All language subtitles for Sony A7 IV Tutorial Training Video Overview Beginners Users Guide A74 A7IV.eng(transcribed).eng(transcribed)

hi my name is michael andrew and i'm

about to give you a free tutorial on the

awesome sony a74

if you are an experienced photographer

and you are looking for a specific topic

feel free to take advantage of the table

of contents that we've built we spent a

lot of time putting this together using

the feature of control f or command f

type in the keyword that you're

interested in it should highlight in the

table of contents and you can click on

the time marker it'll take you directly

to that lesson now if this is your first

real camera or you're new to photography

i have to give you a word of warning

this video is going to cover the basic

operations and controls of the sony a74

it's very important to know which button

does what and why you would want to do

it

that said this is not going to be enough

for you to become a consistently great

photographer sure you can go out and get

lucky but you we really want to

understand what makes a great image and

there's many elements to this talking

about things like the photography basics

or lighting or composition

using a strobe and then when you get

into different types of shooting

the

tactics and the philosophies change

depending on whether you're doing sports

shooting or portrait photography or

video and i say this because we are

putting together me and my team

an awesome sony a74 crash course it goes

hand in hand with this video if it's not

out yet find the link below it'll take

you to my blog you can leave your name

and your email address and we will

notify you as soon as it's ready

that also comes with a 30

discount another resource you should

definitely check out is my sony a74

facebook group this facebook group is

dedicated to the sony a74 only we only

want positive vibes

learning helping each other the link is

in the description we have a ton of

information to cover so let's get

started right now

let's talk about some of the basic

setups for your sony a74 and then we'll

get into the buttons and the controls

you will notice that the cap when it

comes to the camera there's a little

tick mark here on the side this is an

alignment mark and that alignment mark

goes with this little white dot

underneath now there is no lock for the

cap but you can see we have this little

button here right where our right ring

finger would rest so as we grip the

camera if you just slip your right ring

finger there i would recommend making

this second nature so you can grip the

camera release a lens rotate it off and

with your other hand you would put the

other lens on we'll be talking about

keeping your sensor clean in just a

second but releasing a lens should

become second nature like this

there's the beautiful sensor and what

you're going to notice is

every sony lens should have a white

alignment mark i would recommend making

this second nature so you can grip the

camera release a lens rotate it off and

with your other hand you would put the

other lens on we'll be talking about

keeping your sensor clean in just a

second lens is locked so you won't be

able to remove it unless you push this

button down here something i want to

point out about lenses is that if you

look underneath the cap you should be

able to see the lens

thread size in this case it's 55

millimeters what that refers to is the

diameter for the threading of the lenses

and you'll need to know this size

for any filters that you're putting onto

your lens so that's how you figure out

at any time just look at the cap we also

have this lens hood

and lens hoods are great when i first

started shooting i didn't really use

them that much but they offer glare

protection and they also have alignment

marks there's a little red tick up here

it's very hard to see you see we've got

a dot and a tick mark here

so

the way this works is i'm going to get

this long red mark i'm going to line it

up with a dot on the lens and do the

same thing and rotate it until it clicks

another side note is if you're looking

for impact protection there's a lot of

good data that shows that lens hoods are

far better in terms of impact protection

if you were to drop your camera and it

was to hit the lens this is going to

absorb most of it there's better

protection here than a uv filter

as a uv manufacturer i should be trying

to sell you uv filters right the lens

hood is is far better for impact

protection another common practice is to

take your body cap and your lens cap and

just put them together put them in a

place in your camera bag where you

always know where they are because these

are very easy to lose

i get a ton of questions about tripods

and tripod heads and i just wanted to

show this to you real quick

i love bogan manfrotto ball heads but

the way this works is there's something

called a shoe that goes on the bottom of

the camera now different manufacturers

have different shoes but i prefer this

one by bogan manfrotto i think it's

called the m200 it has a little lip here

and when i engage this into the clamp

and push it down it locks you have to

make sure it locks

double confirm that pull on it before

you let it go but the ball head is

basically a metal ball attached to the

camera

that will allow me to position or orient

the camera in any direction and i use

these for still shooting exclusively

when i go to video shooting i use a

different head that i can attach onto

the tripod

it's a fluid motion head that you can

pan left to right it's a different style

of shooting near the end of this video

we will cover accessories i will put

links to michael's bag which is on my

website which has tons of different

types of gear that i recommend i really

like the carbon fiber legs they're

expensive they're about four hundred

dollars from bogan manfrotto this ball

head is discontinued but the current one

they have is extremely sturdy i just

bought one for a friend and i'll put

those links also on michael's gear bag

real quick when we're talking about

batteries you probably noticed when you

got your camera there was not a battery

charger the way this works is we plugged

the usbc cable to charge directly in

camera

sony used to send out chargers back in

the day but now what i would recommend

is getting a third-party charger this is

just a generic brand i found on amazon

and i love it why because i can charge

two batteries at a time now it's great

that we can charge the battery in camera

but there's going to be times where

you're going to have an extra battery

and you want to be shooting you don't be

charging

so 25 30 bucks something like that they

work great and another thing i want to

point out is that every battery has a

set of pins here and you're just

thinking pins out pins towards the grip

and the inside so this is the

orientation

you're going to push it in until you

hear a click there's a blue release

switch here to take it out then when we

close the latch we need to push this

little switch over to lock it

i would also definitely recommend

sticking with the sony branded batteries

there are counterfeits out there so make

sure you get it from a seller that has a

good reputation i personally stay away

from the third party brands because

there's sometimes there's problems with

them or they don't work as well just

spend the extra money on a good sony

battery every shooter i believe should

have two batteries if you're doing any

pro work or production work then

obviously you might have four or five

six or more let's talk about memory

cards real quick something you'll notice

is that we have some diagrams on the

inside this is slot one down here it

says slot two but you'll also notice it

says cf express a

and in a very interesting feature that i

haven't seen on many cameras is this is

a dual card slot meaning it can hold two

different kinds of memory cards

the cf express a is not compatible with

cf express b you have to buy it

specifically cfa and they are very

expensive some questions i get is why

would you want a cf express a card is

because they are lightning fast you're

buying it for speed which really unlocks

capabilities in terms of video and

buffer clearance so if you're doing a

lot of sport shooting you want to clear

that buffer quickly

or if you need a higher data rate for

certain types of video shooting

then you are going to want to get a cfa

card and i will be demonstrating that

card and some of its capabilities on the

crash course the advanced crash course

for those of you that get it

but you'll notice the bottom slot is

just an sd card so something to keep in

mind is that there are actually

different kinds of sd cards

if you rotate them and you look on the

back you'll see that i have one card

that has two sets of pins and another

card that has a single set of pins

but we look from the front they look

almost exactly the same with the

exception of the memory they hold right

well when we look a little bit closer

there's some really important things

here we have a data rate this is the

uhs2 card this is the uhs1 card

the data rates are different this is 170

this is 300 it's a little worn

i highly recommend the sandisk extreme

pros absolutely this is the number one

brand that i personally buy what you are

looking for the minimum requirement you

will see there's a little u in a 3 here

critically important we have that on

both cards

that class u3 symbol is the minimum

requirement for sustained 4k video

shooting so if you're going to do any

kind of video shooting in 4k your memory

card will have to have that symbol i

can't tell you how many emails that i

get from new users who are saying that

they can only record a few seconds of

video

this is always the problem they find a

memory card in their desk and they put

in their camera and it's not a high

performance card so absolutely make sure

that you get a high performance card

that says u3

again sandisk extreme pros

this card i believe it's it's not that

much i think it's less than 30 bucks if

you're on a budget go with the 64

gigabyte if you have more money i would

recommend the 128 gigabyte

class 2 cards they are faster they clear

the buffer a little bit faster something

else you're going to notice if you look

right here we have a roman numeral 2

and over here we have a roman numeral

one i know it's kind of hard to see

but this is how subtle these differences

are on these cards

be sure to check the description when

you are buying the card to make sure if

you want the class to

get the class 2 read in the description

versus the class 1 but we even get a

diagram in terms of how to put them into

the camera

with the notch down

so i'm going to put this guy in

let's do this one i'm going to put this

guy in kind of weird on the dual card

slot this is going to go towards the

camera the pins will

and so we can put both of them in at the

same time like this and you're going to

push until you hear a click

and to remove it you're going to push in

again and pull it out

i would say be careful to make sure it

goes in straight you can damage the

cards and another thing is you'll notice

there's a little switch here

that will lock the card if you don't

want to have anything written onto it

that happens too sometimes people

accidentally bump those but for now

we're just going to start off with this

one card

let's go over all of the external

buttons and controls so you know what

i'm talking about as we move through the

video i would highly recommend getting

your camera having it in hand and

following along obviously we have the

power switch which rotates from left to

right and there's a little indicator

here on the switch kind of hard to see

the power switch also hosts the shutter

button which you're going to be using

quite a bit now what i want you to do is

to push the shutter button down and feel

like there's a springy resistance

and push down all the way it takes a

picture

so the halfway depression is how we

engage our cameras focusing systems if

we are using this button for focusing

there's some different techniques i'll

show you later if you want to move it to

back button for example but in the

beginning i think it's good that

everybody learns to focus just touch it

down

feel that spongy resistance push it down

all the way and it takes a picture this

is going to be very useful for a

technique called recomposing that i'll

demonstrate a little bit later just in

front of the power switch and the

shutter button we have the front control

wheel you're going to be using this to

change your exposure settings that i'll

demonstrate a little bit later

kind of hard to see but right here we

have an auto focus assist lamp which

means if we're shooting in a very dark

situation you will see this light up

it'll try to give us a little

illumination to have something to focus

against

it will also

flash when we are using a timer

we've already covered the lens release

down here

in the front of the camera we have a

switch that has a little button on it if

you push you can rotate this to the left

and right and if you do not push it will

remain locked this deals with our

cameras shooting mode talking about the

difference between stills shooting

and video recording and i'll show you

this in the back in just a second

sometimes i get questions from from

users is what is this little icon or

symbol here this symbol tells us the

exact position of our sensor so if you

wanted to measure the distance between

your sensor and an object this is how

you would do it

taking a look at the top down view over

here we have the mode dial we'll be

covering this in a later lesson on this

video

and then you'll notice over here we have

the

left rear control wheel and the right

rear control wheel and you'll notice

that the right rear control wheel has a

little post in it that we can push up

and down this will lock this dial to

prevent it from turning

now default when you get the camera if

you are shooting in manual mode the

front control wheel will be your

aperture

the rear left control wheel will be your

shutter speed now the right rear control

wheel will change something called

exposure compensation when we are on the

p a or s modes don't worry about those

terms we'll cover them a little bit

later

you'll notice that we have a red circle

this is the video record button which

allows us to start and stop video

recording and you'll also see that we

have some buttons with the letter c in

front of them

c stands for

customizable and we can customize all

these buttons to do different things i'm

just explaining what the default is

c2 as the default will allow us to

choose different focusing clusters so

right here we have our

hotshoe which is where we will connect

different types of accessories but on

most cameras this is for

an external flash which will add tons of

light to your shooting environment we

cover

a very affordable flash i recommend the

godox tt685

s when you're first getting started

simply because they're affordable and

sometimes you may not know how serious

you want to get it's a good flash i

think they run about 120 bucks and the

transmitter is like 70 bucks but i cover

the basics of flash use on the crash

course and

i always seem to lose these these are

the hot shoe protectors if you're not

using your hot shoe it makes sense just

to protect it again from the rear view

this is our shooting mode we have a

stills camera we have a video camera we

also have something called snq which is

slow and quick it's a video shooting

mode we'll cover a lot of that on the

crash course those video shooting

techniques but for now we're going to

leave it on the photo shooting mode

you'll also notice that the camera's

falling asleep if i touch a shutter

button it'll wake back up taking a look

at some of these back controls over here

we have a c3 customizable three default

this is going to be your focusing modes

we'll talk about that in the focusing

lesson

we have our menu which refers to our

deep menu lots of information in here

we'll be covering in the second half of

the video

we have our c1 button which default is

going to be white balance

and you'll also notice down here the

trash can icon has the letters c4 next

to it which is a customizable button

when we are shooting so we can customize

this in different ways

so obviously these buttons here on the

bottom we have play to play an image and

then when an image is being played if we

wanted to delete it we would just select

delete i kind of prefer to just reformat

my memory cards i really don't do a lot

of deleting from the back of the camera

unless i know it's really bad let's talk

about some of these other very important

controls so right next to where our

right thumb would rest we have the af on

which is for back button focusing the

preferred shooting method for most

professional sport shooters that i know

they prefer to focus using this instead

of the shutter button

you will also notice that there is a

little magnification plus icon so if we

are playing an image and we want to zoom

in we can zoom in this way tap the

shutter button to get back to shooting

ael stands for auto exposure lock which

is going to lock our exposure settings

in the p

a or s mode

it doesn't really apply to manual

because manual is exposure locked all

the time it's basically what it is but

you'll also notice up here we have this

little grid up pattern

which will be useful to see multiple

images if you want to see stacks of

images

during your playback

so in a playback mode if we're playing

an image and we want to see the stacks

here they are if we push it again now we

can navigate by different sets of dates

or types of files pretty cool using the

joystick right so the joystick is super

useful for navigating menus you can also

use it to change where your focusing

square is we're in an auto focusing mode

now so i'm going to change this to

let's say

a spot focus and now you can see it's

kind of hard to see but you can see this

little white box that i'm moving around

very useful and comes in handy at

certain times

this directional pad here actually has

multiple controls in it it is a rotating

wheel so you can see i rotate this wheel

to the left or right

and i can also push on the wheel

to access some of these features

and i can also push in the center the

center is like a set or an enter button

on a computer when you want to

accept something or select that menu

item

each direction has a different icon so

very important here

on sony cameras it's the fault iso

control is pushing to the right and now

we can rotate up and down to change our

iso setting

if we want to change the display we

would push up and toggle through the

different displays i'll be explaining

all this in just a minute

if we want to access our

drive modes we will push to the left

the drive modes are what the camera does

after we push the shutter button down

all the way whether it's a burst or a

timer

we're talking about those too most of

these controls are customizable which is

something that's great about sony

cameras you may get into a certain

shooting style and prefer

you know your exposure controls in

different places

for the sake of simplicity in this video

we're going to stick with the default

a very important button here is the fn

button which pulls up the function menu

when you're shooting

so when you're shooting this is

represented with 12 boxes also

customizable we can customize these in

different ways but it allows us to

access the secondary and the tertiary

controls of the camera you know the

features that you might not change that

much for example like the metering mode

or you know

your record settings quality settings if

you want a quick access to that

now there is another fn screen which can

be accessed by pushing up on the display

button

until we get to this black screen i just

call it the black screen and we can

access these items here by pushing the

fn button and scrolling over each of

them

we'll be talking about this a little bit

later

something i would strongly recommend is

to get into the habit of toggling

through

your different displays by pushing up on

the up button just practice this we

sometimes get emails or comments from

people saying hey i got this black

screen how do i get out of it you're

going to push up on your directional pad

another cool thing i need to point out

is this little infrared device right

here just below the viewfinder the

viewfinder is essentially a tv

but this little switch is that when you

get a thumb or a finger or your face in

front of the switch it's going to turn

off the monitor if you're not aware of

what's happening it can be really kind

of confusing

this is a battery saving feature and

what it's doing is is that it's allowing

the camera to toggle the screen inside

when we lift it up to our eye so right

so when we're looking through this it's

automatically going to shut off the

screen

we can also customize the screens to

work in different ways for example when

i demonstrate

gimbal shooting on the crash course i

want this to stay on all the time and i

will toggle that to stay on even if

there's something in front of this

infrared switch

a lot of it depends on what you're doing

but we can determine how these work so

just to the right of the viewfinder

you're going to see a rotating wheel you

can access it by using the tip of a

finger

and this is going to change the focus of

the viewfinder meaning what you see with

your eyeball so if you have corrective

eyewear this will allow you to adjust

the focus sometimes that's confusing for

new beginners like hey everything's

blurry

this is where you adjust it couple other

icons i wanted to point out is this

wi-fi drop feature so if you're playing

back an image and you want to drop it to

your phone to share on social media it's

saying

do you want to send just this image or

just state filtered images talk about

this a little bit more in the wi-fi

lesson

and another feature up here is the key

icon is a protection which means we

cannot delete it from the card we can

still reformat but this would prevent

accidental deletions so if you knew you

took an amazing picture and you didn't

want to accidentally delete it you would

use the key icon

our back monitor will behave

similarly to how smartphones work so if

i play an image and i want to zoom in

i'm pinching out with my fingers

i can touch and drag across the image

i can pinch together to zoom out

for the longest time

the menus were not touch sensitive and

they finally are this is an amazing

uh usability feature that sony's put

into their cameras recently very

thankful for that makes it a lot easier

to navigate just keep in mind the screen

is touch sensitive we can even use it to

help

focus when as we look through the

viewfinder there's a bunch of cool

things that we can do with it but just

keep this in mind i do recommend putting

on a screen protector and i will

demonstrate that on the crash course

it's pretty straightforward let's talk

about our ports on the left side of the

camera they're under these rubber grips

that you kind of have to put your

fingernail in to

move and open

so on the very top the red one think of

red for record that is for our

microphone for an external microphone

you're plugging into the camera the

camera has built-in microphones but the

problem is is that as we handle the

camera those

vibrations get into the mic and it

sounds terrible and typically the

microphone is not directional it's not

that great

i sell a basic microphone for 50 on my

website you can find it on amazon it's

the maven mic if you're just getting

started and you need a directional

microphone it's the one i've personally

tested we put it head head against tons

of other microphones as you get into

more professional work you're going to

invest hundreds or even thousands of

dollars into high-end production

microphones that are really good for

example i'm wearing a sennheiser e100

it's a lav mic why because this is my

job so

if you're not really sure about how

serious you're going to get i would say

start off with something like the maven

mic and then as you get more serious and

you're using it more than you want lav

mics or production quality ones this is

where we plug it in

we also have a headphone jack just below

it which i also recommend if you're

doing video recording because you want

to hear the audio quality even this

morning as i was setting up on my other

camera i was listening to the audio

coming through the microphone and it was

all staticky that one of the cables had

gone bad and i replaced it so you always

want to check and monitor your audio

this is where we plug our headset in the

usbc terminal can be used for different

things including charging your camera if

you wanted to charge the battery in

camera if you don't have a charger it's

the only way to do it it's nice to have

as a backup there's no indicator light

but if you look at

the battery

when you plug that usbc cable in and

it's charging you will see a little plug

indicator right next to the battery i

want to take you on an overview of the

different types of shooting information

that we'll see and this is why i had to

toggle on the display button up

i am in the manual mode

and obviously we have tons of different

icons and they can be very confusing so

to simplify in the beginning i want you

to pay attention to these

sets of information on the bottom and

i'm going to rotate

the aperture wheel to see that so you

can see as i'm rotating the front

control wheel

is that the f number is changing

so this number any number with the f is

the aperture that deals with the size of

the opening of the lens

the one next to it that i'm rotating

with the left control wheel changes our

shutter speed and this is given as a

fraction 1 20th of a second 1 25th of a

second we'll be talking about exposure a

little bit later over here to the far

right we have our iso control

so we can go up and down

by toggling this

over here iso

so these three settings your shutter

speed your aperture and your iso are

critically important to determining

the brightness

of the image

now when you're on the manual mode your

exposure compensation isn't really an

exposure compensation so i'm going to

flip this over

now this fourth icon here has a plus

minus sign in a square with a diagonal

and it says plus minus zero this deals

with our exposure compensation and you

will not see this control available on

the manual mode but you'll notice that

as i turn it one direction the screen

gets brighter and in the other direction

the screen gets darker

don't worry about this for right now i'm

just pointing out this is our exposure

compensation control

and on this particular screen we also

have a histogram which is a statistical

representation of the brightness of the

pixels i talk about this in a lesson on

the crash course there's a intro

photography course and this square here

is our focusing square i also refer to

it as a cluster we're pointing these out

a little bit later but to summarize

these three settings are critically

important shutter speed aperture iso you

will also see this information mirrored

in the viewfinder it's just easier for

me to show it on the back monitor

as i push up on the display screen we

have a level and i'll demonstrate this

real quick is that if i tilt the tripod

down

and we can even tilt it to the left or

right you can see that tilting it's very

useful when you're lining up on a

horizon for example

when you get everything lined up you're

going to see green across the board i'm

tilting it back up and now i know that

is straight even on the horizon

and i lock the tripod

and i use this a lot when i'm shooting

landscapes for example

if we continue to push up on the

directional pad now we're taken to

the infamous what i call the black

screen so the black screen has a

tremendous amount of information the

first time you see it it could be very

intimidating but what you will notice is

that these icons pop up they're the same

icons just in different screens and so

the black screen has pretty much all of

them together right so we have our mode

indicator aperture priority mode

we have our shutter speed

aperture

iso

we have our exposure compensation if we

were to rotate it there it is

we have a histogram on the bottom and we

have our level we've seen these in

different places already

here we have our battery indicator how

much battery life is remaining

this is the memory card indicator it's

telling us that we're using memory card

in slot one these are the number of

pictures available for the particular

setting that we're using 5138

our quality settings tells us whether

we're shooting in raw or jpeg with the

compression setting of the jpeg here is

fine

we have the number of megapixels the

camera's shooting on 33 megapixels is

the maximum resolution of the a74

then we have our image stabilizer for

the sensor this little hand icon is

telling us that it's on

over to the far right you're going to

see a bunch of these icons that will pop

up in other places

if you wish to change these settings

from the screen you need to push the fn

button

and it will allow us to do so we have a

couple here additional ones on the

bottom we have our quality settings

in image stabilization so if we wanted

direct access to the type of file that

we were telling the camera to record we

could do that directly

tap shutter button

we could also turn off our image

stabilizer also referred to as steady

shot so if we hit that it brings us into

the menu

and we can go down

something you will notice is that as

we're pulled into these smaller menus is

that you will see these little triangles

pointing in different directions that

just tells us we have options

in those directions that you press

and we can literally move

this square over different items you'll

notice that we have two exposure

compensations the bottom one is for our

flash exposure compensation

which we'll cover on the crash course

but over to the far right we have these

12 different icons this top one is our

drive mode

flash settings

focusing modes

focusing clusters what type of shutter

we're using whether it's mechanical or

electric or a hybrid of the two

face and eye auto focus we have our

viewfinder refresh rate which deals with

how many images per second we're seeing

in the viewfinder

we have our memory card setting we want

to change how our memory cards are

recording stills or video

we have our aspect ratio i recommend at

three to two for now

our picture profiles which is sort of

like how the image is baked before it's

recorded it's usually

very widely used for video a lot of

video shooters use it but you can apply

it to stills as well

this setting is referred to as the

creative look and it allows us to to

make general adjustments to the image

such as saturation

sharpness contrast things of that nature

then we have our dynamic range optimizer

which bakes in

different degrees of shading in terms of

shadows and highlights

set to auto for now

we have our white balance and then we

have our metering mode so that is the

black fn screen

if we push up and we continue to toggle

through

now we get a live view screen with many

of these same settings on here if we

push the fn button

many of these items are now on the

bottom we just saw them they're exactly

the same

and we can also customize these in our

menu if you want to change them up

when we change over to for example the

video mode and press the fn button

you'll notice that these change

so the this fn menu or this function

menu changes

depending on whether we're in a stills

mode shooting mode or a video shooting

mode but in this particular screen real

quick we have our shooting modes

drive modes

focusing modes

focusing cluster mechanical or

electronic shutter face detection

shutter speed aperture exposure

compensation

iso

on the top we have number of shots

remaining which card we're using we have

our jpeg settings or quality settings

number of megapixels steady shot

our battery life

metering mode

white balance

dynamic range optimizer

creative looks

and picture profiles

when we're on the pa or s mode something

you should notice is this hand icon what

it does is it gives us a warning if we

start to use slow shutter speeds it's

the camera's way of saying hey even

though this is on the shutter speed is

too slow and it might be blurry

so if i come back and for example let's

say i stop my aperture down a little bit

so the shutter speed is changing when we

get under 1 40 of a second it starts to

blink right saying hey

beware of your handheld shutter speed

because it's probably going to be blurry

and then if we

change the settings so it's a faster

shutter speed

it's

on and it basically is telling us you

should be good to go

over the years the image stabilization

in the camera the sensor stabilization

and combined with certain lenses that

also have image stabilization is

phenomenal it is ridiculous compared to

what we had even a few years ago where

you can easily take a handheld long

exposure you know we're talking about

like half a second handheld if you're

really good in some cases you can lean

against the wall and get a full second

if you practice enough and that is

absolutely insane that you do not need a

tripod in certain types of shooting

situations for stills

something i want to point out is that

when i switch to video mode is you'll

notice that we get a few new icons that

we haven't seen before

one of the more important ones is this

these audio levels for our left and

right channel you know you can see even

as i'm talking it's picking up my voice

this is going to be really important for

controlling your audio keeping an eye on

it

most of the icons are the same there's a

few different things we can see the

amount of time

left on the memory card that we're so i

have two hours left of video recording

at this particular resolution frame rate

and bit depth

all of these letters and numbers here

are really confusing if you've never

shot a lot of video before that but they

deal with the compression settings for

video the frame rate uh the bit depth it

even tells us 8 bit and there's a reason

why you would want to change this if

you're a pure beginner there's a there's

a setting i would recommend you use

because the files are easier to use it's

quicker to edit on your laptop

the question i sometimes get is can you

shoot a movie with this camera and the

answer is absolutely you can and those

features these other features of bit

depth

and frame rates and things of that

nature will become more important as you

get more serious we cover

a lot of this in fact we cover almost

all the different shooting styles on the

crash course from

blogging to documentary to narrative

filmmaking all of those examples are

covered in the crash course so if you if

you want to get into serious video work

be sure to check it out

most of these other settings are pretty

much the same now if you're shooting and

you don't want to deal with all these

icons you may want to toggle up and so

we just get the exposure settings that

is a quick overview of the different

screens and icons that we will see on

the camera something i want to point out

is that on your mode dial we have a

setting that is in a green box it says

auto

auto works in both the video mode as

well as the stills mode and i lovingly

refer to this as the dummy mode so right

now we're in the dummy mode for video if

we flip over back to stills we get the

dummy mode up in the top left hand

corner

the dummy mode means that we are turning

control over to the camera the camera is

going to decide the aperture the shutter

speed iso all we need to worry about is

taking a picture

the truth of the matter is if you spent

this much money on a camera of this

nature you're probably going to want to

unlock the capabilities i understand if

you just want to take some pictures but

if if this is really confusing and you

just want to get out and go shooting

you could shoot on the dummy mode and

get some pictures but

the power of the camera is really

unlocked when we at least shoot on the p

mode

so even if you want to shoot on the

dummy mode i would still recommend going

with the p mode because it's going to

give us some control over the camera but

in this next lesson we're going to talk

about the focusing systems and if you

are not at least in the p mode

you're not going to see a lot of these

things so if you're in the green mode

and you're trying to say for example

change your focusing cluster it's not

going to allow you to do that so i

always recommend even if you're just

just starting out go with the p mode and

i really really strongly recommend going

to the a mode we'll talk about that in a

minute something i need to to point out

is that i have my camera turned to spot

m

by default when you get the camera it's

going to be on the wide so

if you don't have this mode set up

you're going to be confused as to what

i'm doing

basically you're going to push c2

focusing areas and i want you to select

spot m for the sake of this

demonstration when we talk about the

camera's focusing systems i really like

to break it down into the how

the when

and the where

how when

where

if you remember those three things this

is going to be easy

so how do we focus with the camera as

i've already demonstrated we're going to

take our index finger

halfway shutter button depression

we get a focus lock indicated with this

green dot in this focusing box here we

hear an audio signal and the camera is

telling us

that this is in focus

push it down all the way to take the

picture so that is the basic way most

cameras will focus

now there is another focusing button

on the back of the camera that says af

on

when we push this we can also achieve a

focusing lock

so how do we focus

halfway shutter button depression or the

af on button and there's some other ways

we'll talk about in just a minute so

let's talk about the

when the camera is focusing

whether this is a one-time focus

or whether it's a continuous focus over

and over again

that refers to the camera's focusing

modes and they can be accessed by

default by pressing the c3 button

and when you come in here you'll see

that we actually have several focusing

modes there's five of them but i don't

want you to get concerned with that just

think of it in terms of how often the

camera is focusing

auto focus single was what i just

demonstrated and if we select that what

it means is

the camera will achieve focusing lock

one time in one time only

which means that if we push and hold the

shutter button halfway down we can move

the camera

in the focus plane will not change it'll

stay in that position the camera is not

updating the focus we can move it in any

direction as long as we're halfway

shutter button depressed

we're good to go it is locked on af

s which stands for auto focus single

now this can be very useful

for a technique called recomposing and

i'll demonstrate this when i teach you

portrait shooting on the crash course

is that sometimes you'll get a focusing

lock on a subject but you want to move

the camera to make it more aesthetically

pleasing in terms of your composition

then this is the technique of

recomposing

focus lock halfway shutter button

depression i'm keeping it held down and

i'm moving the camera push it down all

the way to take the picture that is only

done

with afs and there's tons of different

techniques that we'll talk about

so the next focusing

type i want to talk about is continuous

autofocus

now you're going to notice something

different when i push the shutter button

halfway down

first of all there's no beep

and second of all we get these little

green parentheses around the green dot

and another thing is as as i move the

camera the cameras will update the focus

on the box the focal plane is not locked

and this is going to be better for

moving

subjects

auto focus continuous means that as long

as the focusing box is on the target and

the focusing is engaged the camera will

update the focusing over

and over and over again

whereas auto focus single is really

better for subjects that don't move

they're sitting still maybe it's

cooperating human so you can already see

we have different focusing types

depending on our subject matter if

they're still we're going to go with

auto focus single if they're moving

we're probably going to want to go with

auto focus continuous

the third focusing type is a hybrid of

the first two automatic auto focus and

the truth of the matter is i almost

never use this

the idea is that the camera will

basically assist you if the subject

isn't moving it chooses auto focus

single

if the subject is moving it should be

able to jump into this auto focus

continuous but

usually when i'm in those situations i

just shoot with auto focus continuous

and don't even cross my fingers so to

speak

so those are the first three major

focusing types

the fourth one you should definitely

know about is simply manual focus

and what this means is that when we push

the shutter button down nothing happens

we're not focusing at all

but we can rotate the focusing ring and

you'll see it punch in like this

and i can focus on this target and get

precise focusing lock in fact just a

minute ago i had a question on one of my

facebook groups

uh somebody was shooting a video of a

performance on a stage she's like what

focusing mode should i use and i said

well you're going to want to turn your

focus off you're going to focus on

the stage

and turn your focusing off because you

don't want the camera jumping around and

guessing you know if it's a static shot

so

if you do that this will allow you to

pick the precise focusing point of where

you want to focus now this

direct manual zoom feature can be done

in a number of different ways but when

you are on manual focus and you start

moving the focusing ring it will jump in

and there's a way to turn that off when

we talk about the deep menu i think it's

a very useful tool

the fifth and last focusing mode is

direct manual focus it's like a hybrid

between

single focus and manual focus so the

idea on this is that i push the shutter

button halfway down

i get my focusing lock and then i can

adjust it by rotating

the focusing ring on the lens

so this allows me to get really precise

this particular focusing method is going

to be great for people like let's say

macro photographers where they need a

really precise focusing lock they want

to get a general focus and then really

dial it in so that is the when the

camera is focusing whether it's a

one-time continuous

manual or some type of hybrid between

those

so we've talked about the how

we've talked about the when

now let's talk about the where the

camera is focusing

this deals with the cameras

focusing clusters and there are a ton of

them it can get really confusing

so as i already pointed out the cameras

focusing squares can be found by pushing

c2 by default and you can see that we

have tons of these different focusing

squares and i'm going to go through each

of them real quick

focus area wide means that we are

turning control over the focusing area

to the camera

and what will happen is the camera will

look for a point of contrast in the case

we have this little plus

focusing target

against the white blinds and the camera

can pick it up really quick and easy

so it's a combination of contrast as

well as distance to the camera so if you

get something that's closer to the

camera the camera might choose that

or it might choose the mark and because

of this

it's kind of hard to control where focus

is happening and the only time i really

use something like this is maybe birds

in flight you know a dark contrast bird

on a you know a bright sky it works

pretty good for stuff like that but for

most of the time i don't really use the

wide focusing area for the type of work

that i do

the next focusing cluster is referred to

as zone

and you will notice that we get these

four little corner marks

and we can move those corner marks

around by pushing on the joystick

for me personally i think it's a lot

easier just to

you know use the joystick to move the

boxes around but the idea of this is

that we can limit the area that we're

telling the camera to look in so instead

of looking at the full screen it's

looking in a smaller area again for a

point of contrast so we have a little

bit more control

the third cluster is center and this is

a fixed focusing point it's just in the

center of the screen with these four and

it will not change so if you know that

you're going to be shooting from the

center of the screen and you don't want

it changing anywhere else go with the

center focusing cluster so next we have

the spot focusing cluster i think it's

super useful i use it all the time this

is the medium size and you notice that

we can basically move the box to 80

or so of the viewfinder basically tell

the camera hey only focus in this area

and it does a really good job of that

when we come in to select these clusters

we can also pick a small box this would

be good for precise focusing

you know macro shooters very wide

apertures things of that nature

if the medium and smaller two you know

they don't cover enough area we can go

with large we get a larger box

i use the large box probably 60 70

percent of the time when i am using a

single focusing square and it allows me

to get more precise

the next focusing cluster is something

called expandable spot

it's sort of like a hybrid where it's

prioritizing in a smaller box but it

also gives permission to look around

that box as well

so you focus there move it outside

it's one of these things where it's kind

of an extreme

niche type of shooting that it would

become useful i pretty much don't use it

the last cluster is tracking expand spot

so when i pick this you can see that

it's grayed out it camera doesn't want

to allow me to select it what's going on

if we are in

the wrong shooting mode which is direct

manual focus right now it doesn't like

it so we pick continuous focus here come

back into our clusters i'm pressing c2

on top of the camera

and now we have

this tracking expandable

spot shooting and you can notice that we

can come to the left or right

we can apply tracking to any of

the focusing clusters in this bottom

menu so this determines that we're

tracking and this determines which

cluster we're using so if i wanted to

demonstrate it with tracking wide i'm

going to select that

and now we get a different box it's like

a square with two lines on the side over

the years sony has improved this

dramatically and it does a phenomenal

job of tracking most of the time it does

better when you're locked onto a single

subject you know with not a lot of front

action moving in front of it you know

maybe

certain types of running athletes as

long

as it has that lock it does really

really well

but it can be confused and the idea on

this is that you would just get your

focusing lock

see the thumb button there it goes

and you're holding this down and it's

going to track that subject wherever it

goes in the frame don't expect it to be

perfect

if you get 70 to 80 keepers you should

be thrilled

and we can even change the type of

square that we're using

by changing

on the bottom there so we can change

each of the different clusters oops

with

a different type of tracking even the

center will go off center

and that's another arrow in your quiver

so we've talked about the how the when

in the where of your camera's core

focusing systems

but because we're dealing with a very

sophisticated camera very powerful

camera there are additional ways to

focus

obviously we have this touch screen

it's sensitive to touch and we want to

make sure that this is turned on for

this example

coming into the deep menu

yellow tab on the bottom touch operation

is on we can come into the deep menu to

do these settings but i think there's an

easier way

so you'll notice this icon says off but

in the deep menu it says on so if we

come into the deep menu and turn this

off what it means is that we've turned

off the touchscreen altogether that

there's no way we could

turn that back on unless we come into

the menu so we're going to turn this on

which means the touchscreen is now

sensitive

but we have some additional controls

here with this little button here in the

top right hand corner so right now it's

telling us that the touch

focus is off even though the touch

screen is still working this touch focus

is off but if we push it

so we can get it

now we have the ability

to change where our focusing square is

and i'm using my hand to demonstrate

that it's not focusing on my hand it's

not focusing on the blinds it's just

moving the focusing square and then when

we push and engage

too close maybe

there is the green lock

so if we're on auto focus single and

we're moving this square around like

this we would still have to engage the

autofocus

we can continue to toggle it

and we get this tracking it's a little

confusing because this is not what

autofocus single does so using my hand

if i push

here

now we're actually getting a tracking

mode even with auto focus single

pretty cool if i wanted to go here it

would go here now the problem with the

tracking is is sometimes it's a little

jumpy it'll jump around on something

that maybe i didn't really want

but

it's pretty cool when it works

it's not perfect see it's con a little

confused the blinds

and we can also cancel the tracking by

pressing

this little box with the x icon

or

pressing our set button

and it's canceled

and if we were to push it again now

we're to the off position

so that is how we can use the back

monitor for touch focusing with auto

focus single

now these touch focusing modes will also

work the same if we were in afa or afc

and the idea i believe is to have these

shortcut methods to jump into let's say

choosing where your focusing square is

or

having for example

a tracking point without needing to

change your focusing modes

it's a little confusing at first but

definitely worth

practicing and getting used to because

these focusing tools change depending on

what we're shooting

let's talk about eye detection and by

now you probably know the a74 is capable

of amazing focusing by choosing the

eyeball of a human an animal or a bird

now a word of warning this is one of the

most common questions i see in my

facebook group is about

how come i'm not getting a hundred

percent eye detection

focus for example and the truth of the

matter is it's never going to be perfect

it's going to work better with humans

but when we think about the number of

animals out there in the in the shapes

of their faces and the textures and the

movement with the patterns in the

background the camera is not perfect

it's not always going to be able to

detect a face perfectly even humans i've

never seen it at 100 accurate it is very

very good it makes our life easier but i

want you to lower your expectations just

a little bit for eye detection when

we're talking about using this feature

it's it's a learning algorithm it's

going to get better with time but i

think it's going to be a while before

it's 100 perfect maybe a long time so i

just ask that you temper your

expectations

now by default when you get the camera

face detection is going to be on already

at least mine was

so eye detection

works

depending on

the focusing cluster we have so if this

is wide anywhere it sees a face it's

going to work

when we get something to a zone we're

telling the camera to only look in the

zone for that eye detection see it's

looking for

an eye detection here it's not finding

it

but when we have the human within that

frame now we get eye detection

so that something to keep in mind is

that eye detection

is looking within the square we have

designated

for our focusing clusters

so depending on the size of that if i go

to

let's say

spot focus and i'm over here it's not

going to recognize eye detection

now there is a problem with this

is that sometimes you are going to want

to focus away from the person

and if you have a focusing square that

says look for eye detection

let's say we're in something like this

something like zone let's say we want to

focus over here

well now the camera is focusing where we

don't want to

so i'm going to demonstrate

how to customize the a74 in such a way

that when you are shooting with your

squares you're just shooting for

area

but a quick control shortcut for eye

autofocus that i have customized on

almost all of my other sony cameras so

this is just the first

customization i'm recommending i think

it just it makes it easier for me i'm

coming into the deep menu purple tab

page three

face and eye auto focus

by default mine was turned on yours

might be too and what i'm going to do is

to turn that to off

meaning

that when i focus now

it's focusing on areas of contrast it's

not looking for the eye but people will

say michael that was such a cool feature

right

so what we're going to do

is we're going to customize the set

button this button right here or maybe

you want it on the auto exposure lock

button

i'm going to put face detection here so

when i'm shooting and i want eye

detection i can hit this

and if i don't want it then i would do

my normal focusing it gives me a lot

more control over it so i'm going to

come down to the yellow tab and i'm

going to go to operation customize

still is the camera custom key

and this is where we can customize how

our buttons operate you can see that it

gives us a little picture of the camera

in a little white highlight next to the

button that we want to change its

operation i don't recommend this

very much to beginning in intermediate

shooters because you're still learning

the camera but the focusing thing is is

the one i do because it gives you more

control

and we're going to come down to

the set button and you can see that the

set button is not set

i'm going to select that

and what the camera is now asking is

what function do you want to put there

so i'm going to come back

it looks like we're in the deep menu but

it's not it's asking what feature do you

want to customize

and come to page three face and eye

detection and then i'm just gonna turn

on i auto focus so now i auto focus

is ready to go where the set button is

and you can put it up here by on the

auto exposure lock if you don't use that

button i kind of like having my white

balance here and these other c buttons

where they are

but once this is done i'm going to come

back out and now when i push the set

button i am jumping

into eye detection

which means i can focus here

for the focusing square or i can focus

to the eye detection and it gives me a

lot more control

over precisely where the focusing is

for example if i'm shooting a sporting

event people are running around i might

be going with a focusing box

but if they stop and pause and i get a

shot to jump on their eye then i can do

it that way and for me personally that's

the way i like to shoot this gives us

powerful controls over regular focusing

versus eye detection

when we get into the deep menu i'll

cover

the most important stuff in this video

when we talk about eye detection there's

a number of other settings in here

and we can prioritize for animals left

or right eye there's a huge number of

settings we can even

have a face memory so if i had a child

at a birthday party and i wanted the

camera to try to recognize the pattern

of my child's face we could register

those those faces but for now

just focus on the core focusing and the

eye detection

let's talk about face detection when we

are shooting video

there's a setting in here that's really

going to make this a lot easier strongly

recommend turning this on we're going to

come into our purple tab

page 3.

something else you'll notice is that

when we're in the video icon mode

you this little video camera icon

and what we're going to do

is to turn on

the face and iframe display

if this is not turned on you will not be

able to really tell when the camera is

focusing

on a person's face so we're going to

turn this to on

tap shutter button and when we come back

out we get this little white focusing

box on our model's eye

so this tells us what the camera is

focusing on in its tracking right

again we still have these touch controls

that we talked about earlier

but face detection for video is amazing

especially if you're doing vlogging and

you you're moving around a little bit

you want the camera to follow you it

does an

incredible job and the question will

then come

what if we have you know maybe a subject

in our foreground that we want to focus

on instead of the eye so if i move my

hand in front of the camera

now it's focused on the hand and now

it's jumping back onto the face

so it's giving the camera permission

to jump on to face detection

now

remember when we talked about this

little guy right here

these controls work in video as well and

they can be very very handy let's say we

have a person here and we're trying to

do something called a rack focus

where where the attention needs to be

shifted from here to here for example

well i can push on my hand what this

does

is it tells the camera to focus on where

you touch

instead of the face detection

we know this because when we push the

display up and we come back to this

information panel watch here it's now

it's on manual focus

so i push on

the model's face

it jumps to auto focus continuous and

then manual focus so this is how we can

rack focus without needing

a camera assistant there's people in

hollywood this is all they do

is they they have a rig on the lens and

they they're manually adjusting these

rings

and by touching on the screen we don't

need to do those things

we also have the ability to turn off

this feature this touch feature so if i

hit this now we're back in face

detection

so that is a really cool way to jump

between face detection

touch focus you just do it

and then jumping back into face

detection again very powerful focusing

techniques

now there's another one i want to show

you which is referred to as

peaking focus

so to do this we're going to jump over

to manual

and we're going to come into the menu

so in the menu we're going to come into

peaking display

and you can see that it's turned off

we're going to turn this on

and we're going to turn the level let's

just turn it up to high and for color i

kind of like red because it stands out

we're turning peaking on

touch shutter button and now

we get this red kind of outline

when there are areas of contrast so in

manual focus this is a very powerful way

to see exactly where the focal plane is

and used a lot for video shooting

so you can see

that as i change the focus and the

manual focus

when we have the area of of the most red

is that when we have the area of

greatest contrast it's telling us this

is where the focal plane is if we wanted

to zoom in on this we could come into

purple tab

focus assistant

focus magnifier

we press change magnification

and then it jumps in

there's a lot of steps to kind of get to

this and the way it's set up right now

is my auto focus on

his eye detection but i have it here

right

so i would customize this to be my focus

magnifier if i wanted to do that real

quick why not

come in here

so customize operations for video

shooting i want it to magnify just as an

example

it's going to be

oh it's right now it's following the

custom of the camera

i'm going to change this

to

focus magnifier and video so now if i

want to jump in

there we go it's a quick way to set that

up

video focusing is a little different so

when i'm in the video mode i can use

this as my auto focus on button

if we get off of

that

and in video mode

now it's a magnifier

but that is an overview of peaking we

can change the colors on it as well if

we wanted to

blue

there it is

i'm going to

turn this to off

and another thing i want to point out is

that if you press your fn button we have

a shortcut to our peaking display right

here

and that is an overview of peaking focus

something else i want to point out that

in the event you needed a quick zoom in

you could hit this right away and you

could use a manual zoom technique

if you are in manual focus just hit this

even without peaking it'll work

so

you have to be in manual focus for that

so we've discussed tons of different

ways to focus both in stills

as well as in video

very common question

can you use peaking focus and stills

well there's manual

let's turn it on

there it is so on some cameras you

cannot but now we have the ability to

use peaking focus in both video as well

as stills briefly let's talk about white

balance white balance by default can be

accessed with your c1 button right here

i have this setup customized for the

recording

but when you get it default it's

probably going to be set on auto white

balance and for the most part this is

going to be fine

white balance is one of these things

that you might not really want to worry

about until maybe you're an intermediate

shooter and you have your focusing and

your composition and your exposure

settings down so in the beginning auto

white balance is fine when you're just

starting to get used to your camera

now

what will happen is you'll be shooting

and you'll notice the color will be off

when you look at the images maybe it's a

person and there's like maybe a bluish

tone or maybe it's too yellow

this deals with our white balance

suffice it to say the human eye is

amazing it can make all kinds of

adjustments in different kinds of lights

types of lights brightnesses of lights

camera sensors are not quite like that

and the heart of the matter is that

light sources give off different colors

according to what the type of light is

so if you have your camera set for let's

say the sunlight and you're shooting

indoors in incandescent light you are

going to see

this color shift that is very unpleasing

so the way we control this there's a

long answer and a short answer the short

answer is

when we see these color shifts we want

to select the icon that correlates to

the shooting environment we're in so if

we're shooting in the sun

we would want to have the sun icon

daylight or if we were shooting in shade

we would want the shade icon you also

notice

the color of the monitor is changing

it's giving me a preview of what the

image would look like

if we're shooting in cloud cover we

would want the cloud icon

if we were shooting an incandescent

light light bulbs we would want the

light bulb icon and then we have

fluorescent types of lights

we also have flash

if we're using an external flash we

would have the flash

sony cameras are pretty cool that they

have a setting for underwater auto white

balance

we have a kelvin setting that i'll

demonstrate in just a second and we also

have three custom white balances and

i'll show you how to set these each of

these up in a second but the short

answer is if you're shooting and it

looks weird the color is off it's either

too blue or too yellow it's probably

because our white balance is not

selected correctly again i don't really

recommend worrying about it until it

starts to bother you and you see it

regularly in the meantime just shoot

with auto white balance

there's actually a lot more to white

balance then

you know just select the icon

is that if we push the directional pad

to the right

we have this color gamut which allows us

to shift the white balance

in different directions how the auto

white balance is working

i definitely do not recommend doing this

unless you're an advanced shooter you're

an expert shooter and for the most part

i never use it with the exception of a

panasonic camera that i have that does

need white balance tweaking other than

that i never use this color shift so i'm

gonna hit cancel

let's take a look at the custom white

balance

custom white balance assumes that we are

shooting in a mixed lighting condition

and we're able to tell the camera

something like these white blinds this

is white please adjust the camera

settings to this

so i have it selected to custom one

i'm going to hit the set button

it gives me this square

and then i'm going to capture that using

the set button it's going to capture

what i'm telling the camera is white and

we get a beautiful neutral tone here

at least from where i'm seeing it

looks a little bit different on the

camera that i'm recording

but this is like perfectly neutral to me

it's telling me it's at 5000 kelvin

and i'm gonna hit okay and then i would

continue shooting in this shooting

environment you can do it with a dr

bride's dress a white wall a white

ceiling a gray card any neutral color in

a mixed lighting condition you can

custom white balance

custom white balance is typically used

for

you know things like on location types

of video shooting where you have mixed

light conditions or

it's just you know you have incandescent

and fluorescent and maybe you're in the

shade a little bit it's like really

weird

so we're going to talk about the kelvin

temperature i'm going to go into it a

little bit deeper i talk about it on the

lighting crash course that i have

the short answer is is that the camera

kelvin temperature we can move it up and

down and you can see it's getting more

and more orange

and as we turn it down it's getting more

and more blue

right and when i explain this to people

they usually get pretty angry with me

and i get people arguing with me i'm not

trying to argue with you i'm just

telling you what's going on with the

camera

the kelvin setting allows us to tell the

camera

the color

temperature

that we are shooting in

and it's very confusing because the term

there's two terminologies that are used

that conflict with each other

so when i see a blue image

this can be referred to as being

very cool it's a cool color tone and

when you see the tones leaning to let's

say orange or yellow

this can be described as a very warm

tone

but something you'll notice

is that the temperature for kelvin is

high here

this is very hot temperature right

and this is a very low temperature

right the blue so you're like okay yeah

that's pretty straightforward no problem

right

well what's happening is the camera is

adding a different color it's adding the

opposite color

of the kelvin we're shooting in so for

example if i had

a candle

well a candle has a yellow flame in a

candle kelvin temperature is very low

and there's a whole science behind this

which is far beyond the scope of this

video but it's suffice it to say

that

light

given at different temperatures has

different color hues right so if you see

a candle and you say hey that's yellow

what the camera is doing is it's adding

blue

into the scene to counteract the yellow

and if you're looking at something like

a blow torch like a blue blow torch

that's really really hot

well now the camera would add yellow in

to counter balance the blue and that is

what's happening on all of the white

balance settings the kelvin settings is

the camera is adding the opposite color

in

to make the image neutral

so very very

high kelvin temperatures

are actually blue this is where

everybody gets confused and you're like

no that doesn't make any sense it should

be orange no

the hotter kelvin temperatures are blue

the camera is adding in yellow

to counteract it and the lower kelvin

temperatures are actually yellow

and the camera is adding in blue that's

probably more information than you

wanted i just wanted to kind of explain

to you what was happening with white

balance but again as i said before if

you're just starting

go on auto white balance and and change

it once you see this color shift color

temperature in your you know your

picture styles and all that stuff is

really

pretty important for video you can save

a lot when you're dealing with raw

images there's a lot of information in

there even jpegs can be processed pretty

well

it's the video shooting you got to be

really careful about your auto white

balance your picture styles all of those

things should be dialed in we'll be

talking about those on the crash course

so the next feature i want to talk about

is your drive modes just going over them

real quick your drive modes tell the

camera what to do after we push the

shutter button down all the way so in

the case of single shooting we're

telling the camera to take one single

picture

in the case of continuous shooting high

we have a number of options here

designated with the triangle we can come

over we can pick medium low

high high plus so if we're doing high

plus with a mechanical shutter

right it's pretty quick

so think of continuous shooting

as rapid fire for sports if you don't

want the full burst you would turn it

down to medium or low just depends on

what you're doing

when we're talking about a timer we have

a little 10 seconds next to it so we can

change the amount of time

between the timer so if we wanted a two

second shot versus a 10 second shot we

could do that

if we come down

now we have the ability to choose how

long and the number of images 10 seconds

three images

five seconds five images so if you're

doing let's say a group photo and you're

worried about people having their eyes

closed while they're blinking you might

want to do this

we also have the ability

to bracket our shots continuous

bracketing basically means that if we

choose this

let's pick something here obvious

so we're going to go one exposure value

for three images

and what this does it gives us a bracket

indicator

push the shutter button down

if you hold it down it will take all

three images and when you play it back

you can see the camera automatically

changed

the exposure setting

the shutter speed between each shot

bracketed shots are classically done in

landscape shooting or a situation where

you have

varying tones of brightness and darkness

and you want to capture all those

details

coming back in

we have single bracket feature

i'll do this once and see if you can

listen to c

so you have to push the button down

separately for each one instead of

pushing and holding

that's the difference between those two

now we can bracket also with our white

balance

between high and low

so it'll do a shift for the white

balance

and then we can shift with our dynamic

range optimizer

high or low as well so that is your

drive modes the ones you're really going

to be using is between single shooting

and continuous and maybe the timer a

quick way to jump into electronic

shutter if you wanted to just go with

electronic shutter you could come in

here hit the fn button

and go to electronic now something i

need to point out is that if you're

going in pure electronic mode and let's

do this let me use a faster shutter

speed i'm going to bump up my iso

a ton so you can see this

and i take a picture

now i'm shooting with led lights and if

if you see this this is very typical

when shooting with an electronic shutter

with led lights is you get this banding

it's just a phenomena of flickering

lights i even have a video on flickering

lights if you want to understand what's

going on but suffice it to say leds are

flickering very quickly and when we use

an electronic shutter we get these kinds

of patterns

the only way around it is to go either

back to mechanical shutter or to change

your shutter speed down to 1 125th of a

second or less

it's almost gone i can see some faint

faint marks of it because we're just

over the magic shutter speed

but in any event if we shoot in video

we can see the same thing if we're using

a very fast shutter speed let me open

this up and you can see this banding in

real time

there it is you can see it kind of

moving up

same rules with video is we want to be

at that 1 60 of a second and it should

resolve most of it

something like that my iso is turned up

way too high

so banding if you see it that's what's

going on it's with an electronic shutter

so now we're going to start getting into

exposure control on the still setting

triple check to make sure that we have

our live view display set correctly

we're going to go into the red tab in

our menu

shooting display it's number 10

in live view display set we want to make

sure that the setting effect is on for

the demonstration that i'm about to give

now if you're doing studio flash you may

want to come in here and turn this off

because flash is adding a lot of extra

light this is where you would come in

and change this but for this

demonstration make sure

that the effect is set to on otherwise

it's not going to work what i'm about to

show you

so it should be it should be set to that

by default we are about to go over the

mode dial

how it changes the behavior of the

camera the different modes you're going

to see a p a s and m and some numbers

and then we are going to talk about

changing the exposure controls probably

the most important lesson on this whole

video it's so critical and at the end of

that i'm going to talk about iso what it

is and how it works again just remember

you can jump back to review any of these

lessons at any time

i would highly recommend you have your

camera in hand to follow along

so i am rotating the mode dial and

there's an indicator on the viewfinder

that white little tick mark

that when we line up the tick mark with

the mode we can see which mode we're on

right here in the top corner so here's

the dummy mode that's pretty much

everything's automatic almost everything

and then we have the p

a

s

and m modes

then we have these numbered modes

it'll

basically it's a way to customize so if

you do a lot of sport shooting you would

want to set those settings onto the one

mode or the two mode or the three mode

and you could just jump to them that's

what they are

and pretty much nothing else right

so this mode dial basically means that

we can tell the camera

hey i want you to control certain

aspects of it and i want to control

other aspects

and

the exposure settings change differently

depending on what mode we're in

so the easiest way for me to explain

this with exposure control is to start

with the aperture priority mode

this is the mode that i would strongly

recommend that you focus on learning

because it's going to give you a

ton of mileage

as a professional wedding photographer

as a sports shooter i typically use

aperture priority mode even even in the

most

professional settings i will use

aperture priority mode for a very

specific reason

so aperture priority mode

tells the camera that we are changing

the aperture that's what it means

we change the aperture by default

by rotating the front control wheel and

we can see that indicated

with this orange

number f

as it changes

apertures are often very confusing for

beginners

the short definition is is that smaller

numbers mean

the opening of the lens is larger

larger numbers

mean

that the lens opening is smaller and

it's letting in less light so if you see

a f20 that's a very small opening if you

see an f1 it's a very large opening

and

if you're into interested in the math

it's basically the focal length of the

lens

divided by the opening size of the lens

in millimeters that's how we get these

numbers

so i can change the aperture size

but you'll notice something

the brightness is not changing it's it's

flickering a little bit but it's pretty

much the same brightness after a second

right

how is that even possible

if i am

making a lens opening smaller and

smaller and letting in less and less

light

it should be getting darker

so what's happening here is the camera

is adjusting

the shutter speed

as i

make that aperture smaller and smaller

the camera is using a longer and a

longer shutter speed to compensate for

the smaller aperture size the camera's

trying to help us

so aperture priority mode means

we dial in the aperture and the camera

dials in

the shutter speed

now i often get this question

is what are the settings i need for xyz

kind of shooting and i can never answer

it because

i don't know how much light is in your

shooting environment it changes

depending on how much light you have

what kind of shooting you're doing and i

can't just give these blanket statements

right so i want you to do an exercise

with me and i'm going to prove this to

you

how good the camera is at changing its

shutter speed i want you to take your

hand and slowly block the amount of

light coming into the camera

and you'll notice the shutter speed

is increasing

putting your hand in front of and taking

it away

the camera is still doing its job the

camera is making adjustments to the

shutter speed based on the amount of

light that's entering the lens

that is aperture priority it's a very

powerful tool if you're shooting in

changing lighting conditions so for

example as a wedding photographer we'd

be shooting the bride and the groom in

the chapel and now we're in the lobby

and now we're outside and within 20

seconds those are three different

exposures or brightnesses i'm shooting

in the camera does all of the changing

to the shutter speed for me so i don't

have to worry about

changing it on the fly right so very

very powerful thing to keep in mind we

change the aperture the camera changes

the shutter speed so the question then

becomes michael what if i want to change

the brightness

it's a great question

that is where exposure compensation

comes in it's right here the short

answer is we're going to turn our

exposure compensation dial to a plus

number and we'd be looking at the

viewfinder trying to figure out you know

how bright we want it

and we could take the picture oh i'm

still on electronic shutter let's get

rid of that

right

so now it's brighter

and we can also go in the opposite

direction

so it's a negative number now it's

negative 2.

right so i want to take a minute and

explain

how exposure compensation is working

in this shooting situation at 1 40th of

a second with an even exposure when i

rotate the dial to say plus plus one

what this is telling us for every one

it's twice the amount of light entering

the camera

and we can prove this as i turn it down

to zero again we're at 140th

so what we're basically saying is camera

we want you to double the amount of

light coming into the lens

and we know this is true because 1 40th

of a second plus 140 of a second is 2 40

of a second if we simplify 240ths that's

1 20th

right

here it is

now if i was to say let's say we wanted

to add

one more full stop what do you think the

shutter speed would be

if you said one tenth of a second you're

absolutely correct and we can even go up

one more

to three stops

one fifth of a second so every exposure

value unit represents twice the amount

of light and that's reflected in the

shutter speed

and that's what exposure compensation

values mean or stops we're talking about

stops of light

so when you hear that phrase

you might hear it with flash you may

hear shutter speed

one stop of light

is twice the amount of another amount of

light that's what we're really getting

to when we see exposure values

now there are some very important

barriers to keep in mind when we're

shooting an aperture priority

a shutter speed of 1 40th

handheld

many of your pictures are going to be

blurry because we are moving around our

subject is moving and we want to use

faster shutter speeds when we're hand

holding the camera we're even getting

this warning here right

so

we want a faster shutter speed and i'm

looking at this okay we can maybe we can

turn our f-stops

wider but we've run into a limit of the

lens the lens this particular kit lens

at this focal length can only open to f5

so the question you should be asking

yourself was wow i want a faster shutter

speed but i'm only at f5 man what can i

do

you know you can you can add a light

think about it for a minute we haven't

talked about iso

but if you are familiar with iso we

could come in and bump our iso up

now an iso

is a boost of the sensor and there are

some drawbacks to using a very high iso

number

but when we added the iso in here you

can see that the shutter speed changed

and this is something

that some refer to as the exposure

triangle i i don't like that term

because it's really shutter speed and

aperture that are controlling the amount

of light the iso is an electronic gain

it's a it's basically a way to cheat

in in the time of film days we would use

more sensitive film it would be more

grainy right

in the age of digital cameras we can

just adjust this on the fly and it's

changing how much gain or how much boost

we're adding to the sensor

now there's something i want to point

out here

and just for the sake of

the lesson

i'm going to turn this way up so you can

see what a really

grainy

iso looks like we turned it way up the

camera shows a very fast shutter speed

we're going to zoom in

and look at

the edge of the blind here you can see

it's almost like salt and pepper it's

almost sort of like grainy

and that's what high isos do is they add

digital noise to the image

so as tempted as you may be to bump that

iso up whenever you need new light you

can't really do it

limitlessly because it's going to

introduce this grain

now if i pick an image

i'm playing back the images

from earlier

with an iso of 400 and i zoom in

you can see that that graininess isn't

there

and that's the trade-off with iso very

high isos are grainy it's going to give

you a boost very low isos are not so

grainy but you don't have that

electronic boost when you need it

i was shooting in a in a gym last week

for sports and it was just dark so i had

no choice i was shooting at 1200 1600

because i needed that fast shutter speed

most of the time i like to stay

at 400 or under for my iso

uh but these cameras are quite capable

of shooting 1600 3200 without really

getting a lot of grain it just kind of

depends on

what you're doing

so

my advice is that if you're shooting in

aperture priority mode is to always

sneak a peek at your shutter speed keep

an eye on this we want to make sure

that the shutter speed is 1 60 of a

second or higher if we're hand holding

it

if we're shooting sports

we want this number to be

usually almost always 1 500th of a

second or faster

some slower you know sports certain

types of like golf for example you could

probably get away with one 250th maybe

children

but once you get to an adult athlete

that's running

you're going to need at least one 500th

of a second maybe even faster so

always sneak a peek on your shutter

speed when you are in aperture priority

mode now if we switch the mode dial to s

s stands for

shutter

priority

this is the opposite

of aperture priority in shutter priority

when we rotate with our primary numero

uno finger primary front wheel dial is

your primary

it's going to change the shutter speed

not the aperture this is why

users will get confused they're like oh

my gosh i thought this was the aperture

in manual mode it's the aperture

but in aperture priority mode or shutter

prior priority mode it's going to change

the primary setting

and in shutter priority

we dial in the shutter speed and the

camera changes the aperture

isn't that crazy

watch this

take your hand like we did earlier cover

the lens the camera will start to change

the aperture not the shutter speed

so shutter priority is the exact

opposite

of aperture priority

we dial in the shutter speed the camera

handles the aperture

sometimes beginners will use shutter

priority for sports they'll be out at

the track and they'll say well michael

said shoot at 1 500th of a second and

they'll dial it in

and they're like oh my gosh it's dark

this is going to happen to you you know

if you're shooting on shutter priority

camera's blinking it is not happy

the exposure preview is telling us it's

going to be too dark

what's happening here is the camera is

protesting it's saying for the shutter

speed that you have dialed in i cannot

open the aperture anymore it's

impossible and this is the result that

you're going to get if you take the

picture

so when you see this there is a way out

of it like we did with aperture priority

and that is to bump up our iso again we

don't want to do it if we don't have to

but we will if it's the only way we can

get the picture let's just turn it up to

6400.

now the blinking has stopped

so we've seen in both situations there

are limits of physics in terms of the

shutter speed and the aperture that may

not give us the result that we want

and if we bump up our iso now we can use

a faster shutter speed and the camera is

saying this is the result that you'll

get

so that is shutter priority and the

truth of the matter is i almost never

use shutter priority even when i'm

shooting sports

i prefer

aperture priority

bump up my iso and i just sneak a peek

at the shutter speed i'm always looking

here to make sure it's above 1 500

if not i'll bump my iso up but that's

just the way i shoot i know some people

that like shutter priority they just

want to dial it in it's easier for them

to keep track of

do whatever works for you i just really

like aperture priority

so the third mode here is the program

mode and this one's a little wacky

because when i rotate the front control

wheel you can see

both the shutter speed and the aperture

are changing

and

what's happening is the camera is giving

different combinations so if you know

you need you know a fast shutter speed

for sports you may try to do something

like this program mode is basically

you're taking the training wheels off of

the dummy mode but i i know

professionals that actually use program

mode and they use it all the time

something you'll notice here is the

exposure compensation stays respected

when we jump between the p s or a mode

so if i bump this up or bump it down the

camera will remember it as i'm jumping

through those three modes so we can

always

just turn it back to zero and if we did

we're worried about bumping this we

could just lock it so now it doesn't

change

so we've talked about the program mode

talked about the aperture priority

shutter priority and now we're going to

talk about

the manual mode

manual mode is the mode that i

personally use when i have

enough time so i'm not being rushed and

not at an event i'm not dealing with

changing lighting situations or maybe

i'm dealing with strobes

in the manual mode is exactly like it

sounds

it means that we change the aperture

rotating the front control wheel

we can change the shutter speed speed by

rotating the

left rear control wheel and the camera

doesn't change anything even if we put

the hand or hand in front of the camera

there's no changes it's telling us

there's a problem

but the exposure compensation turns into

a different indicator now

watch here we have the exposure

compensation indicator and here we have

the mm

manual

metering

the camera is telling us how over or

under exposed it thinks it'll be

oh more than

two exposure values

so that's what's going on is there is no

exposure compensation

in the manual mode we dial in the

shutter speed down the aperture we dial

in the iso and we shoot

and it gives you the the greatest amount

of control

something i need to point out here is

there is also something referred to as

auto iso

some people love it some people hate it

i i think it has a time in place for

example if you were shooting indoor

sports mma for example where you have

changing lighting conditions you know

and athletes moving where you need to

dial in let's say a fast shutter speed

maybe 1 500th of a second

and you have a set aperture and you have

changing lighting conditions well

now we can change that we can give that

control over to the camera and the

camera would change

the iso i don't recommend really doing

this unless you're dealing with these

very wide

lighting condition changes because the

camera is going to do what it thinks is

best now we can set limits on this in

the deep menu but

very rare situations i will use this i

know some people that love it because

they don't have to change their iso at

all they just put it on auto iso and

they shoot until they tell their hearts

content

but again that problem is is when the

camera picks a very high iso and

introduces grain so for that reason i

mostly like to dial in my iso

on my own

this is saying it's way too dark

so that is a quick overview of the mode

dial

changing the exposure settings in each

of the different modes and explaining

the philosophies of use and the ideas

behind them

again just keep in mind one sixtieth of

a shutter speed if you're hand holding

say for a portrait

one five hundredth of a second for adult

athletes running those are the minimum

shutter speeds that you want

if you're shooting very telephoto

you want to do the reciprocal rule at

the minimum that's for example if you

have a 200 millimeter lens

you're going to want a 1 200 of a second

if you're 800 millimeter lens 1 800 of a

second because movement is magnified

over distance so if you're if you're

trying to keep sharp images that those

are definitely some good rules of thumb

for this lesson i want to talk about the

metering modes and so i have set up a

light

it's just the headlamp on a tripod to

demonstrate how our metering modes work

now if you if you're unsure just leave

it on the evaluative metering mode we

can access our metering modes again by

pushing our fn bet button and scrolling

over here to our metering modes

now the easiest way for me to explain

this

is to talk about

the spot metering mode first

here it is

and you notice some weird things going

on with the camera

i'm going to change this and make sure

we're on aperture priority it's kind of

hard to see but there's a little circle

there

and as i move it away from the light you

can see that it's getting brighter right

but when i move that little circle over

the light now everything's getting dark

and if i keep on turning it now it gets

bright again

what in the world is happening here

so what the metering modes are

essentially they are patterns that we're

telling the camera to look at

into and to measure the light in that

pattern so in the spot metering mode

we're telling the camera to look in this

little spot

and to make the exposure adjustment to

the shutter speed right aperture

priority

based on the light entering that circle

so when i move that circle over a bright

light

now the camera is recommending a much

faster shutter speed it's saying hey

this is really really bright in here we

might want to turn this down right

that's what's going on with metering

modes it's very useful when you're using

p

s or a modes

now this isn't the only shape obviously

we have more shapes in here

the multi metering mode is kind of like

a general purpose one there are

different patterns

different sections you can see for the

most part it doesn't change until i get

to the very extreme edges it prioritizes

the center and in these quadrants here

i think it's a great general purpose

metering mode i think most of you

probably be fine on it using that

and then there is a center weighted one

we don't see any lines here but it gives

it gives more weight to the center area

not quite as tight as the spot

but you can see it getting darker as we

move that light towards the middle

pretty good general purpose one if you

like shooting into like heavy bat

backlit situations like a portrait

photographer who likes to shoot the sun

through vegetation you know i've seen

those

a lot of them use the center weighted

metering mode

again here's our spot we can even go to

a large spot versus a standard spot

we can do an entire screen where it's

evaluating everything in the screen

evenly

we could even go to a highlight which

means no matter where that highlight is

well it looks like there's a little bit

of weight in the center it's going to go

off let's talk about the deep menu

system there is a huge amount of

information in here i stopped counting a

few cameras ago when it was like 70 or

80 items

and sony has made huge strides in making

this more

easy to navigate

you'll notice that on the far left we

have different colored tabs to start

gray is the my menu which we will

customize at the end it's going to make

sense if i show you this later

red is for shooting

pink is your exposure and color control

focus is purple

playback is blue

using the wi-fi or network settings is

green

and our camera settings are found in the

yellow tab and i'm navigating using this

directional pad up down left right

so the way this works is that every tab

has a different number of pages within

them

you can see those pages as we scroll

down some of them have more than one

sheet of pages so you can see this

little arrow here on the bottom scroll

down

and then to the right of those we have

different camera settings so you're

seeing this tree this network of

different menu options

the beautiful thing about this is now we

can use our touch screen to help

navigate

that all that wasn't always there a

fairly recent update very nice thank you

sony i've been asking for that for years

and what i'm going to do is i'm going to

show you the menu items that you're

going to be accessing a lot if something

in here is a feature that requires a

demonstration we are going to set those

aside for the crash course and i will

give you a full lesson on those

and you can also use your your joystick

to navigate you can push into the camera

body if you want to select something

with a joystick there's so there's a

number of different ways that we can

select using the set button whatever is

easiest for you

for the sake of time i'm going to give

you the most important settings that i

think you should set your camera to if

there's a feature in here that requires

a demonstration we'll do that on the

crash course there is a ton of

information so

some of these things are not as

important you may find me skipping those

so number one image quality as i push to

the right on the directional pad we have

the ability to change the file formats

and the types of files that we're

writing to our memory card depending on

whether we're shooting stills or video

jpeg is

just as you know it's a simple jpeg

image it's not raw it's it's basically

where the camera takes a raw image

throws away a lot of data and says this

is the most important

that's what we know is jpeg very small

file sizes with

for the most part a lots of information

that we can use that you're used to and

you've been using this for years so

these new two file formats here height

high efficiency image format the

differences between jpeg this jpeg and

these other two

is the amount of color information that

we're finding and i would say in the

beginning just stick with jpeg but if

you wanted

10 bit color

420 you know what that is there it is

and if you want 10 bit 422 there it is i

have a video on youtube explaining what

those terms mean and this is where we

select it if you're a beginner stick

with jpeg

image quality settings allows us to tell

the camera

where to write different file types

depending on the type of shooting and

preference we have

think of it as if we have two cards in

the camera which one do we want to

record stills or video that's probably

the easiest example

but when we come into this menu we have

slot one and we have our raw and jpeg

all this stuff right that we've talked

about down here we have the record media

settings

the record media settings allow us to

designate what is being written to which

slot

so the way it's set up right now is i

have

stills that's the camera icon that means

still images it's recording to slot one

and i have video

images recorded to slot two pretty

straightforward right well some of you

are wedding photographers and portrait

photographers are you doing paid work

and you don't really want video

but rather you want

uh

backups you want them simultaneously

written to both memory cards so in that

case we can come in here

and select simultaneous recording

and also designate this for simultaneous

recording and then when we come into our

image quality settings

you can see that we have raw and jpegs

written to both memory cards we have the

raw type here if we wanted to change

that

we have the jpeg quality maybe it's

light we'll change it to fine and we

have the image size and we would hit ok

and it would save those settings

there's some other ways we can do this

let's say we wanted to sort

our images between jpegs and raw

so now we have

a way to come in here

and you can see that

we have the two slots represented here

and because we only have jpeg selected

it's only giving us jpeg but let's say

we can designate this as raw

so we could have one slot for our raw

files

we could have the other slot for our

jpeg

we can change

the file type as they're being written

file size obviously raw is the full

resolution

and we can change these settings as i've

already demonstrated it's really pretty

nice kind of confusing the first time

you go through it

but let's just go to simultaneous

recording for now

so this is because there's only one

column now it's basically saying that

the same files the same exact files are

being written to both memory cards so

that's the important distinction between

sort and simultaneous

i'm gonna turn this back to one

now there is another option

we see in here which is auto switch

media which basically means is that if

you are shooting stills as we have the

setup to memory card one and it fills up

now the camera will switch it over to

memory card two and just continue to

record the images you don't have to

worry about changing your memory cards

or reading hey your memory cards are

full

a lot of information in here but once

you get the hang of it's pretty

straightforward and you will set this up

according to your shooting style aspect

ratio i recommend keeping it at three to

two that's the full sensor aspect ratio

for the most part if you have a reason

to change it this is where you would do

it i have friends that like shooting at

16 by nine and have another friend like

shooting

in a square format one by one

something you'll notice here is that we

have a different icon it's video camera

so this is saying

the video camera file format

when we come in here it gives us this

warning hey this is you're in a still

shooting mode it's not the video

settings

it's asking what video format do we want

to record in and there's lots of

different kinds of information in here

suffice to say

that as we go higher up on this list we

have

better data rates faster data rates and

as we go lower

it's more compressed so

i'll demonstrate the data rates in just

a second but in the beginning i like to

shoot 4k

it's gonna you know depend on your

computer if your computer can handle

these faster data rates just because of

the way the video files are created

but we can see the data rates when we

come into movie settings

hit okay

and now we have two settings in here the

first is the record frame rate

so if you're shooting for youtube or

you're shooting for video you're almost

always on 30p which is 30 frames per

second you can also shoot at 60 frames

per second if you want

or 24 frames per second which is the

standard for film so if you were making

a narrative film and you wanted to get

that film-like look you would choose

24. if you're shooting for youtube you'd

go 30 or 60. i almost always shoot on

30.

this setting here is talking about this

data rate that i was just mentioning

earlier

so the m

refers to mega bits per second and

there's eight megabits per megabyte

and the higher

data rates mean there's in this case

there's even more color information 422

10 bit if you're unfamiliar with those

terms again i have a video on youtube

that will explain it or you can go with

100 megabits per second 4208 bit and

this is typically what i'm recording at

if i am doing a youtube video that's

what i would recommend if you are

shooting in 4k but again if you wanted

to change

you know if you wanted to come in here

and look at the hs 4k just to see what's

different we hit ok

and we get

a couple more options in terms of the

100 megabit

10 bit 422 or if you wanted to go 50 10

bit so

really depends on what you're trying to

do we'll be spending a lot more time on

the video settings and some of these

descriptions in the crash course

aps-c s35 shooting

what this is doing is it's telling the

camera to use a smaller part of the

sensor if you want to force this you

would come up to on

if you want the camera to decide to do

it automatically when it recognizes a

crop sensor lens is connected to the

camera it will do it automatically

if you just wanted to shoot full frame

all the time you turn this off so some

people ask why would you want to crop

the sensor well because i have an

amazing 10 millimeter f4 lens that i use

on the gimbal

you know the steady basically steady cam

but it is a crop it was made for crop

sensors so it's not going to give full

image projection onto the sensor and

we'd have this you know a lot of black

it would just be black around the

corners but put it into crop mode and

now we have a great wide-angle lens

light wide angle lens that we can use on

a gimbal i've been using it for six

years

that's just one example there are sports

shooters who are willing to give up

resolution to just shoot crop and that's

fine too you know smaller file sizes

things of that nature but in the

beginning i would just say leave this to

auto

sometimes we'll come to menu items that

are grayed out and if you try to select

it sometimes it'll tell you and it will

be clear what you need to change and

sometimes it will not be as clear but

because i am on

a multiple burst mode it doesn't it

doesn't want me to do that so i'm going

to come up to

single shot come back down

and now we can talk about long exposure

noise reduction when we take images over

a second long they're considered long

exposures and sometimes we start to see

noise artifacts and grain artifacts for

very long exposures so we can turn this

on and the jpeg compression will clean

this up

i am pushing down on the directional pad

to get to the next page

high iso noise reduction is just like it

sounds if you are shooting very high

isos this would allow us to clean it up

i have it on normal most of the time for

my jpegs

hlg still image uh if this if we don't

have a high file selected we're not

going to see this so we'd have to come

back up

come into a high

high efficiency image format turn that

on and then we can come back back down

in h

lg still images on

in this essentially think of it as a

high dynamic range jpeg

there's more color information in there

my view on this is that if you're

shooting

for dynamic range and color information

just shoot in a raw format you know

sometimes high files are a little tricky

to manage but if you wanted to use it

this is what you would do you turn it on

and you would have this feature

basically higher dynamic range available

in your high files

again we come down to color space and

now we can't select it because we have

this turned on

and we need to come back up to

go to jpeg only come back down

and so now we've come back to the color

space of srgb

color spaces essentially mean

it's a range of colors the camera is

using to produce in this example jpegs

in most cases we're going to use srgb if

you are shooting for a magazine and

you're familiar with adobe rgb or you're

doing a lot of print work you're going

to select adobe rgb

uh the beginning and intermediate

shooters out there you're going to stick

with srgb

lens compensation very important to know

about this so what this is is

sony makes software to help clean up a

lot of this for example shading

compensation is this darkening in the

corners you'll see with wide angle

lenses

chromatic aberration is a fringing that

you will see

as a blue or purple or you know yellow

or

in some cases magenta green

and basically it's very annoying when

you zoom in and see this in high

contrast areas and this will allow to

clean up

we also have this option here for

distortion compensation i'm not using a

wide angle lens but if i had a wide

angle lens it would also clean up and

for the most part i would recommend

leaving these on allow

the software to clean it up a little bit

it's even more important when we're

talking about video because we're

shooting you know 24 or 30 frames a

second that's a lot of defect that we're

baking into the file that's not easy to

clean up when we're done especially when

we're shooting with wide angle lenses so

for the most part yeah i just leave

these on auto

so that was only the first tab we have

so much information

so when we come into the media i like

that they have the format memory card

here so if i wanted to clear off my

memory cards this is where i would do it

i'm not going to do it now because i've

been taking some images on here but it

allows us to wipe the memory card clean

everything will be erased and reset this

is how i redo my memory cards after

everything's been backed up twice always

have two copies of your images probably

the best way to do it is one on the

cloud one on an external hard drive or

two external hard drives maybe a dropbox

or something like that

you want to always keep

one file somewhere else and i've i've

had a friend who lost all of her

children images she kept one hard drive

and the hard drive just eventually

failed and she's been trying to get it

recovered and it's been a nightmare so

you always want two copies

before you back this up what i'd

recommend is get into a workflow where

where you are always recording

the images to two places before you

format your memory cards record media

settings we've already seen and this is

a direct way to access this instead of

going through

all of the other ones up here as we did

earlier it's the same thing as this guy

right here so we've seen this

recover image database refers to if you

put your memory card into a computer and

the database is corrupted by the

computer and you put your memory card

back into the camera

sometimes you'll have playback issues

and this feature will allow it to be

rewritten or re-fixed so you can still

access your images hasn't happened to me

off the top of my memory but sony put it

in here for a reason so if you see that

this is how you fix it and then finally

we have display media if we just want to

see the information that we have on our

memory cards in terms of

you know what we're shooting on the file

size the number of images remaining and

then the

video settings so

that is tab two

tab three we're talking about how files

are written to our memory card the file

settings allow us to designate

whether this is a series meaning it's

continuously counting

every time you switch the memory card or

do you want to reset it i kind of like

the series because it allows us to keep

track of these different file numbers

right

forest file number reset so if you

wanted to force a change like if you

were shooting two events in a day and

you wanted to reset the memory cards

this is where you'd do it

you can change the folder name or you

can just cancel out

so we can also change the first three

letters

if we wanted to if i wanted to delete

these and write something else i could

so i'm typing and i'm waiting

i'm going to cancel this

also cancel this

another thing we can do is that if we

want to change the folder name where the

images are held on our memory card we

could come in and select a date form i

just leave it on standard form

something that we can do is have

multiple folders on our memory card if

we wanted to create a new folder we

could

i'm just going to select that and hit ok

and then when i come into select record

folder

now i have two different folders the

original one and the one i just created

i've done this a couple times when i'm

shooting events where i have maybe two

events in the same day and i just

automatically want to keep them separate

it's just me kind of an easy way to do

it

so your iptc information deals with you

if you're working for the international

press telecommunications council so if

you don't know what this is don't worry

about it it's essentially a way for

reporters to embed their information

into the exif data of the files

we can do the same with copyright

information if you wanted to write your

copyright or your name

and embed that information into your

memory cards also pretty cool idea

just a way to help protect your images

when you're giving them out to people

you know you want to help control that

and this is also writing the serial

number of the camera onto the exif data

because each camera has a specific

serial number so you know if you're

worried about your images your original

image is getting ripped off and you have

a way to prove it hey this is the serial

number of the camera this is my

copyright information this is where we

would set this up

this next menu item shooting mode is

very confusing because of how it's

worded

suffice it to say that on our mode dial

on the top of the camera we have three

numbers up there

those three numbers are presets where we

can set the camera up exactly the way we

like it and we can save the presets to

each of those numbers and it will be

saved on the camera so you know there's

different shooting style types so if

you're a sports shooter you may prefer a

certain shooting mode you may like to

shoot on aperture priority but if you're

shooting strobes then you may want some

different settings and it's kind of a

pain to have to set the camera up

exactly the way you like it for each

kind of shooting so those three numbers

on the top of the camera allow us to

record our camera settings to each of

those slots that said

we can also save

four additional slots onto the memory

card where we can say hey we want to

save these settings it's on the memory

card

which we should be able to transfer

those settings from one camera to the

other now the way we go about this is a

little bit different and it can be

really confusing

so the idea is is let's say i'm shooting

and just for the sake of this example

i'll go with

shutter priority you can see it here

and i like my drive mode a certain way

just for the sake of this example

everything else is the way i like it

right

so then i would come into the menu

and set up camera set memory and you can

see at the top we have the three numbers

this these correlate with the three

numbers on our mode dial and then we

have m1 two three and four those

correlate with

software memory settings that we'd put

into a memory card

this is asking where do you want me to

save all of these settings that you have

saved up it's

right

well i'm going to say just for the sake

of this example let's save it to memory

slot 3.

now it says it's registered right

so you can't see this but as i rotate

the mode dial

i'm going to go through

1

2

[Music]

three and you can see

the mode is reflected in what i just

saved and all of those camera settings

are saved to that position

most beginning in intermediate

photographers you're not going to need

more than three of these things and so

you would just remember hey sports

shooting is

is position three maybe portrait

shooting is position one you know after

you've saved them

this is where it gets a little confusing

is let's say

that you wanted to save it to a memory

card

use one of these extra slots

so let's just save it right here

m1

now it's registered

i'm going to turn this off of these

numbers to show you a problem you're

going to have

come back in

and now the recall camera setting is

grayed out and when you come into it

says hey this is disabled

all right what sony wants us to do is to

turn the mode dial to one of the numbers

once we do that we can come back in now

it's available

and we can choose

any of them that makes sense so i have

empty slots

here's the m1

so that is how it works

think of the numbers only as saving to

the camera m one two three and four to

the memory card we can even designate

where that information is stored whether

slot one or slot two you should be able

to take that memory card and transfer to

another camera and then recall it

recall media right

this last item here is similar to what

we just described only

we would save our camera settings to

recall custom hold one two or three

we can come in here and select from the

menu specifically how we want to do it

or we can just import the current

setting

and then we would register it

so what this will allow us to do is in

our button customizations we could set

up different buttons that if we were to

push and hold that button it would

recall those settings as long as that

button is held down

a little bit more complex but some

people like it

that's how you do it

usb streaming refers to using our

cameras in a usb cable to stream video

for example to the internet or zoom call

and you can come in here and choose the

resolution and frame rate

in this case i would just recommend

sticking with hd 30 frames per second

it's a good resolution when we go to 4k

we lose the number of frames per second

it's not going to look as good and then

we have a higher data rate if you want

it to go at 60 frames per second

beginner should start here

and we also have the ability to also

record simultaneously to our memory

cards and if you wanted to do that just

keep in mind if you have dual recording

there is going to be a greater use of

power

drive mode here deals with what we've

already discussed about the drive mode

when we were demonstrating this this is

a menu way to access these settings and

it's easier to

access through the fn menu we have our

bracket settings which is when we're

telling the camera to take a series of

different exposures that i've already

demonstrated

we can use a self timer with a bracket 2

5 or 10 seconds this would be used if

you didn't want to shake the camera or

have any vibrations you would turn this

on

and there would be a two second timer

we can also change the order of the

exposures from an even to an under to an

overexposure so

under exposure is represented with the

negative overexposure is represented

with a positive and then even is zero

this just changes the order of how the

images are recorded to the memory card

the intervalometer shooting is an

excellent feature that i will

demonstrate on the crash course it's a

little bit complex but i'm going to take

you down to the beach to show you how i

would shoot a sunset using this feature

suffice it to say the interval shoot

function allows us to program the camera

to take images at different intervals so

i like to do it with sunsets and we can

see the progression of the clouds and

how the sun moves over time it's a

pretty cool feature so if we turn this

on now we have the ability to change

different intervals

the number of shots things of that

nature and again i'll be demonstrating

this on the crash course

shutter and silent shooting features

if we are shooting for example on a

movie set and we have to be perfectly

quiet we could come into this setting

go to silent mode and turn it on

and what this assumes is the camera is

going to make all of the cameras

features as silent as possible including

you know how you're handling it beat

features the sound the shutter makes

when you close all turn it off all of

those things are automatically silent

if you do not want those features

included in silent shooting you could

come in here and select which features

to not target

for example the aperture drive in auto

focus

or if we didn't want to

hear the shutter close when we powered

it off we could select not target

that's just basically what it's allowing

us to do is to tweak how silent you want

your camera

now there's this mention of auto pixel

mapping pixel mapping is typically done

automatically but because it makes some

noise we can designate to turn it off

dead pixels you'll see as red or white

pixels on every image and pixel mapping

resets that problem and feature so that

this is what this is referring to

some other features we have in here is

just selecting the shutter type we can't

do it because we're in the silent mode

so we could select mechanical or

electronic shutter

by default our camera is going to use an

electronic first shutter curtain

traditional film cameras used two

mechanical shutters that would expose

the media and then

cover the media as you're shooting

in in most cases first shutter

electronic curtain is fine

in very extreme types of shooting very

rapid sports or in other situations you

may occasionally see something a little

weird and in those cases you would want

to come in and change this to off that

would make it a dual mechanical shutter

release without lens simply means that

we can take pictures without a lens

being recognized this is used when

adapting non-sony compatible lenses

owner let's over let's say you can you

have an adapter and you're putting a

like an old zeiss lens or something from

russia on on the front of it camera

doesn't recognize it this would allow us

to still take pictures with it pinhole

cameras things of that nature

release shutter without a card this

means we can

release the shutter without having a

memory card in it i had a couple email

me years ago saying where are my images

we can't find them on the camera they

had this feature turned on they went on

a trip and they didn't have any images

something to keep in mind and the

anti-flicker set allows us to access

some tools to minimize flickering

i'm not going to go into this one but

this is how you access the settings i

think it's easier to adjust the shutter

speed depending on the shooting

environment we're in you will also

occasionally see flicker in certain

types of sodium based lamps like street

lights in let's say race car trackway

kind of thing and some of these tools

can be very useful

so i'm going to turn this to off

steadyshot deals with the image sensor

stabilization if you want to turn that

off you could do so here

steady shot the auto setting recognizes

sony and sony compatible lenses where

the camera would recognize the focal

length

if again you're using a very old lens

and you wanted to set the image

stabilizer based on focal length this is

how you would do it

come in here and set that

but in the meantime i would recommend

just leaving this on auto

this next feature zoom deals with

specific sony lenses that have powered

zoom motors

essentially it allows us to control how

the zoom works whether it's an optical

zoom a digital zoom or a special feature

referred to by sony as

clear image zoom which the idea is you

can zoom in without losing resolution

there are some really cool things you

can do with lenses that are compatible

including adjust your zoom speeds on

standby whether you're recording

shooting display deals with what we want

to see on our viewfinder as we are

shooting for example if we wanted to

have a grid line display

there it is

we can change the type of grid

there's one with diagonals so if

somebody's doing a lot of architecture

maybe interior real estate

or you need specific alignment tools

this is where you would set that

live view display set we've talked about

this already here we have the setting

turned to on this is going to give us an

exposure preview there are situations

where you will want to turn this off for

example if you're shooting with strobes

in a studio setting you would come in

and turn it off

but for most of you i would recommend

leaving it on

we can even adjust whether this is

working for

natural lighting in flash or natural

lighting only

in certain low light shooting situations

you may see this very low frame rate

what's happening is the camera is trying

to

allow us to see what's going on

by using longer exposures so this would

allow us to

turn that limit on to prevent that from

happening

and that ladies and gentlemen is just

the red tab

for

stills for shooting stills something i

need to point out is that when we rotate

the mode

to a video icon and we come back into

the menu you're going to notice we have

some items

specific for video shooting and i will

cover these near the end of the menu

section the important ones because i

don't want to have confusion as i'm

going through these the pink tab are the

formal exposure settings in the deep

menu i there's not a lot of things in

here i really access because you can get

to them

you know through the shooting menu

through the function menu but there are

a couple important things i do want to

point out

so in this first item number one

exposure control for iso again this is

just a formal way to change it from the

deep menu it doesn't make sense to me

because you can do this while you're

shooting pretty straightforward

but the iso limit range

does have an option in terms of setting

your minimum and maximum if you don't

think you're ever going to use for

example 200 000 iso we would

set this lower we also have the ability

to set the

auto iso

minimum shutter speed and this is when

we're shooting for example let's say on

aperture priority and we have auto iso

the camera has the ability to change

that shutter speed and if we want to set

a hard limit on it this is where we

would do this for example if we're doing

sport shooting and we don't want the

camera to use

a shutter speed slower than let's say 1

500th of a second we could come in here

and designate that we can say that the

absolute minimum shutter speed would

need to be 1 500th of a second

that's its purpose and use otherwise

just leave it on to this standard

setting and the camera will make the

decision we have some flexibility when

it says fast or slower but

until you get into the heavy sport

shooting and know exactly the shutter

speed that you want this may not be

necessary so just leave it here for now

exposure compensation again this is a

formal place in the deep menu to set it

we've demonstrated this in the exposure

lesson

we can change the increments

of the exposure stop so if we want to go

by half stops we could i have it on

third stops

this feature allows us to adjust the

standard for each of the metering modes

i would say leave it here for now

metering we talked about in

demonstrating with the flashlight in

terms of how they work

we can select those metering modes here

face priority in multi-metering mode

essentially gives the camera permission

to

value faced patterns higher in its

calculation of what the exposure setting

should be i think it's very useful but

if you like full control for example

when you're using aperture priority over

your exposure settings you might want to

turn this off this is where you would do

it

this is actually a really important

setting

it's the spot metering point what it

means is that when we are using the spot

metering mode do you want it to be

locked to the center point as i

demonstrated or would you prefer it to

be associated with your focusing square

for example a small a medium or a large

focusing square you would come in here

in focus point link that is going to tie

your spot metering mode to your single

focusing square

so when we're shooting with ps or a

modes

sometimes you may want to lock your

exposure you can do it with the auto

exposure lock feature on this button

or

how most cameras work is when we push

the shutter button halfway down or

achieve focusing lock

and that is what we see in here so when

we get focusing lock

it's going to lock the exposure

if you want it to lock with a halfway

shutter button depression

you can come here select on or you can

turn it off completely and let the

camera update the exposure even pushing

through the shutter button

so on the a74 there is no built-in flash

and so if we add an external flash we

would have the controls of the flash

unit in most cases there are depends on

the flash that you're using some flashes

don't have those controls

but for all of the flashes that i teach

i recommend getting something

significant and substantial like minimum

godox tt685

made for sony it's about 120

great way to introduce yourself to flash

and learn those techniques i talk about

them on the crash course

but if you are using a flash that you

don't have those controls over you could

come in here for example and choose

regular flash

slow sync flash where you might be

firing flash with a very long shutter

speed in aperture priority mode

or you might want to fire the flash

at the end of the exposure at the rear

curtain immediately before the rear

curtain lifts so that's what these

settings mean again i don't recommend

doing a lot of this from the camera

we have flash exposure compensation i'll

demonstrate this on the crash course

with the flash and show you how it works

we can control our exposure compensation

for both ambient light and reflected

light reflected light is is the term i

use for flash

there are some really great wireless

flash settings anytime i do wireless

flash i'm typically putting on a

commander unit so something that can

control the external

speed lights and godox has one i think

it's like 60 bucks totally worth it very

very useful powerful reliable and i also

cover that on the crash course

red eye reduction helps reduce obviously

red eye when you're taking a picture

this feature by default is turned off

and this feature here deals with

external speed lights not connected to

the camera if you wanted to control some

of that information customization firing

so this tab white balance this is the

same options that we had in the other

white balance lesson this is just the

formal deep menu way to access it

we have different priority sets when

using auto white balance there's a

standard and then we can also shift

between

ambient light in more think of this

towards a little bit more yellowish and

think of this as obviously more white i

leave it here for now

we also have the ability to lock our

auto white balance with a halfway

shutter button depression

i would leave this off for now

the color and tone features allow us to

essentially change the ingredients of

how jpegs are baked

obviously we take a picture it's raw

data the camera's processor converts it

into a jpeg image and if you compare a

jpeg image to a raw image they look very

different

this is where some of these settings

will start to happen there's also some

in the lens profile settings but just

going through each of these real quick

the dynamic range optimizer deals with

slight differences in dynamic range in

tones in terms of shades of bright and

dark

the idea here is that maybe it'll make

the darkers a little bit easier to see

adding some detail and maybe adjusting a

little bit of the highlights but in some

cases you won't really notice it a whole

lot

i leave it on and i tell beginners to

leave it on in the beginning but if you

want full control over the exposure and

you don't want that extra help for jpegs

you would turn it off

the creative looks deal with different

sets of information that the camera is

making for recommended shooting

ingredients if you're baking jpegs so to

speak

when we come in here we mostly see these

letters st stands for standard pt is

portrait the nt is like a neutral tone

vv is vivid for example for shooting

landscapes we may get more vivid blues

and greens

but

these are just presets but the idea on

this is that you can push to the right

and you can adjust things like your

contrast highlights

shadows

fade

saturation

sharpness

sharpness range

and clarity this is a little bit more

important i feel when shooting video

because video

if depending on what your format you're

shooting in the information is mostly

cooked into a jpeg type of video format

with still images we can import those

and have greater control but what i tell

beginners is don't worry about this for

now it's just more complex than you need

to worry about focus on your exposure

settings and composition

in focusing correctly and then you can

come in here and play in this if you

become a heavy jpeg shooter and you want

your jpegs to be a little bit sharper a

little bit more saturated

and the idea on this is that if we

continue to come down you're going to

notice that we'll get

some numbers

and those number sets are

basically presets where we can designate

which creative type we want to start

with by pushing up or down

as well as the individual settings and

then those would be saved and we could

jump to them anytime in the future but

again beginning in intermediate

photographers you don't need to worry

about this right now that's what it does

picture profiles takes this to a

completely different level and again we

find that videographers use these

settings more maybe they want to get a

flat look with low contrast on their

video because they want to add those

into post there's different color spaces

different gamuts s-log for example

for beginning and intermediate

photographers and videographers i would

say do not worry about this for now

there's tons of information out there

people have recipes that they like for

their video shooting but the idea is

you'd come in here

you would start a picture profile that

you want for example push the right we

have different black levels and gammas

knees

saturations it just takes it to a

completely different level again if

you're just getting started don't worry

about this for now leave it on zero

which is basically off

a soft skin effect applies to humans if

you want to soften the skin texture just

a little bit i personally prefer to do

this in photoshop if i'm doing any

retouching but some people like it you

can turn it on if you want to give it a

try

that's how you do it

zebra display is a powerful exposure

tool that will display diagonal lines or

marching ants on edges that are

overexposed we turn it on by coming in

and turning this on

and this is the key important thing is

you can set your zebra exposure level

it's asking when do you want these

marching ants to appear

i personally want to know when something

is completely overexposed at 100 or

greater so i'll click that i'm tapping

my shutter button and what i'm going to

do is just start turning up my iso

and when i get to the point that i'm

overexposed then we start to see the

zebras anything that's

overexposed or more i can see it as this

indicator

pretty useful thing to know about

come back in and turn it to off

the deep purple tab is for our focusing

systems

on the top page we have afmf

the focusing modes allow us to determine

in a formal location which focusing

modes we're using i prefer to do it with

the c3 button

these next two priority set in auto

focus single priority set and auto focus

continuous

allow us to tell the camera

which to prioritize

whether it's the auto focusing

or if it's the release

in the beginning you're going to find it

on balanced emphasis what these other

settings mean release means the camera

may take the shot without it being

completely in focus

when you have this setting af we're

telling the camera to make sure it's a

little bit more in focus before taking

the shot

i don't recommend

in autofocus continuous to focus on the

focus because you're dealing with

moving subjects and what you'll notice

is that it'll hesitate just a little bit

either release or balanced emphasis this

is going to be

kind of dependent on the type of sport

you're shooting but it makes more sense

for auto focus single because we're

trying to get that single focusing lock

and so this does kind of make sense in

this case

we can also change the

tracking sensitivity

whether it's more responsive or more

locked on in the beginning stick with

three

the autofocus illuminator is the little

light in front of the camera that will

kick on in dark situations we only have

two settings auto or off if you find it

turning on and you don't want it on you

would come in here and select off

aperture drive and auto focus for now

leave it on to standard i think that's

fine

and then we also have the auto focus

with shutter

in the event you want to customize your

camera for back button focus you would

come in here

and turn this to off and what that does

is it removes the focusing ability from

the shutter button so i'm pushing

halfway down on the shutter button

nothing's happening but when i push af

on

now i'm still getting my focus lock that

is how quick and easy back button focus

setup is

if you forget that you've set this

you know if you've turned this off in

your go back to front

shutter halfway depression focusing

you'll think your camera is broken

you're like oh you know what my focusing

is isn't working so just make sure that

you check that before thinking

something's wrong with your camera

and then we have the pre autofocus which

i recommend leaving turned off

if you turn this on what's going to

happen is the camera will attempt to

pre-focus wherever this focusing square

is and i have found that it kind of

messes up what i want to do when i'm

going for

very specific focusing points so i

usually turn this one off

the focusing areas we talked about this

is just another formal location that we

can navigate through them

the focus area limit you'll notice we

had tons of clusters to choose from and

if we don't want them appearing

into our focus cluster menu

we can come in here and turn these off

just gives us fewer options simplifies

it you're probably going to want to do

this once you become a niche shooter

switch vertical to horizontal auto focus

area

what this means is like so what i'm

demonstrating here is i'm holding the

camera in the landscape orientation if i

was to take the camera and rotate it

to the portrait orientation

that is what it's referring to as

vertical

so what this is asking is do you want to

maintain the location

of your auto focus point only or do you

want it to maintain the location of your

auto focusing point

and your auto focusing area and if you

select this what this means

is that when you bounce back and forth

between vertical and horizontal the

camera will remember both the area in

the specific location of the point the

last time you used it

so for example if you're shooting let's

say um some kind of a portrait shoot or

a person or a family and you're bouncing

back and forth between

landscape

and portrait orientation

every time you moved back the camera

would remember the exact position of

those focusing squares in the area that

you were using to me it makes sense to

put this on this middle selection but if

you don't want that you can leave it to

off

focus area color in the demonstration

the the focusing box was was white you

can change that to red if you want

auto focus area registration it's kind

of an advanced tool i would say the idea

is that you can save the exact position

of where a focusing square is so if i

come in here and turn this on

it's basically saying we can register a

focusing point by pressing and holding

down the fn button

so if i come back out and let's say i

put the focusing square right here i'm

going to push and hold the fn button

down

and it tells us that it's registered the

focusing area

and then when i

want to have a custom quick recall for

that

i would come into

when we talk about

the customization

i would select which button i want to

assign it to in this case it would be

here

i'm going to select that and then i'm

going to jump back

to

the auto focus area

and it's basically saying

this is the registered auto focus area

if i hold this down the focusing square

will automatically jump to that position

or i could tap it and lift my finger so

either one of those would

assign that auto focus point to the

button that you chose

i'm going to jump out

i'm just going to turn this off we could

also delete that registration if we

wanted to i'll say sure

autofocus area clear basically says do

you want your focusing cluster to

disappear after

a few moments i don't recommend this so

i leave it off

these next three can be pretty confusing

they're just subtle ways that we can see

which focusing square we're using when

we have our camera set up in certain

ways

i kind of like leaving this one to on

and

these first two to on

the area display for tracking you have

to be in a tracking

focusing cluster to see it

so if i come down to tracking

also make sure that we're on auto focus

continuous

basically what this means is that when

we're in a tracking mode

the focusing square stays on the screen

and for me i think this makes sense

because it allows you to reset

the camera is going to lock on we don't

have high contrast here so what's

happening is the tracking squares is

going up but the idea is that you would

know where to re-begin

your focusing as it's tracking the

moving subject so if you have lots of

people running around this tells you

where to tell the camera to look first

and the second one you're only going to

see

when you have like a wide or a zone

square on

so i come up to wide

if i focus you can see these little

green

boxes that's what this is referring to

if you don't want to see where it's

exactly focusing you would turn this off

phase detection area will only work with

certain compatible lenses so i would say

just don't worry about that for now

circular point of focus i would

definitely recommend turning this one on

to circulate

and what it means is that when we have a

focusing square especially something

like a spot

it means that when we reach the limit of

where we're focusing

the focusing cluster will jump to the

other side

right

or up and down or left and right it's

very useful

and we can also change

how fast that focusing square root will

move whether it's by a standard amount

or a large amount i have it on standard

for now

page three of the focusing system deals

with a lot of the customizations of face

to and eye detection

so we can prioritize

eye detection which we have turned on

already

and we can also determine whether this

is a human

animal or a bird

eye detection in animals is fairly new

and it's one of the most common comments

i see in our facebook groups how come

i'm not getting 100 keepers on animal or

bird eye detection and the truth of the

matter is the algorithm

can't always figure it out and so if

you're if you're getting 70 keepers you

should be pretty happy with this eye

detection this allows us to prioritize

whether we're looking for a human some

sort of creature or a bird specifically

so there is a custom feature that will

allow us to rapidly toggle between which

subject we're shooting in it's in the

button customizations i'm not going to

show it to you on this video but this

would allow us to limit which of those

three options we can toggle to

if we have it set up to a custom button

for example

our ael button so if we turned off the

bird

then we would only be able to toggle

between humans and animals

left or right eye selection this allows

us to tell the camera whether we want it

to jump to the left eye or the right eye

or to automatically choose i have it on

auto

i like having the frame on to tell me

when

we are dealing with face detection you

can see it as this white frame kind of

hard to see

but if you didn't want to see that you

could turn this to off

face memory means that we can tell the

camera to remember

specific face structures in humans

so if you have children and you're

shooting them a lot and they have their

friends and you just want to tell the

camera to try to find your child's face

this is how you would do it we'd say new

registration i have a model here

handsome guy

i'm going to shoot

putting his face in there

i'm going to register the face and now

the face is registered simple as that

right

again i wouldn't expect 100 keepers on

this

we can even determine the order of

multiple faces like who do you want to

show up

more often if you have a favorite child

maybe you would move them to the top you

can also delete the registered faces

now once that face is registered

we can also turn this on or off

you know if you're shooting an event

lots of people and your child isn't

there maybe you want to turn it off so

the camera won't be looking for your kid

in the crowd of faces right so i'm going

to turn this off for now

autofocus magnifier in manual focus

means is that when you are in manual

focus and you rotate your focusing ring

it is going to jump in so let's do that

real quick

coming into mf

i'm rotating

my focusing ring and it's jumping in i

prefer that personally

if you don't you would want to turn this

off

the focus magnifier activates a

magnifying feature that you can push

into your set button

and it will jump in i believe we

demonstrated this earlier

we can also determine

the

focusing time limit if you wanted it for

just a few seconds or no limit

we can determine the initial

magnification again of this focus

magnifier

whether it's at normal view or five

times zoom

and this last one's pretty cool it's

auto focus during focus magnifier

we're on manual focus right now so if i

come back in and turn this to let's say

auto focus single

come back up

activate my focus magnifier there it is

i'm going to press the set button to

zoom in

and you'll notice we have these little

crosshairs if i push

the shutter button halfway down it's

starting to engage focus

so this is a way and it turns green once

we achieve it

so you'll see this crosshair when this

feature is turned on in your zoomed in

could be very useful for macro

photographers or people who are trying

to get very precise focusing position

it's really wonderful

but for the most part i don't really use

it so

i'm just going to turn it off for now

and then coming into this last page this

deals with the peaking focus that i

demonstrated already in the focusing

lessons peaking focus allows us to see

areas of very sharp contrast to know

exactly where the camera is focusing

now if you don't see it as in this

example it's because my auto focus is on

i'm going to turn it to manual focus and

you can see it now

we have it set to blue with a high level

of intensity but we have these other

colors as well

and that is the deep purple tab which

deals with the focusing systems of our

camera

blue deals with the playback of images

and some of the controls and settings

when doing so for example on this first

page first item we can select where we

are playing back our images from whether

it's slot 1 or slot 2. we also have this

view mode that we can come into a date

view a folder view or a movie view i

think date view is the one that i

resonate with the most

basically shows us when we were shooting

and we can jump to that day and take a

look at those images

on the far left over here we can also

jump between

stills

videos actually have videos

on another card

but that's that's going to allow us to

navigate when we were shooting by

different modes

magnification means what it says we can

zoom in and enlarge an image if we want

to i just use the

drag in and drag out so

if i'm playing an image i can zoom in i

think it's just easier and more

intuitive to do it that way

this gives us some other options if you

want to control them from the menu i

never use them

we have the ability to protect

our images by putting a key icon on it

this is something i almost never use and

for the most part i just don't really

delete a lot of images off the back of

my camera i typically delete them from

my computer

because sometimes

i don't know how good an image is until

i've imported it and touched it up a

little bit

the idea on the protection is you put a

key icon in it it prevents you from

accidentally deleting it you can do it

on multiple images all the same date or

cancel all of them with that date

the rating

very rarely use it but the idea on this

is that you can add a rating

again this is something that i do in

bridge i don't really use lightroom a

lot that surprises people but typically

i rate and bridge and then i decide

which ones i'm going to process

this rating custom set tells us which

rating options we want to have available

if we have it dedicated to a specific

customizable button

stars one through five delete options

this top one is if we wanted to delete

multiple images or all of them with a

certain date

sometimes you might be shooting and be

running out of space and you have some

images on there from last month and you

don't really need them come in here and

do

deletion of images without deleting

everything on your card

this one's kind of cool it allows us to

delete the image by pressing the garbage

icon button twice

the warning on this is is be careful not

to bump

typically when we delete we'll play an

image we hit the delete button then we

have to push up select delete and we

delete an image that way the double tap

is is faster there's fewer steps but

there's a chance you might accidentally

bump it twice and delete an image you

don't want to

we can also have the delete confirmation

default to be selected on delete first

so if i come in and press play

you can see that the delete's ready to

go and now we're only dealing with a few

button presses

so it just gives you some options in how

you're deleting images the edit page

gives us some options in terms of

cropping an image

if we wanted to crop an image out we

could

depending on the size of this we can

move it around with the joystick

we could change the aspect ratio by

rotating the thumb button or the front

we can preview the crop

and then to crop it we would hit enter

we can rotate

a certain image

depending on what we've shot this is

down at the beach the other night

i could rotate it if i wanted to

pretty straightforward

copying from one memory card to the

other so i'm shooting on memory card one

coming into this copy feature

basically asking do you want to copy all

of the images on the date that you

played

to memory card two there are some cases

i have used this

the photo capture feature allows us to

export a still from a video so we have a

video file we can export a single still

and this last one the idea behind it is

it allows us to use the camera as a hype

player for hdmi so typically you're

going to have it on jpeg but if you have

files that you want to play out through

your hdmi

port this is where you would come and

select that obviously kind of an

advanced feature

if you were to shoot using your

intervalometer and you wanted to have a

continuous play from that i have some

shots in here with the intervalometer

that i'll save for

the crash course but you could play

those images we also have the play speed

for the intervalometer and we also have

a slideshow we used to do this with

weddings where we would come in you know

we would shoot

let's say at a ceremony and then we'd

come in and set up a tv at the reception

and we'd be playing back images that we

just had taken you know half an hour to

an hour earlier and you know

the guests loved it

so we could have it loop

obviously this was done on other cameras

when i was shooting weddings still

enter and then the slideshow would begin

and every five seconds

you would change the

image

so i'm going to stop that

this final page in the blue tab deals

with how we are playing back images

for example when we're using the grid

display we want 9 or 30 images if you're

wondering what the grid display is i'm

hitting play press the grid display

button

scroll down and now i have nine you can

see them there

when we were doing a continuous burst in

sports mode for example and taking 100

images do you want them displayed as a

group

you could do that you would see them as

a stack of images

kind of saves when you're you're

scrolling through multiple images to see

the burst collection so to speak instead

of all 150 images

kind of a nice feature turn it on

and that is going to display

those images as a stack of pictures

see if i can demonstrate it real quick

you can see that on the edge here we

have the stack

display rotation i definitely recommend

leaving it on auto basically is going to

rotate these in playback for us

automatically even if you're rotating

the camera

into the portrait orientation

focus display frame will tell us

where the focus point was

when we took the picture it doesn't

necessarily tell us where the camera was

focusing because you can obviously get a

focus lock and recompose it tells us

which square was active when the picture

was taken

display specified time of image

doesn't it's not really intuitive the

idea is that you pick a date

if it's the exact date the camera will

then play the images from that date

or if you didn't have any shoots on that

day it'll be the closest date to it it's

a way to navigate by time on playback

and then the jump image setting is that

when you are in playback and you rotate

the front or or rear control wheels

it allows you to jump by different

numbers it's set on one in the beginning

so let's say we wanted to jump by more

than one

say we could jump by 10 images using the

front wheel and that's what the setting

will do so we have

customizable for the left the right and

the front dial

that is

the blue tab

the green tab deals with our smartphone

connection wi-fi connection

control of the camera through remote app

things of that nature and i'm going to

cover this in a separate lesson because

i

believe it deserves its own setup

let's talk about the yellow tab which

are the camera settings there are some

important and also some confusing things

in here a lot of this is very

self-explanatory for example the

languages you're using if you use a

different language

on this list obviously you'd want to

change it

we have our date and time settings

the area setting i live in the honolulu

time zone we don't have daylight savings

here

but this is where you would set your

camera up if it was to change daylight

savings mine is turned off also arizona

doesn't have any daylight savings

believe it or not

then we have our date and time if you

wanted to change it

pretty

straight forward pretty easy

i'm just using the directional tab and

then when it's all set the way you like

it you would come in and hit okay

the date format

year is month day

month day year

it's the one i have it set on and then

we just get the information about what

time zone we're in the date it is

if you live in the united states you are

going to want to set this to ntsc and

leave it on ntsc

if you live in parts of europe and

you're familiar with pow for the video

system you're going to want to change

this

obviously there's tons of different

settings that we can dial into our

camera and if we wanted to take those

settings and put them into a different

camera or maybe back them up this is

where we would do it

we could reset our camera setting by

coming into this feature that would

reset it to the factory defaults or we

could save the settings to a memory card

so if i was to save these settings here

save new

and then i was to take that memory card

put it into another camera come into the

same menu option and hit load

the camera settings would then update

that camera to what it is now you could

also delete certain camera settings we

have this is

very useful if you have more than one

camera you have it set up the way you

like it and you don't want to fiddle

with all these settings going through it

in extra time or multiple cameras you

know if it's a if it's a wedding

photography team for example

so now we get into the customization

tabs and the thing that i want to point

out here is that when we bounce back and

forth between three and four

you'll notice the custom key and the

dial set

features

the first two on both of these are the

same and i know people are going to ask

me what is the difference between these

two

the answer is there's no difference

between

between those on the top we're talking

about these two right here

i think what happened was

there were multiple sets of features to

put in with the customizations so sony

just included them in the top but if you

change an option here it's going to

change

an option here

and the idea on this

is that the icon determines what mode

the customization applies to and so in

this case it would be still photo

in this case it would be video mode and

in this

case it would be playback

and the way it works is if we come all

the way over

and we get these pages of the camera

you're going to see little

white numbers and little white outlines

depending on what it is that we're about

to change what you want to be customized

i personally do really like the way the

camera is set up we set up the face

detection

the button i would probably change is

probably the auto exposure lock if i

wanted something else here maybe like

you know changing how

face detection works and we can do that

real quick to demonstrate so i'm going

to come to the auto exposure lock hold

button

see the little white number one see the

one here

and let's change this to

face detection type

so i'm going to choose

face and eye subject select this means

that it's going to allow me to determine

what type of animal i'm looking at

whether it's a person an animal or a

bird and so when i'm back out shooting i

can push this and you'll see in the

bottom left hand corner and on the

bottom

i'm able to toggle between the types

of eye detection that i'm using so this

is just an example one example of how to

customize

a button

in the case of the auto exposure lock

button and this would apply to all of

them i'd recommend that probably

beginning and intermediate shooters

should probably hold off on it until

you're comfortable with your niche and

you have a particular shooting style

now we could also do the same with video

shooting so when we flip it over to the

video mode

we can customize those buttons the same

but for right now

most of the default options say

follow the customization for still

shooting

then we have our playback customizations

and you'll notice the options in here

are a little different we don't have as

many

currently it's also following we also

have the options to protect images or to

send images by wi-fi

so when we press the fn button while

we're shooting in stills or video we get

those 12 menu options and you can

determine which menu items will pop up

for example if you didn't want your

drive if you wanted bracket or interval

shooting you would determine it here

different set for stills or movie refers

to whether you dial a setting in let's

say you're in stills mode and you pick a

certain aperture and then you flip the

camera over to movie mode do you want

the aperture to

be remembered

if these are the same sets the camera

will respect your settings as you bounce

back and forth between those if you want

them to be unique in their own you would

come in here and select which items you

want to be different as you switch the

camera back and forth between those two

modes

now your screen display set

so this deals with the type of

information that we see in the

viewfinder versus the back monitor so if

we come in here you can see that we have

different types of display information

our exposure

histogram levels

and we can determine which types of

information are appearing in either of

those two

record with shutter button refers to if

you're in the video mode would you like

to start and stop recording with

your shutter button

i think it's pretty intuitive so i'll

just turn mine on

and then

the zoom ring rotate this applies to

only certain lenses the idea on this is

that certain lenses are powered by servo

motors and you can determine how the

lens is zooming in or out depending on

the direction that you turn it

when we talk about our dial

customizations uh the first two here are

the same that we just talked about

we also have a customization called my

dial settings which would allow us to

customize how buttons and dials worked

into these three different sets

the maya dial 7 settings will then

appear as a possible customization that

you can have your camera jump to when

you push down and hold for example

a customizable button like the ael it's

kind of confusing i don't think most

beginning any even intermediate or

advanced shooters would use it this is

for experts who have a very particular

way of setting up their camera

we can also determine

how the aperture priority in shutter

priority time value how the dials rotate

in one direction we would have it as

normal if you like it the opposite

direction you would come in and hit

reverse this usually deals with coming

from different camera systems or having

your camera set up a certain way that

you're used to rotating your aperture in

one way or your shutter speed in another

direction if you don't like it you can

come in here and and choose reverse

this next one's grayed out function

ring lens this has to do with certain

powered lenses where you can customize

the ring to do different things like

jumping to a psc mode for example

lock operation parts this allows us to

lock certain wheels and features

on our camera so that when we bump them

they do not change

we can ch we can lock the multi selector

wheel only

we can

lock the multi selector wheel in the

dials or we can lock everything

and if you have this on and you're not

aware of it you will think your camera

is broken it's one of the most common

questions i get on a particular camera

is when people bump

a lock switch and they they forget about

it but this allows us

if your camera set up a very specific

way and you know you're not going to

change it you may want to come in and

lock it

touch operation this deals with the back

monitor you can obviously see that it's

on we can turn it on for playback only

or we can turn it off

touch panel and touch pad

those sound like two different things

but it's really talking

about

this guy here when we are shooting using

this back monitor this is referred to as

the touch panel

when we look through the viewfinder

we can still use this monitor but it's

referred to now as the touch

pad so panel

pad and the idea is that as you're

looking through the viewfinder you could

reach down with your thumb and change

your focusing square for example so what

this is asking is what do you want to

have active do you want both of them do

you want just the panel as you're

looking at the back monitor or do you

only want the viewfinder

if you are unaware of it of both being

on in your shooting and you're touching

the back

monitor the pad

the focusing square might jump around

and you'll be like holy cow what's

what's going on i think that's why it

usually comes default as this but let's

just have them both on for now

so we can come into the touch pad

settings do you want this on in the

vertical orientation we'll leave that to

on

and

we're also asking what part

of the touchpad do you want active

so do you want the whole screen do you

want the right half the right quarter

and it's this

grave part of the screen that's active

now another problem with this is going

to depend if you're left eyed or right

eye dominant i'm left eye dominant which

means my nose is going to be right here

so like i personally if i was going to

use this i would be kind of stuck with

using upper right because as my nose is

bumping the camera i don't want the

focus point to be changing

if you are

right eye dominant and your nose is over

here then this side of the of the

monitor is pretty much the one you're

going to want to go with like right half

if you don't have a big funky nose like

me then you might want to go with the

full screen so the idea on this

is that as you look through the

viewfinder if you don't want to use the

joystick you can use the touch pad

and you can also change

the position of it so the touch position

mode allows us to determine whether the

area represents

the entire

viewfinder that we're looking in so if

you have a little square here and you're

touching here it would be the absolute

position

or the relative position play around

with it if you use it you'll find out

which one that you like and prefer more

this last setting here is the formal

menu selection for the touch tracking

feature that we've already

demonstrated if i come up and hit touch

focus

i can move the focusing square around by

touching on the screen

but you'll notice this little touch box

up here

if i press that to a tracking mode now

i'm

having a tracking feature

and you'll notice that it's reflected

the change

in the deep menu so it's just a formal

way to change that setting

the next feature i have never seen on

any other camera it's the accessibility

basically means that you're going to

hear a voice this has to be done in

english obviously so

if you turn your screen reader to on

accessibility group screen reader screen

reader fun button delete button display

guide menu button speed standard button

delete button display guide menu button

back so you can see that what it's doing

is it's reading everything on the screen

so

i don't know

how long a person could listen to that

without going crazy but it's really nice

feature for people that want some type

of cue maybe

you have bad vision and you can't really

read the items

it's a great idea in terms of

accessibility it needs a little bit of

work very cool the finder monitor

settings deal with the difference

between the finder and the monitor

now in the beginning we have it set up

by default for this little

infrared switch to change between the

two

if you raise the camera up to your eye

it senses it it's going to turn off the

monitor and then when we lower it

the monitor comes back on this is a

battery saving feature there are times

you are going to want to just leave one

or the other on for example

sport shooting you may want to save the

battery because you know you're going to

be looking through the viewfinder every

time you shoot

or if for example i'm using a gimbal and

i'll demonstrate this on the crash

course sometimes the gimbal has

some of the attachments close to the

monitor and it'll it'll turn it off

and so what i'll do is i'll come in

and just leave it on manual

for the monitor

and when that happens you can see that

it finally shuts off

and vice versa if i just wanted the

viewfinder monitor to be on but for now

i leave it on auto

we can adjust the monitor brightness

that's this back

whether i wanted to make it brighter or

darker

there's also a

sunny setting

if it was sunny weather we wanted it

really bright

it's pretty much maximum brightness

right because it's hard to see sometimes

in the sun so we can do the same thing

for the viewfinder it's set to auto now

we can also change the color temperature

of the viewfinder

look at the viewfinder and come in there

and change

temperature if you want

display quality whether it's standard or

high display it's going to be your

battery up a little bit quicker on high

display

in the viewfinder frame rate same thing

we have a standard refreshment if you

put it on high it's a higher quality

it's a rapid more rapid refreshment of

the viewfinder

at the cost of greater battery

these first three are

pretty advanced if you're a beginner i

wouldn't worry about them this deals to

the counter as we are recording video

the gamma display allows us to see how

video is being recorded when we're using

certain s-logs for example if we were to

turn this on

we could also choose the type of display

that we want to be reflected in the

viewfinder

so

probably far beyond the scope of a

beginning or an intermediate

videographer gamma logs are designed to

capture wider dynamic ranges typically

it looks really flat when you're

shooting it and then when you import it

you can adjust the color and the

contrast and this allows us to see it as

we're recording depending on which of

those flavors we're using

remain shoot display is a buffer

indicator bar let's see if we can pull

it up real quick

you'll see on the left hand side

when it's turned on so there's

not displayed

this is what it looks like when it's on

you can see the buffer bar there it is

and then as the buffer is filled that

bar will go lower and lower it's a nice

indicator that that tells you when

you're running out of space when you're

doing high-speed bursts for sports for

example

this last one still

auto review basically means when you

take a picture do you want the image to

play back automatically and we can

choose the time it does so

so we have our power setting options

which is really battery saving automatic

camera shut off

auto monitor off basically means is that

when we are in a still shooting mode do

you want the monitor to turn off if you

don't want it to turn off you leave it

here or the monitor could turn off after

two five or ten seconds we also have an

uh sleep mode for the camera the camera

will go into sleep mode

at these different intervals i have it

on 30 minutes because i'm teaching right

now in in real world shooting it's

probably one or two minutes

saved by monitor essentially puts a

power switch on our monitor as we open

and close it

by default mine was on to both linked

and let's say you have your monitor on

and you flip it around and you turn it

off

if you do this you'll be able to hear

the camera shutting down

very faint noise looking through the

viewfinder you would also see that it's

turned off and as you open it the

monitor is back on again

kind of cool

and then we have our auto power off

obviously if sony put this in there

they're aware that the a74

is overheating in certain video modes

there's a lot of information on youtube

about it sounds like when the monitor is

closed it will get warmer faster if

you're shooting at a higher frame rate

like 4k 60 it's gonna going to overheat

sooner

sony batteries tend to extend the life

of a few minutes before it overheats but

the main thing is is opening this up

when you are shooting video and trying

to use lower frame rates it's going

you're going to get different mileage

depending on your settings

sound options obviously if we wanted to

change the volume of the sound that we

hear the beeps

channel monitoring basically allows us

to send two more channels out of my

understanding to the headphone jack if

you wanted to record

additional

information in terms of sound usually

sound in stereo has two channels a left

and a right channel so when we

when we record

into the camera we're only recording two

channels this option allows us to get to

four channels

pretty cool and then we have our audio

signals we can turn on or off

this usb setting allows us to determine

how our usb terminal

is being used it's a compatibility

feature that enhances what it can do

so this first item here it makes sense

to me just select it when you connect if

you're not getting the traction if it's

not working

usb streaming means if you're streaming

video with your camera

so these next two are basically we're

turning the camera into uh removable

media we would plug the camera into a

computer and then we could transfer

files if we wanted to

doesn't necessarily have to be computer

it could be another usb type of device

and then we have

a

pc terminal for a remote control

but again if you leave it on here

you should be able to select when you

connect it

the line setting is basically if you're

having a hard time getting the

connection you want you would turn this

to single and then you would come up

here and try to select which one you're

using

this last one is the power supply

meaning that we can charge the battery

in camera as it's plugged in i like this

feature i like having it even though i

don't prefer using the camera to charge

the battery i have done it many times

i've been in a bind it didn't have a

charger i had a cable plugged the cable

and charged the battery and i was good

to go

we also have a very small hdmi terminal

on the side of the camera

and this is going to allow us to control

the resolution for example on the crash

course we talk about using an atomos

ninja 5 as an external recorder

why we would want to do that the

accessories we need to make it work i

shot a commercial with the atomos ninja

5. it was amazing footage it was

beautiful we graded it i was very happy

with the result we will show that video

in some of the techniques involved so

typically if you don't change it

it's going to do it automatically

if you know you're going to be recording

in 4k you would choose this resolution

to output

to that atomos ninja for example and we

have these other two options but

if you can go

4k go 4k

we have additional hdmi output control

here

probably a little advanced for the pure

beginning or intermediate videographer

but again i'll be demonstrating hdmi

output on the crash course

we can control whether or not we will

get display settings so

if you're recording typically you don't

want to see things like

the time code or aperture settings and

so we would turn this off to get a nice

clean feed out of our hdmi

and then we also have the ability to

control recording from the hdmi device

which is typically what i do is i

start and stop recording from it the

video light mode deals with the control

of a specific video light that you would

obviously

if you're going to use it you're going

to purchase it's going to come with

instructions but this has

how that light

works some of the features in there

the anti-dust function and i will

demonstrate manual cleaning on the crash

course there's a couple tools that i use

but this feature is a built-in feature

that vibrates

essentially a cover over the sensor to

kick off

you know sensor dust if you see these

they're like little specks you'll see it

at smaller apertures

and this is the auto cleaning so when

you turn the camera off it'll happen

automatically or you could force it to

happen immediately if you wanted to

force the camera to do that you could

auto pixel mapping is a feature to

correct any dead pixels that you might

see in your images they're typically a

white or a red pixel that's in every

single image in pixel mapping resets the

sensor so those are no longer there i'll

leave it to on

you can also force pixel mapping

right now if you wanted to it would

reset the pixels

it's worked i have seen this work in the

past and then finally we have the

firmware version so the software for the

camera or the lens you can see it here

and then

if there's a new update for that

firmware then we could go in and update

it

and that is the yellow tab

so let's talk about the my menu tab we

have covered a huge number of menu items

and the reality is you're only going to

use maybe a dozen of them tops you know

some of the other ones the lesser known

ones you can dig through but the ones

that you use the most want to put them

in a place where they're easy to locate

it doesn't take us you know minutes of

searching and that's what this is all

about think of it as a favorites tab

now the language that sony uses is tabs

on the far left

and the what i call sometimes sub tabs

or other tabs these are really called

pages by sony and then we have the items

in here

and in this item we're going to select

add an item

it's going to show us a mirror

of the menu and it's basically asking

what do you want to add

so one item that i use frequently is the

format memory card

i'm going to come over here

select format

press i'm pressing the set button

it gives us the option to add it to up

to six different custom pages

i'm going to add it to page one adds to

this location i put i'm pushing the set

button

and now it's just asking me what else do

you want to add i'm still in this mirror

of the menu system

i'm going to come down to metering

for example the spot metering mode tied

to my focusing square i think that's

another good one for me personally i'm

going to add it to this first page

right here

and it's added

now i am still in this

edition type of my menu so i'm going to

tap the shutter button to jump out of it

press the my menu tab

and i can come up to this first page

where i have my format and my spot

metering point that have been added

if for whatever reason i want to sort

them i could come in here

select spot metering

i could still move it around to which

location i want move it up here and we

just flip them

i'm tapping the shutter button to jump

out of that

i can also delete an item delete a page

delete everything

and this last option display from my

menu means is that when we

go into our menu so i'm going to tap

that i'm going to select a different

tab here

tap shutter button so i was on purple

right so when i press the menu button

again it jumps me right up to the

my menu tab instead of where i left off

so that is the my menu tab it's really

great for customizing the items that you

use the most and putting them into one

location now i need to point out even

though we've gone through the menu

system for the stills mode there are a

couple features that we need to be aware

of when we flip over to video mode you

can see i'm in the video mode here

that when i press the menu button some

of these red options have changed

now in the red

tab these pages are different you'll see

the video camera icon where we can

choose

the format

the file format for the video that we're

recording in

we can also change our movie settings

so how many frames per second are we

shooting 60 30 or 24 30 is for video

24 is typically for film or a film like

look and we have 60 frames per second

we also have the bit depth

the data rate is indicated

on the far left 140 megabits per second

and then we have the bit depth

if you're just getting started i would

recommend this first option hundred

megabits four two zero

the slow and quick settings for shooting

in slow motion the idea on this is that

we record at a faster frame rate and we

play it back at normal speed it appears

to be slow motion i will be

demonstrating this on the crash course

proxy files are smaller video files that

are easier to edit

and it's a second set of video files so

the idea on this is that you record

proxy files small in the full resolution

you edit the proxy files which will then

give instructions to your computer

on how to take the original footage and

export it without overwhelming your

computer the formats that we use are

very uh

computer heavy in terms of processing

there's different there's different

formats a lot to go into right now

suffice it to say it could be

overwhelming for some computers and in

those cases you would want to use the

proxy files

now the second really important page i

want to put out in here is on page 7

when we're talking about audio recording

you're going to want to keep an eye on

your audio levels we can control this by

moving this guy to the left and right

and you'll notice that we have these

channel monitors here is that when you

are recording video you want to make

sure that you are not clipping out so if

you see red it's bad i'm gonna turn it

up so you can see this

so you get that red mark that's a bad

thing keep an eye on your audio levels

and we also have some

other audio level settings so those are

the important things that we need to

keep aware of

in the video record deep menu

so typically on these videos i have a

section where i'm talking about the

wi-fi connection i've been having such a

hard time connecting with it i'm going

to actually skip it and just say keep an

eye out for an upcoming video i think

there's some bugs with the app uh this

is not working the way it's supposed to

i'm able to connect and then it kicks me

out and there's no explanation for it so

if you're struggling getting your camera

to connect

don't worry i am too and i have done

probably 25 or 30 different videos

connecting cameras to wi-fi so

something's going on here there's some

kind of incompatibility so that's what's

happening until there's an update i'm

not going to talk more about the wi-fi

stuff but hopefully it'll come soon and

we can update you when we're talking

about accessories for our sony a74

especially if you're a new photographer

lenses are going to be one of your

primary concerns

every new photographer should have some

type of general-purpose lens in in the

case of my sony's i use the 24 to 70 2.8

g master now the g masters are the cream

of the crop they're gonna have this

orange badge on them

this is the best you can buy they're

made by sony four sony cameras they are

super sharp but they're also super

expensive most of the good ones are over

two grand if you're looking at a prime

15 1800s they are expensive and when

you're just getting started you may not

even know the niche that you're shooting

in so you want to get a general purpose

shooter

in the focal range between 24 to 70 or

24 to 105.

it's okay to invest a little bit of

money but the best you can get is the 24

to 72.8 i believe g master from sony

tamron makes a number of fantastic

high-performing quality lenses there's

the 28 to 75 and then on the low end

sony actually has a 28 to 70 it's not

the sharpest it's very affordable those

are all some good options to start in

the beginning as you get further away

from your subjects you're going to want

a zoom lens i personally love the 70 to

200 2.8 g master that's recently been

updated but again tamron has a bunch of

really affordable alternatives and there

are even some low end versions so tons

of information in regards to lenses i

will put a resource link in the

description below where we're listing

the sony lenses and i'll share some

thoughts i also have a gear bag that

will take you to those lenses to

purchase them for a small affiliate link

one of the most important accessories

after the camera and the lenses are a

tripod and i tell all of my students

invest a little bit of extra money into

your tripod don't buy one of these

cheapy ones from walmart that are going

to break in you know a few days that you

can get for 40 or 50 bucks they always

break

invest a little bit of money i like the

bogen manfrotto be free the carbon fiber

version it's light it's sturdy it's

going to last you four years and there's

also some higher end bogen manfrotto

tripods i'm shooting on one right now

those are in the four to five hundred

dollar range there are some ball heads

that i like the 496 rc2 it's been

updated but that ball head will allow

you to lock your camera in different

positions if you're a photographer if

you're a videographer you're looking

more at something like a fluid head and

i'll cover that more on the crash course

if you do any kind of video work you

should invest into an external

microphone

now in the beginning many photographers

will go out and spend hundreds of

dollars on an external mic instead of

doing that i would recommend starting

off with the maven mic because it's 50

bucks it's a great external microphone

and you'll save some money while you're

still trying to figure out if you really

want to get serious about video or not

if you know videos for you take a look

at the rode video mic pro there's a

couple different models those range

anywhere from two to three hundred

dollars and if you do any kind of video

interviewing or talking head videos like

i'm doing right now you're looking at

the sennheiser e100 i've been using them

for years they're fantastic rode also

makes the wireless go i love these for

their size about 200 for a set the

quality is decent it's not fantastic but

it will definitely work and it will fit

into a very tight space so it doesn't

take up a lot of room in your camera bag

at some point in your career you're

going to want to invest into some lens

filters there is a maven filter line

coming out 2022. i've been working on

this for years but the difference

between my filters and other filters is

that they're color-coded meaning that

the color on the outside of the filter

helps remind us what its function is

used for and it makes it a lot easier

than fumbling through a bunch of black

filters

i will post that link in the description

as soon as it's ready i get a lot of

questions about sensor cleaning and i

will demonstrate this on the crash

course using the tools that i prefer and

i'll also give you those links in the

description below if you've enjoyed this

video and you like my teaching style be

sure to check out the sony a74 crash

course put that link in the description

thank you for watching and i am so

looking forward to seeing your images

questions and comments on our facebook

group thanks again and i'll see you next

time

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you