some of them are free, some of them cost five dollars or ten dollars, they're not too much money, and so you do need to create an account with sony, which means giving them your email, your password, and then if you will purchase anything, you're going to need to get a credit card or something you need to download what's called a p m c a downloader this allows your computer to be able to transfer this onto the camera system and that's just going to kind of sit in the background on your computer. It's not something you really need to open up or work with now when I hook this up the other day to download my app, I gotta admit to you it took me a while and it's not that I had a slow internet connection is just that my camera didn't want to connect up to my computer, and so some things that you might want to pay attention to is we haven't got to this in the menu section, but later on in the menu in the set up section is something called a usb connection, and you probably want to have that set to m t p ital! More quickly be able to hook up veer the usb connection on your camera and then there's another thing called the usb l u in setting and you want to set that for single so that it's looking exactly for this one particular signal and so it took me a couple hookups with the usb to actually get the connection. The second time I went through the process, it went much, much quicker and so sometimes it's a little bit easier and I was trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, and it was just the usb connection from the camera to my computer was just just not getting a clean signal or something before I could download the app and have it installed straight on my camera. And so these air, some fun little things, it's an interesting options. I would like to see this grow in the future, it's a little bit limited right now, but I'm sure we'll see more of this in the future. And so the main reason people are gonna want to use this is so that they can use their phone as a remote, so we're going to try a little live demo. We're going to take our cameras, our camera, and I'm going to try to hook this camera up to the phone so that I can use this as a viewing device. So first off let's turn the camera on, and we're going to go in to this application list, let me go back for you so you could see it. We're going to go into the menu on the application list, we're going to click on that, and we're going to go to the smart, remote control and we're going to activate this app. On the camera and it's going to turn on and it's going to start sending a signal out of the camera. Now we need to go to my phone and turn on my wifi and because I've been doing a class here I mean get this set here now I need to make sure that my airplane mode is turned off and I need to go into the wifi and I need to find the wifi for this camera now I've already connected up just to test to make sure it works right you might see it listed someplace else, but it says seven r m too that's this camera and so that's the one I'm going to have selected here next I need to open the camera app which I have stored in my wifi camera system right here and it's called play memories down here so I'm going to click that and now it's starting to communicate and we should start seeing some action here pretty soon so now that looks pretty good we should see the image over here and there we go so this is a live image and I can turn it like this on we can see it right there and so what I could do is I could come around and if I want to have myself in the photo, I can do this and let's see if I can strike caitlin's pose like that and maybe I was a little off on that one and so now it will send the image back to my phone right here it looks like a didn't quite time that quite right but I can take a look at this photo here I could email facebook or send that out be careful about where I point that phone on as as need be and so there are very few things that we can adjust on this remote app when it comes to shutter speeds and apertures there's a few little controls that we have let me see if I can show you so we do see r shutter speed aperture and eso information we can take photos right down here we can go into our tools and we can look around and play around with a few things it's kind of fetching that image right now let's go back press the tools we can go in here and we can play around with some of the op shins on our camera. It is a little bit limited but for just getting in the shot forgetting the cameron unusual position it's really nice to be able to use your phone as a remote viewing device it's larger and obviously much more portable so just a quick little bit on wifi and so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go ahead and just exit out of this and so get the menu button and exit that application and I'm gonna turn my phone off all right set that back so that's doing a little bit of wifi action all right, time to continue on where are we going next? There's little introduction that just tells you a little bit about what these applications were doing there's not much information in there and then we're over into the playback menu, so these are features and controls that control the playback of your images there's really not a lot to talk about in here, but we'll run through it quickly. You can delete individual photos, you can delete groups of photos it's my preference when you are done shooting with a memory card to reform at the memory card that's going to delete the images and all the other data directory. We'll talk about that as we get further into this, but if you did want to delete a particular image, this is one way of doing it. The view mode on this camera allows you to look at different folders of information by date, by types of photos that you shot, whether they're movies or their stills most of the time, just date view will hold all the photos of one particular date in one folder not a lot of reason to change this for most people the image index on the camera when you used the thumbnail button to back up to seymour images, you can either have it show nine or twenty five images and that's just a personal preference. Nine image is kind of the normal standard. Change it if you want rotating your images is kind of interesting. Most cameras are set to a manual rotate, which means that they are I'm going to be shown to you in the format that you actually shot them, so if you shoot a vertical image it's going to rotate it for you? Well, it's actually what's doing is it's trying to rotate all the images so that they look good on a tv playback. So if you're going to hook your camera to a tv and do a slide show, people don't have to turn their head sideways to see what you shot for the still photographer who's not doing a tv slideshow I normally recommend off on most cameras that way you were using the maximum image area on the back of the camera to see your image, but this camera has a new feature, which I like even more, which is an auto mode, which means that it will tilt and turn the image for whatever way you happen to be holding the camera, which is really convenient. And let's, go ahead and do a quick demo here with this camera and so let's go ahead and turn the camera on that always helps we're gonna have it in the programme mode we'll shoot a horizontal image, we'll shoot a vertical image will play back these images and I probably don't let's see do I have it? I probably don't even have it in auto let's check you fight night wherein my playback I need to get to the right areas playback image display rotation I need to change this to auto now it should fix this problem play back an image it's, right? If I flip the camera, it flips for me if I go to the horizontal image, it flips for me and so the auto mode is always flipping the image to whatever makes sense. The only time this doesn't work out is if you're shooting straight down or straight up because in the camera can't tell which side is up and so auto, I think works really good for this system. You can put the camera into a slide show mode and show it on a tv. I'm not going to get into all the particulars, but you can choose which images and how long they're shown and so forth if you need to manually rotate your image is for the slide show, you can do that it's just kind of a go to an individual image and tell it to rotate on the camera, and this is simply for slideshow reasons page two in playback, we can enlarge an image, which doesn't seem to be something that you would normally want to do, but in this case, what it's going to do is it's just going to magnify an image and playback? You can put a protection on an image which would prevent it from getting deleted or accidentally deleted. This doesn't truly protect it from being reformatted on the memory card by this camera or other cameras or other machines, and so it's a very, very light level of protection going on on the on the devices, you can work with this camera and connected directly upto a printer in order to get prince, I would highly recommend going through a computer because you'll be able to make more specific changes to the your photos and really get him truly fit better with better color and cropping and so forth. But if you want to do this, you can hook it up. It does have the right protocol and there's a whole bunch of features that we're not going to go into about specifying which prince what size and how many prints you want to make from it. One of the options that you can do with the a seven mark to is that you can choose to show images on a four k screen. So if you have a fork, a tv screen, you can set this up to playback. Still images and make use of the four k resolution of your tv.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Sony® A7II Info and Menu List
Sony® A7RII info and Menu List
Sony® A7SII Info and Menu List

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

INCREDIBLE Class! I couldn't find anything on the internet that truly explained this camera, explained what it can and can't do and what accessories would work with it. I have had my Sony A7II for awhile now, but was so overwhelmed by it, I rarely even took it out of its case. It was just easier to use my Canon 5D III. After this class, I am so excited to finally practice with and use my Sony. John is an incredible teacher. He is thorough, professional, fun and knowledgeable! Buying this class was the best investment!!! I feel like I just got the gift of a new camera because I can finally use my Sony!!! Thanks John and Thanks Creative Live!!!

Enrique Vega es
 

I stored my Sony A7II for more than a year since I've been Canon's user for 7 years and I felt unsure of taking this new camera which implied a different menu system, different functions, a little bit intimidating. Finally, I took a bit of valor, put my camera next to the computer monitor for then start watching this guide and I spent a great time actually. I'm amazed at how helpful and clear is the sequence of the chapters. It was enough to get to chapter ten to know all the basic controls and start taking pictures with an equivalent confidence of my good old Canon, or even better since in the chapter 8th I learned how accurate and easy to use is the focusing system, either, manual or auto (For stills I've always used manual focusing). Very informative, enjoyable and now I became a new fan of the mirrorless cameras, at the point that I'm considering to buy another two :D

VeraInAlbania
 

John is an excellent teacher! In fact his Fundamentals of Digital Photography 2014 was the first ever class I watched on CreativeLive, and since then I'm in love with his teaching style as well as with CreativeLive! I bought my Sony A7II in March 2015 and when I found out that John is giving a class on it I was very excited! As I expected I learnt many secrets about my camera which I had been using for 9 months already. For example about the option of focusing on the eyes, setting the buttons, making panoramas etc. The camera is still smarter than me I must admit. I am enjoying my Sony even more now since after the class I feel much more confident. Thank you John and CreativeLive for such an opportunity! I would recommend to everyone who has a Sony a7II camera and the other cameras in this line to watch this class. It's a concentrate of useful information, very detailed and to the point. I spent two days just watching the class and practicing new knowledge with my camera straight away. I had to postpone all the other life chores. And I would be ready to watch the class again after some time as it's a professional camera which needs a lot of practice!

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