In this lesson, I’m going to teach you about your camera settings, such as resolutions, frame rates, exposure, white balance and focus.
I’m not going to go into a bunch of detail with each setting, there’s plenty of places to go online where you can learn about this stuff in more detail. I want to do everything I can to give you my perspective on what I do when I’m making a video.
First things first, and this applies to whatever you’re filming, check your camera settings. There is nothing more painful than going into the edit and realising you’ve shot half your footage at the wrong resolution, or even worse, out of focus. It’s so important to know your camera, and check it’s settings constantly whilst you’re filming.
Now, just how much you go into your settings really depends what kind of creator you are. Dave, knows every inch of his RED camera menu, every setting everywhere. Personally, I only really pay attention to the top level, most important stuff - which is what we’ll cover in this lesson. But everyone’s different, and that’s a good thing.
So a pixel is a tiny square light that shows a colour, and a screen is made up of thousands… *millions of pixels. So when we say an image is 1920 x 1080. We mean the image is 1920 pixels across, and 1080 pixels up. If we say something was recorded in 4k, we mean it is 3840 pixels across, and 2160 pixels up. Those are the most common, because the most common ratio for video is 16:9, and these resolutions are 16:9. But there’s so many different resolutions, I mean you can make a video at any resolution you want.
I used to record everything at 1920 x 1080 (or 1080p, you can also call it). But more recently, I’ve really enjoyed offering that 4k option. Whilst typically, when shooting at 1080p, a project would be 30-40GB, I’m now looking more like 100-120GB for shooting in 4k. So yes, it’s more data, but on the plus side, I feel like I’m future proofing my content a bit more.
You will not tell any better stories if you shoot in 4k instead of 1080p. Just want to make that totally clear.
So a video clip is made up of a bunch of images played really fast. So lets say you shot something at 25 frames per second (or ‘fps’). You are literally shooting 25 frames in a second.
Now I shoot everything at 25fps. I know often Americans prefer to shoot at either 23.976 fps, or 24fps. But in Europe, it’s 25 fps, or 50fps. I think it’s something to do with the camera frequencies or something, the difference in PAL (which is Europe) vs NTSC (which is America). I’m not going to go into that stuff, it’s kinda boring, you can research more into that if you’d like.
Occasionally, I might shoot at a higher frame rate like 50fps if I plan on doing some half speed slow motion. Where in the edit, I’m basically playing back at 25fps. But because I have an extra 25 frames per second, you can spread that 50 frames per second over 2 seconds, slowing the footage down to half speed when you playback and export at 25ps. The same goes for even faster frame rates, like shooting at 200fps, and playing back at 25fps. For every second you film, you playback 8 seconds.
The best way I was taught to think about exposure is the following.. Think of the shutter and light as a door in a submarine. Where the door is the shutter, and the water outside is the light. The size of the door is the aperture, and the amount of time the door is open is your shutter speed. You might open a small door for a long time, or you might open a large door quickly - it lets in the same amount of water (or light), but in 2 different ways. Lets expand on that a little..
Shutter speed
The faster your shutter speed is, the more crisp each frame will look. This is because the shutter is open for less time, so the light has less time to hit the sensor therefore creating less of a blur. If you imagine opening a shutter for a full second, and you run through frame, you’ll see a big blur of a person because the light of you running is hitting the sensor across the full second.
I aim to shoot at 1/50th if I’m filming at 25 frames per second. You generally want THIS figure on the shutter speed, to be double whatever your frame rate is. So if you’re shooting 30fps, the shutter speed should be 1/60’th. Or if you’re shooting 50fps, shutter speed wants to be 1/100th. Doin this will allow for a nice natural motion blur on the image.
Aperture
The aperture is basically the hole in the lens that’s letting the light through it. The size of this hole, is set by a figure called the F stop which you can change. The lower the F stop, the bigger the Aperture, and the more light can hit the sensor. The bigger the Aperture though, the shallower depth of field you’ll get, making it harder to focus.
I generally don’t worry too much about the aperture for my videos, as long as my shutter is 1/50th, and the ISO isn’t too high, I’ll set the aperture to whatever F stop where the exposure looks good.
Something to remember though, if the F stop gets too high, the auto focus can struggle. Ideally you’d want to keep the F stop inbetween 2.8 - 5.6 - roughly.
ISO
The final thing that affects the exposure is the ISO. This is basically a digital exposure enhancement. The higher the ISO, the brighter the image will be, although if you go too high, you’ll get lots of image noise, which doesn’t look great.
Every camera has different capabilities in low light.. I generally try not to go above 400 ISO.
The White balance is very important because it tells the camera what colour white is, and will set other colours from that. So if your white balance is wrong, colours will look odd. Your white balance is made up from 2 figures, the colour temperature, and the tint. I never touch the tint setting in my camera, I leave it alone, I only check the temperature, so lets go over that.
Colour temperature is measured in Kelvin. This ranges from a lower Kelvin figure, like 3000 Kelvin, which is very warm, to 7000 Kelvin, which is very cool. So the lower the Kelvin, the warmer the temperature. 5600K is considered daylight. But this is +/- a few hundred Kelvin, I personally wouldn’t lose any sleep if you shoot at 5500K instead.
I generally have my camera set to a white balance of 5600K. This is so I match the daylight lights I’m using, which are also set to 5600K. If you set your camera’s colour temperature to 3000K, daylight lights would appear really cold, or blue, because they’re 2600K cooler than what you have your camera colour temperature set to.
You can tweak the colour temperature in post-production, but it’s generally easier to get it looking the best you can in camera first.
The most important thing when it comes to exposure and white balance, is to lock it off - as in don’t use AUTO anything. If you don’t care about the camera adjusting your exposure whilst you’re talking, fine, use Auto exposure. Personally, I much prefer to have control of when it does that, so I don’t get this constant changing of exposure or changing of colour, in the middle of my shot - I just find it annoying, so I always have AUTO stuff off. It’s a personal thing (!), I understand certain use cases where auto settings is useful - the main one being if you’re walking from indoors to outdoors, and you don’t want to have to manually change the settings.
The one exception to my ‘no auto rule’ is… focus.
Most cameras and lenses have auto focus now, they can detect your face, and focus automatically to it. It’s great because you don’t have to worry about focus when you’re talking to camera, it just follows you.
This is actually super useful when you’re doing a piece to camera because you can be animated, move around, and not have to worry about the focus.
How well it follows you varies from camera to camera, there’s so many reviews for this stuff on YouTube, so do your own research before buying a camera.
I sometimes switch to manual when I have a fixed distance between subject and camera, for example a top down setup, and I don’t want the focus to shift around. Other than that, it’s always set to automatic.
