Transcripts
1. Course Trailer!: Believe by the end of today, you will understand
how to use a camera, how to choose a camera, and how to go out and
film something with that. Let's start off by
looking at lenses because there's a few
things to understand. You'll see these
kind of gold dots. That allows this lens to
communicate with the camera. Having done this
for ten plus years, I'm always learning
something new, and I think that's
kind of why I love it because you are
never standing still. So ISO is a way we can control how bright
and dark our images, but it comes at a
cost and a sacrifice. But the reason it looks blue is it's because I'm
telling the camera, we in a really
orange environment. So the cameras trying
to balance it. Build a system that
lives within that. And generally speaking,
a better way to go. You can use like a ten P coin, if you still have
one of them, pick a camera that has a CFAs card. You're going to be spending
a lot of money and twist. Now it's separated. That is something that I didn't
know for about a decade, and when I found out
it was like magic. I'm going to look
stupid for a minute, but, you know, such as life. If we close down the aperture, the amount of light
that our camera gets is a lot smaller, quite crucial to
understand, actually. It's better to have
a lo signal on your microphone and a quieter
level on your camera. They kind of create
this shading effect. You don't necessarily need to
understand in its entirety, but it's good to be aware of. You'll kind of start to
build up your skill set, and hopefully I've been able
to give something back.
2. Lenses, Mounts, & Filters: The key to Capturing Cinematic Images: Okay, so, welcome. I'm really
excited that you're here. And hopefully by
the end of today, you will understand
how to use a camera, how to choose a camera, and how to go out and
film something with that. So we're going to break today down in three different parts. One, we're going to
look at the ergonomics, the actual building and
assembling of kit together. The second part, we're
going to look at exposure. So how do you actually
expose your image correctly. So looking at your aperture, your shutter speed,
and your ISO, and other things
like ND filters. And finally, we're going
to look at some of the more complicated
elements such as resolution, white balance, and bit depth, which you don't necessarily need to understand
in its entirety, but it's good to be aware of. But first off, let's talk about the actual physicality
of camera gear. So the first thing to
understand is you can buy cameras where the
lenses are attached, and no matter what you do,
you can't unattach them. It's one thing, but many cameras are separate
from the lenses. So it's up to you to pick
the combination you want. This is a lot more flexible and generally speaking,
a better way to go. The kind of caveat to that is if you want to
just be going out, traveling a little
pocket camera, sometimes quite nice
just to get the thm ones where you have a
lens that kind of pops in and out of
the body itself. But assuming that you want to go this slightly more
advanced route, let's start off by looking at lenses because there's
a few things to understand because not every lens works with every camera. So I have three
different lenses here. I have a digital lens, I have a digital zoom lens, and I have an old school
manual prime lens. So taking a look at the two digital lenses first.
These are very similar. The only real difference is
that this is a zoom lens. So one of these rings here
is a bit hard to see, but if I turn it, then you'll see it ever so slightly extends. Whereas this lens
is a prime lens. It's a fixed lens, and it tells you on the
side at what focal length. So this says 35 millimeters, which means it has a focal
length of 35 millimeters, and you even have that
over here on this Zoom. I will tell you ten
to 20 millimeters. So now you know that it
goes between that range. The other number that you have is the aperture, the F stop. I'll explain that a little
bit more in a minute, but the number it gives
you is the lowest F stop, or basically, how open
can the aperture go? Again, I'll come to
that in a second. But generally speaking,
the lower the number, the kind of better quality the lens or at least the more
expensive it's going to be. So this one says 1.4, which means it's quite an expensive
lens compared to this, which says four to 5.6. That is telling you
that at 10 millimeters, the widest this aperture
can be is F four. But when you zoom in, that's actually going to
go down to 5.6. Some zoom lenses will have just one F stop the
whole way through, and again, they're
more expensive. Things like this where
that F stop changes, is pros and cons, the pros
being that is cheaper, the cons I'll show you shortly. The other key number
on there says here 67. What that is referring to is
the diameter of the lens. So if I just take off
this front part here, it's a bit dusty, so forgive me. What that is saying is
that from one side to the other side is
67 millimeters. Now you might think,
why is that important? Well, when you look
at this lens here, you can see, actually, there's quite a big difference
in terms of size. One is very small and narrow, and one is a lot larger. Why is that important?
Well, quite often in film, a bit more than photography. We want to put on filters
onto the front of our lenses. So this is a very
old dirty filter. I'm using some of my nicer
ones on that camera. But these filters come in a certain size,
a certain diameter. And naturally, you know, that doesn't fit, does it? This might fit on
some of your lenses. Maybe you've got one,
that is the right size, but in an ideal world, you're going to buy
one filter and not have to buy a new filter
for every different lens. So knowing that filter size, means you can either try and buy all the lenses that have the same filter size and then that way you just have
to buy one filter, or you buy one filter, and then you buy these
very, very cheap adapters. So these are known as step
up rings, and effectively, what it allows you to
do is if I take off, which one was it, this one, So you can see with that, that is a small narrow ring on the inside and a bigger
one on the outside. So now I can just screw that on. And these cost nothing. They're just a
small bit of metal. And now, I only have
to buy one filter, and it doesn't matter
what lens I've got, as long as I've got that
step up ring in the middle. An extra tip that
sometimes is quite hard to separate the filter
from the step up ring, they kind of interlock
and get stuck together. So the key to that is, if you end up like this and
you can't separate the two, then what you want to do
is with a mouse mat from a computer is you're going to
press down and then twist. So as I press down, just holding the
ring here and twist, Now it's separated, loosens off. Then you can separate
the two. That is something that I didn't
know for about a decade, and when I found out
it was like magic. The amount of times you try to get them separated,
and it doesn't work. Very useful to know pack a
small mouse mat with you. Okay, so Go back to lenses, not to get sidetracked too much, we'll discuss these elements a little bit more in a minute. It's important to understand
the differences between newer digital lenses
and old manual lenses. So just because they're old doesn't necessarily
mean they're cheaper. Quite often, old manual
lenses can be more expensive. They have certain prestige
or character that we like, and sometimes new
digital lenses are made very cheaply and we can buy
them a bit more affordably. But generally, the difference is that this
has electronic contacts. So take of the back, you'll see these
kind of gold dots. That allows this lens to
communicate with the camera. The benefit of that is for
things like autofocus. It's not impossible, but there's a lot of extra
bits of equipment you have to buy to create a similar autofocus
with a manual lens. But with a digital lens, if you have a lens and a camera that can
talk to each other, then you can start to use
your auto focus on that lens. Now, that's great,
right? That sounds like a massive plus for
digital lenses. However, manual lenses have something that
digital lenses don't, and that is this ring here. This is the ris or the aperture. And effectively, what this is is quite crucial
to understand, actually, is if you
look through there, as I open and close
that it's physically changing how small is the
hole inside the center. Now, why is that
important? Do you think? Well, kind of got a little demonstration to try and make that
bit mo obvious. I'm going to look
stupid for a minute, but you know, such as life. Alright, so table is the camera. This is the lens. I'm
the sun effectively. So you can see on the table that if I have the
aperture wide open, and this is why the wider
an aperture can go, the more expensive it is, it
lets in more light, right? I'm letting in a lot of
light on the inside here. The benefit to that is it means if you're in
a dark environment, let's say outside at night, you can open this up
and let in more light. Explain why that's a huge
benefit a little bit later. But if we close
down the aperture, then suddenly, the amount of light that our camera
gets is a lot smaller. Now, if you have
lots of, you know, artificial lighting that you
can bump up the light, fine. But if you're working
with natural light or you're in
difficult conditions, suddenly, not having
all that extra light can cause real problems for you. But on the flip side, let's say it's actually too bright and you want to reduce the amount of light
hitting your camera. Well, what we can do with manual lenses is you can
close that aperture down. We can actually make it smaller. That way, we let in less light. We control that, and it means things aren't going
to be overexposed, which means things in
your image are so bright, we can't actually see them. And this is where
let's take that off. And this is where manual
lenses start to have their own benefit because we
can change that on the lens. But with these digital lenses, there's no way to change that. The only way to change that
is through your camera. On the whole, that's fine, because normally speaking,
you're going to have a lens that can talk to your
camera. It's going to work. But Sometimes, we want to buy a lens that doesn't naturally
fit onto your camera. And that might be down to price, it might be down to certain
aesthetics hereafter. But there are times
where you want to put on a lens to a camera that
doesn't naturally fit. And that's where we
start to get adapters. So we get different
types of adapters, and they do different things. You get these very
cheap adapters that have no glass
on the inside, I just put my finger through it. And these might allow your
camera to talk to the lens. You know, dally, most
of them do these days. So that will still allow
you to change the aperture. But not all of them do. Sometimes the cheap
adapters don't actually have the ability
to control the lens. They're literally there
as just a mechanical fit. It takes a lens
of certain sizes, so this is an EF lens. It's meant for cannon cameras. I can place it on there, and then I can now put
it onto a Sony camera. Brands is really the kind of
thing that separates them because cannon uses
EF or RF mount. Panasonic uses L
mount or MFT mounts. This is where it
gets complicated. You have to know what mount does your camera have and what
mount does your lens have. So with these kind
of simpler ones, you can't control that aperture, and then you end up in a
very limited position. But you can get smarter
adapters where they do talk, and that's how we tend
to describe them. A dumb adapter is one where no electronic
connection takes place, so no communication happens between the lens and the camera. And then we get smart adapters with that communication
does take place, and you can control
the aperture and, you know, maybe auto
focus and those things. Now, me, I use a Lumix
camera or panasonic camera. This is a Panasonic s52, and the lens mount is
L. But I only have EF mount lenses because I've owned multiple
cameras over the years, where that's been, you know, the lens mount of choice, and they're a lot more
common on different cameras. So having a lot of EF
lenses means, really, no matter what camera I go to, I'm going to be able to use
an adapter to make it work. But it did mean, in this case, I had to buy an adapter. So this is a Sigma MC 21 adapter that allows me to put cannon
lens on a Lumex body. That is, in a nutshell, what you need to understand
about cameras and lenses is that Electronic lenses
give you more power, more options in
terms of autofocus. But if it's not a native
fit for your camera, then you will need an adapter. And to make that
work, you have to understand what lens mount
does the camera have? What lens mount is the lens? So what adapter do I need? Not all cameras can
adapt to all lenses. Although if you want a
cheap recommendation, you get a mount like this. This is an M 42 mount. So a lot of old lenses, M 42. And they're usually quite cheap. And this is all you need. This is just a screw
thread adapter. So the lens mount is
actually a screw thread. So I bought one of these
for about two pounds. And now, I can put
that on my camera. No, it doesn't have autofocus, but neither does any
old manual lens. So that's how you start to choose your cameras and lenses. Right now, the camera
is set to F four, so maybe you can see that
if I just do that there. So here is saying, Okay, my camera is set to F four. If I drop that aperture down, what I'm actually doing, if
you remember, from this one, is I am physically
changing the aperture. So I'm doing this effectively, and I'm making that
whole smaller. That's making it darker, and it also means that actually, more things are going
to be in focus. So shooting at F f, you can see that my
hand is in focus, and the wall is
kind of in focus, but it's a little bit soft. When I boost this
aperture down to F 22, let's compensate for that. Now, you can see that that picture is more
in focus, right? It's sharper. There's
more detail there. So this is the trade
off you're making, when you are wanting more light, you generally lose
focus and vice versa. And you'll notice that
in a lot of films, they have a very
blurry background, so that's something that
people try to replicate now by shooting at F 1.4 F three.
3. Exposure: What, How, and Why!: So we're going to
talk about exposure. Key things we need to look
at are ISO shutter speed, aperture, and frame rate, and also ND filters. Let's start with ND filters because it's the
simplest to understand. This is like a pair
of sunglasses. And if I turn it here, this
is a variable ND filter. What it means is that
when I turn this handle, I can darken that image. This is really handy
right when you have your camera set to
how you like it. So if I put this in
front of the lens here, you want to put it on the
lens, that might help. Okay. So let's say it's
too bright outside. When I point this at something
bright and I turn it, things start to get darker. Same thing here, if
I go the other way, it'll get it brighter. So this variable ND. The point of it is
to allow you to keep your settings where
you want them for good reasons that
I'll come to shortly, and then just fine tune
your exposure with the ND. Now, this is my old one that
is dusty. Shall we say? The way it works is
you have two pieces of glass where they kind of
go opposite each other. So as you go down, they kind of create
this shading effect. With cheap ones and even
with expensive ones, when you push it to the very, very darkest it can possibly go, You might notice on your image, you get slightly odd shapes, you get crosses or different kind of weird
vignettes, et cetera. That's pretty normal because it's just the way that
these things work. So generally
speaking, you want to avoid going to the
darkest parts of these, but they're very handy to get. And that's why we
use step up rings, because this is one of the most critical bits of kit that any film
maker can have. You can your lens
is important, yes, but without an ND
filter to control it, you're going to end up in
a situation where you're sacrificing settings
and your image is going to start to fall apart. So to explain IO, shut speed, and frame rate, it can be a little
b complicated. So I'm going to try and
demonstrate to kind of drawing, and hopefully you kind of understand what I'm
actually getting at here. Let's start with
ISO because this is kind of a bit
easier to grasp. So back in the day, when we were talking
about old film, like proper film film, we had to use chemicals to get our film to expose to
actually turn into an image. Now, generally speaking,
a piece of film, let's say, something like that, my very lovely drawing. All right, so this is a piece
of film that's kind of, you know, blown up into
a macro sort of look. Within that film, you
had these grains, and these grains sit in
that film like that. Pretend they're all, you
know, in there somewhere. And when we started with photochemistry and
with film development, we could only create
certain size crystals. We could only get
our film strip to have so many pieces
of grain here. That were sensitive to light, which means as light came in, and like I say, it is a little complicated,
but stick with me. As light came in, it caused a reaction on these pieces here. Obviously, with the
grain being small, it meant that the amount of
light hitting, you know, it would take a long
time to expose, hence why back in the day, we had to do really long
exposures to get an image. As things progressed, We managed to start creating
these bigger grains. What that meant is that the
same amount of light that came in would suddenly have
a much bigger reaction, and therefore, we would get a much brighter image very quickly in comparison to
what we were doing before. This was rated with numbers, so a small, kind of low
sensitive piece of film. It might have an IO or 50. Whereas, when they
started making these bigger ones,
that suddenly, by comparison, would be 500, so obviously would be
a lot lot brighter. The only problem with
these bigger grains, these kind of more
sensitive pieces of film, is that you could see the grain
more easily in the image. And that's when we
say a grainy image. That's what we're actually
talking about historically. Nowadays, however, you know, we don't have pieces of
film in our cameras, they're kind of senses
and they're digital, but the idea has stuck around, and that's why we talk
about it in terms of ISO. So as a guiding principle, everything in old school film, that terminology,
that understanding has been applied to
digital cameras. So what that means is if you
have on your camera ISO 100, And you also have IO 3,200. When it's dark outside, this one is going to be dark, whereas this one is going
to be a lot brighter. But the flip side of that
is that this will be clean, So it won't look grainy, whereas this will
look very grainy, or noisy is another word
that we now use a lot. So ISO is a way we can control how bright
and dark our images, but it comes at a
cost and a sacrifice. And different cameras have
different strengths here. You need to look up the camera
that you're looking at. Some cameras, the IO 3,200
is very, very clean. Other cameras, the moment you go past 800 is really not clean. Now there are times where it's
better to use a higher IO. But that gets a little
bit complicated. I'm not going to talk
about that today. Just understand, in general, the lower your IO, the
cleaner your image will be. And if you can keep a low IO, but then get the right amount
of light into your camera by using the F stop by
opening up that aperture, then you're going to
create a cleaner image. Then if you have your F stop really down down to like F 12, F 14, but you've got a high IO. That combination will
create a noisy image. A low O with a
more open aperture will create a cleaner image. Alright. Next up, frame rate. So, the difference
between film and video is the number of stills you're
seeing at a certain time. If you look at one still
image for 5 minutes, it's very clearly a photo. If, however, you look at 24 slightly different
photos within 1 second, it's going to look
like it's moving. This is how film came to exist. So I'm going to try
and draw 24 photos. Okay, so if we're capturing
24 frames per second. What we're really saying
is the camera is going 2591112 blah blah
blah, within 1 second. So all of these filter
down into here like that. That then means that this
1 second looks like video, looks like moving image, right? But because it's 24
frames per second, there's not much time for the camera to see
what's going on, take the light, take
all that information, create an image, then
process it down. The reason that
we have 24 frames per second is that's what
standard and cinema. It kind of gives us that
motion blur, that film look. In TV in the UK, it's actually normally 25, and in America 30
frames per second. But in film, which we're
talking about here, 24. But things start to get complicated when you
want to do slow motion. So slow motion, I'm just going
to do a little cheat here. Let's do Okay. So slow motion, we're capturing more than
24 frames per second, but we're still putting
it down into 1 second. So now, I've got 48
frames per second. What that has done, though, is it's meaning that
our camera now only has half the amount of
time that it had before to capture the
same information, which means your
image is going to be half as bright or twice as dark. In terms of priorities, this is one of the
most important, if not the most important
deciding your frame rate. Some cheaper cameras won't be able to do 24 rags per second. They might give you
something like 23.976, but if you can't get 24, then just go for 25 or 30, 25 in Europe, 30 in America. Okay, so we know we
want to capture, let's say 25 rags per second, just imagining that your
camera can only do that. We want this to be that, so we're going to
leave it at that. We want our IO to be low. So we're going to put
the IO to IO 400. That's still relatively low. 800 tends to be like the kind
of steady middle ground. Our aperture, we're going
to put it at F four. Let's say that's what
our lens can do. We're going to set it at F four. So the last thing
we have to think about is shutter speed. Really, your aperture
is the only one that you actually want to
be changing that much. I you have some flexibility, but aperture is the
one you want to be changing or ND
filters on the front. Your frame rate and
your shutter speed are quite key to creating
a film look. But to understand shutter speed, it's better to start with the old school
mechanical analog form, and that was actually something
called shutter angle. So I'll play a clip when
I'm talking about this, so you can see it in principle. So as film used to
pass through a camera, an anticol camera, we had this thing called the shutter going around in front of it. Now, if our shutter
was a complete circle, and it was, you know, pitch
black, a solid circle. If that's going in front of the film and the films
passing down behind it, the film's not going
to see anything. No light is going
to hit that film. But if we were to remove
half of that circle, so now we have a
semicircle, that roughly. Yes. As this spins around, we're going to see
light half of the time. Now, you might be wondering,
why even have this, why not just have nothing
at all and just have the film run through.
It's a good question. If you were to do that, and
sometimes people do that. What it means is you're introducing more
opportunity for blur. So, you know, as
my hand does this, it's not going to look quite as sharp because that piece of film is not going through fast enough for this
movement to feel natural. The kind of golden ratio is
this 50%, this half number. That's what creates
this really nice kind of natural thing that we're now used to of a bit of motion blur
that looks like cinema, but not too blurry
that it's distracting for our eye and we
can't understand what's in focus, what's not. So this shutter
angle would spin, so every piece of film would
get light half of the time. This was nice and simple back in the day when we had this
circle going around. And going to do a
small bit of mass. Stay with me if you're
not a mass person. It's just one sum. So a full circle. If I was to just do a
little bit like that, a full circle would be
360 degrees going round. Half a circle, is 180 degrees. So if you ever hear
this shutter angle, 180 degrees or maybe your
camera is advanced enough that you actually get to pick that, that's what
we're talking about. But when we're talking
about smaller, simpler cameras, that ratio, this two to one, this half ratio, so this is half of that, this
is two to one. That ratio has stuck around. So now, if we have 25
frames per second, we want our shutter to be 1/50. What we're saying is we want to see the image half the time. Half double depending which
way you look at it, right? And this stays true across film. So if you were in America and you were shooting at
30 frames per second, you'd want to set
your shutter to 1/60. Let's say you were
shooting slow motion, and you were shooting at
200 frames per second. You would set your
shutter to 1/400. Now, you can play around with
this. You can change this. If your image, let's
say you've got 25 frames per second, ISO 400, your aperture is F
four, and it still, it's not quite
looking right and you don't want to change
anything else, then yeah, you can
change your shutter. But what you'll get
is you'll start to introduce either kind of
blurriness and softness, or it will look
almost like, real, too judery, to, too
precise, I guess. So my advice is always as
much as you can with film. This is different
for photography. Photography, that shutter,
you might want a really, really fast shutter
because you're just capturing a short
moment like sport, whereas if you want
to allow water to flow and look like
streams of kind of mist, then you want a slow shutter, so we're leaving the
image open longer. But in film, this ratio, is what we go for
as much as we can. And there are kind
of caveats to that, but guiding principle is this. So this is how you
get your exposure. You set your frame rate, right? You choose what frame
rate do I want to be at. Let's say it's 25
frames per second. If you know it's going to
be 25 frames per second, then you probably want your
shutter at 1/50, right? This is 123. Next up is our IO. We want to keep our IO relatively
low as much as we can. Generally speaking. Let's say
our IO is going to be 400. And then we want to
look at our aperture. Now, if you want a
blurry background still and you want it to kind of
look a bit more cinematic, then you're going
to try and shoot towards the lower end,
generally speaking. So let's say you are setting
your aperture to F 2.8. If you've done all of this, and it still looks too bright, your image is coming in
like looking really bright, then you're going to
add your ND filter. If you have the
opposite problem, let's say your image is too
dark, let's just change that. You still probably want to have your frame rate at 25
frames per second. Maybe you feel brave enough to increase
your IO a little bit. Let's say you're making
a documentary and you just have no other
light source around. Okay, you're going to
raise your IO to 1,600. But it starts to get noisy, so you don't really want
to go much below that. You can't go any wider
open than F 2.8, so you've done the best you can there. You've taken your ND off. There's no D. If
it's still too dark, despite all of this and
you have no extra lights, then maybe maybe
you're going to change your shutter to 1/30 or
something like that. You won't be able to open your shutter to a number
below your frame rate, right? Because you're
basically saying, I want to open the whole frame. Otherwise, you're suddenly
creating some sort of nonexistence meta situation. So the very lowest that you
could put this would be 1/25. Then it's going to
start to look blurry. If no one's really
moving your scene, not too much of an
issue, but people tend to move on film. And that's how we do exposure. So if I put that
into practice now. Okay, so as you can see, it's far too bright. So first of, my IO is 4,000. So I'm going to drop that all the way
down to 640, right? It's the lowest I can
go in this setting. My frame rate of 25, I
want to keep it at that. And my shutter angle
because on this camera, I can do angle is 180. I want to try and keep
that as much as I can. So I've got two options, right? I've got my aperture or ND. I'm currently at F 1.4. I don't need to be that open. So I'm going to bring
it down to F 2.5. But you know what?
I still kind of don't want to go any deeper
than that, let's say. So now I'm going to place
my ND on the front. As you can tell, I
have a step up ring. This is why I hate this
ND filter. Okay, come on. Alright. Cool. Now,
if I just kind of find tune that. Great. I can start to get my exposure
to a place I'm happy with. Let's just put on manual focus. What do
I want to focus on. And just like that, I now have a pretty correctly
exposed image. If you want to learn
more advanced tools on how to judge your exposure, then look up
waveform, WAVE FORM. That's a really useful way to start knowing your
exposures in or out. As you also have
your histograms. Your histogram is a little kind of graph you
see on the side. The right is the right end, and the left is the dark end. If you get your image
somewhere around the middle, then it's going to be in
a pretty good ballpark. But every camera is slightly different on their histogram. And histograms are not
particularly accurate. So once you kind of
got into a rhythm, then maybe start
looking at wave form.
4. Camera Bodies: All You Need to Know: So most cameras that
you're going to look at, will have a similar layout where they have a lens
man at the front, button on the right,
a screen on the back. This one has a nice flip
screen, which is very handy. And then these dis up the top. These dials generally mean, M is manual, so you
control all the settings. S is shutter priority. So what that means is you
select the shutter speed, which I'll explain shortly, and the camera
figurs out the rest. A stands for aperture priority, so you select the aperture of the F stop and the camera
figures out the rest. And then P often means that you can
control certain things, but the camera will do the shutter and the
aperture for you, but you might be
able to set the IO, which, again, I'll
explain shortly. So, generally speaking, manual is kind of like
the best one for film, so you're in control
of everything. And if you have, like a full auto mode, so I imagine IA is
going to be full auto, you're going to end up causing issues without really
understanding why. This camera has
actually got an M for manual for photography
and a manual for film. Sometimes cameras kind
of switch the settings. Cameras will usually need
some sort of card in there, some sort of memory card. So this can actually
take two SD cards. So it requires certain
types of SD cards, and you can find
out what type of SD card your camera needs. If a camera like this
one can record very, very big high quality files, you need a card that
is fast enough as in it can write onto the
card at a quick speed. So a cheap SD card is not
going to work for this camera. That said, you know, not all cameras are like
that, many cameras, you can use any SD
card pretty much. You also get other
types of memory. So this here is a CFAst card. And these are very
expensive in comparison. So it's something to consider when you're
choosing your camera. If you have to pick a camera
that has a C fast card, you're going to be
spending a lot of money on just the
recording media. On these cards, on any card, it will normally
tell you the size, so this is 128
gigabytes of storage, and the read and
the right speed. That tells you how fast can this card take footage
being put onto it, and how fast can it
push it off again? SanDisk is a very
popular, very safe brand. I've also used LexA, L E X AR, which has, generally speaking,
give me good results. One or two the cards have
kind of stopped working, but I've owned them
for a long time, so, you know, I think
it's just wearing tet. Now, you notice on my camera, I have this metal
cage going around it. Pretty much every
camera on the market, someone has built a metal cage that you can place
onto that camera. Do you need to? No. You can just walk around
with your camera. But when you take a
photo like that, it's, you know, going to be
pretty stable because you're taking a sharp job done. But filming when
you're moving is surprising how much shake you start to introduce
by hand holding it. When you have a
cage, you can start to kind of modify and
build up your rig. Now, I have a top handle. That's going to be
a lot smoother for me to kind of work and operate, and it means I can start to add things and maybe a monitor, or maybe I want I don't know, something coming off
here, like a microphone. These handles and cages
will probably set you back somewhere 60-200 pounds depending how much
you want to pay. Like I say, you don't
need it, but for me, when I'm filming,
having a top handle, it's just a really
nice way to work. This one has what's
known as a NATO rail. So quite often, like
the front here, if you want to attach things, then you actually have to
screw and unscrew them. But if you get things
that have NATO rails and you start to build a system
that lives within that, then your life becomes a lot quicker because you can quickly take things on and off. And when you're packing
up on a long day, you want to quickly
take off the handle, throw in the bag,
it's quite nice. But you don't need it. It's
just something that I have. The last thing to talk about
in terms of ergonomics, that's really important is
attaching this to a tripod. So I have on the bottom here, you can see on my cage,
I've got these holes. You have the same holes on
the camera itself normally. Smaller cameras will
generally just have one, I'll be the smaller one, and a bigger more professional
cinema camera will have two. It will have a small
hole and a bigger one. On your tripods that you buy, they normally come, well, they
should come with a plate. This plate and it is very
easy to lose these screws, so be real careful because
they can just fall out and pop the back in,
and slide it forward. This is how you attach your
camera to your tripod. So you take off the plate,
and then on the bottom, see if I can do this
the other way around. I'm left handed, so
it should be fun. So on the bottom, you can then place
this and tie it up. The problem with only having one is even when you
do it up really tight, it can kind of move
around a little bit. The ways to tie that up
are, you can either. You can use like a
ten p coin if you still have one of them
or a very thin key, or you can buy
something like this, which is a very small
base plate tighter. And then you just pop
that in and tie it up. And I meine is not
very straight, but you get the point. Great. So now, I can attach my
camera to my tripod. Not every tripod has
the same type of plate. Like everything in film. There's a specific
version to everything. But this is how you get
your camera onto tripod. And if you are smart and
you decide you really want to go with this whole
kind of like film journey, then there is a certain
type of tripod plate. It's called a Manfrotto 502. This tripod plate tends to
fit on a few more tripods, and because of that,
you can start to kind of build up one ecosystem. You can always, you know, put put a tripod plate, and then beneath it, have
what's known as a riser. So you can start to
build a system where you can quickly take your camera in and out of different systems. Maybe one's a tripod, maybe one's a shoulder rig,
maybe one's a gimble. It just requires having the same type of
base plate going on, and a system that can take that. The other very common one,
more for photography, but it does mean
that you'll get more kind of, like, smaller tripods. So if you want to be
a travel filmmaker, then these are great. This is called in Arca Swiss. So it has, I mean, this one's got a nice
kind of like loop so I can tie it up and
then close it down. And it has these
two nubs that kind of go in there and
lock it in place. These are very, very
common, very popular. The only thing is
that these are really only for the smaller tripods, whereas something a
bit more like this where it slides in
or kind of clips in, they're a little
bit more secure, and they're normally found on what's known as a
fluid head tripod. Okay, so I'm going to put
a lens on the camera. So let's put on this
very wide lens here. So, my camera, as you can see, is kind of showing you
what I'm seeing here. So first thing to notice is we've got this kind
of round edge going on. And if I zoom in, that
does kind of go away, but it's still
there a little bit. This kind of gets back into this camera to lens discussion. So, every camera has a
different size sensor. So imagine like a
piece of film, right? Let's say, back in the day, you were shooting on
a super eight camera, and the piece of
film is that big, one piece of film, one
frame is that big. As cinemas progressed, we
kind of went from, you know, Super eight to 16 millimeter
to 35 millimeter, now even 70 millimeter, and even can't really get
any bigger, but Imax, right? The physical size of the film has been
changing and growing. And the same has happened
in digital cameras. We've had super 35
for a long time. So that's kind of this size, and a lot of lenses were
built to cover that frame. But then cameras started to
develop full frame sensors. This is not double
the size of super 35, but it's a lot bigger, right? And all these old lenses weren't made to
cover that space. So what you can see here is
actually a lot of this is a black ring around the outside because the lens
is not technically big enough to cover that full frame sensor
inside this camera. Now, some of my other lenses
are full frame lenses. So again, something you have to consider when purchasing
your lens and your camera, you want to start
think about the sense size of your camera. Generally speaking, a full frame camera will
be more expensive, and also the lenses will be two. Was a super 35 camera will be cheaper and there'll
be more lenses, and they'll be cheaper. So my advice is going
to the super 35 camera, or even below that, you have something called a
micro four thirds sensor. So if this is your
super 35 sensor, then your micro four
thirds is more like that, and your whole package starts
to get smaller and smaller. The reason people
go for full frame is because it's wider, you can film in the
same size room, you'll get more image,
you'll get a wider view. But that's coming at
the sacrifice of cost.
5. Advanced Camera Settings & Terminology: Cool. Alright. So
hopefully, now, you know, at least kind of how to
put a camera together, put it on a tripod, create that level of exposure you
want and get a nice image. You've got kind of the
basics down, right? The next bit to show you is where it starts to get
even more complicated, but I'm going to try
to make it simple. It's first of resolution. That's really nice and easy. So I'm sure you're all
familiar with HD and four K. We're talking about how
many pixels are in this image. So eight K, we've
got like twice as many pixels within
that same image size. So we get twice as much detail, which means it could be twice as big for the same
quality of image. Yes, things have
moved towards four K, but you'd be surprised
just how much is still kind of
displayed at HD. So, generally
speaking, you know, I always shoot and
capture in four K, so I've got all
that information. And then depending on where
I'm putting films out, I might put it out in four K, or might go out in HD. I did a TV commercial
a few years ago, and it actually was
requested to be less than HD just for the kind of
streaming application of it. So, don't get hung up on the numbers with the resolution.
Yeah, they're great. It's lovely to have
that extra resolution, but there's more important
things to be aware about. Aspect ratio is another
easy one to talk about. Most cameras will have an
aspect ratio of 16 by nine, which is what you're
looking at right now. But you can on some
cameras, change that. So it might be four by three, which is more traditional
in terms of that's how films were captured before
and smaller bits of film, or it might give you the option of a more kind of
cinema scope one. So 2391 is the aspect
ratio of cinema scope. That gets very complicated
as to why it is that, but it's still something
you can replicate in post. You can add bars to
the top and bottom, or some editing
applications will actually have kind of like a preset that allows you
to work in that frameline. Then on the camera, on this one, I can actually create guides. Hopefully, you can see
here, I've got this set up for a four by three guide, so I can see what my image would look like if
it was a square. I could go in if I can remember
how on Earth to do this, because it's been a while since
I've needed to change it. Cool. So we're going
to frame marker set, then I can change
that aspect ratio. Let's say 12391,
when I come back, it's now given me like a narrower field of view.
And that's just a guide. I'm still capturing
the full image, but it's given me
that guide as to what my final ratio is
going to look like. Now, white balance is a
bit hard to understand. But basically, I know
this table is white, and if I put an orange
light in this room, everything would look orange, but I would still know
that this table is white. That's really easy for
me. But for a camera, they don't have that
brain necessarily. So for them, Right now, this table will look white. But if I had a really orange light pointing at this table, this table would look orange. And then when you get to post production, when
you get to your edit, and you don't want
everything to look orange, you want it to look like white, the footage won't be able to
do that, it'll be too late. Understanding your white
balance and setting your white balance depends
on the lighting environment. What's nice is most cameras have like presets
that you can use. And these are until you really understand it, this is
the best way to go. So on my camera, if I change the white balance, so right now it's an
auto white balance. If I said it to
kind of daylight, which is what this is,
it still looks white. So if I just put that there, that white looks like white. But if I was to change this to, let's say be this one here, it looks very blue, doesn't it? But the reason it looks blue is it's because I'm
telling the camera, in a really orange environment. So the cameras trying
to balance it. That's what that lightbulb
means because normally, a lightbulb is a bit warmer. You could go the
other way though. So it might be that actually
if it was a really cold day, it was like early
in the morning, there was just a lot of
blue around just generally, then I'd want to set my camera
to a warmer white balance. That's the simplest way
to kind of understand it. The key numbers, if you want to start looking
at the numbers of it, because when you just flick through the different presets, they've got a nice
picture to help you. Normally, there's a sun
to suggest daylight. There's a cloud to
suggest a cloudy day, and then there's a light bulb to suggest inside
orange warm lights. But if you want to understand the numbers that go with that, 5,600 K. It stands
for 5,600 Kelvin, which is a way we measure
the warmth of light. That is daylight, right? So normally, 5,600
K is daylight. We set the camera to 3,200 k Kelvin when we're working
in a warm environment. So 3,200 K is like a
cooler color temperature. And we're saying, Okay,
in a warm environment, let's make the camera cooler so we get back to
our neutral white. Hope that makes sense. Alright, let's set that back to something vaguely correct. And the very final thing to just mention before I get into audio is the idea of bit depth. So you don't have
to understand this, but you might hear something called eight
bit and ten bits. And in a nutshell, what we're saying is how
much color information can we pack into our
footage into our clip. C heaper cameras will
film in eight bits, and eight bit is plenty. You'll do absolutely
fine with this. Whatever you film will
come up looking like that, it'll look nice, great. Ten bit is what you start to get on professional
cinema cameras, and sometimes you actually go
above that to 12 or 14 bit. That's because in
post production, we're going to change
all the colors around and really make
it look quite different. All those weird, different looks that you see on Hollywood. If you're on a budget and eight bit camera is what you'll be getting,
and it'll be fine. But if you've got
a bit of money, and you're looking at
two or three cameras, and one of those
cameras shoots eight k, so really high resolution, but only in eight bits, and the other camera
shoots two K or four k, but in ten bits, that's actually going to have
more information for you, you might be thinking
resolution is packing in all this extra data
to a point, it is, but really all it's
there for is scaling, whereas the bit depth
is like, you know, the volume, the kind of
density of information, rather than the width of it. So you're going to get
a lot more control, and you're going to not
cause yourself issues. The problem when you
start to change things in eight bits is if
I pulled around, you know, the colors
of this room, This camera is ten bits, so it can probably
handle it okay. But if if it was an
eight bit camera, you'll start to see banding, and I'll put up
one or two photos so you can see what
that looks like. And if you get that, that's probably why because
you're trying to manipulate something a bit too much for what the camera
is designed to do.
6. Audio: Mics, Settings, and Placement: The audio on your camera, there probably is some sort of small microphone somewhere. On my one. It's I
don't even know. I really don't actually
know. There are these two fans either side. They might also be where
the audio goes in. But the point stands that it's not going to be
very good, right? It's not going to be very
accurate, very directional. The way to get good
sound is you want your microphone
basically as close to the thing that you're capturing
the sound to as possible. And there's a couple of other things to
think about as well. So the first and cheapest
easiest option is one of these. You get different
versions of these. This is just a road video. And these just screw
on to your Shoe. Your cold shoe or your hot shoe. Hot shoe means it's got, like, electronics in there. Cold shoe is just a metal grate that you kind of
side things into. So I'm going to put mine on
the side here on my cage. Let's tie it off. Then now in the mic input, I can plug that in, and I now
have a better quality mic. So this is a lot
bigger obviously. It's a lot, more directional. It has it allows a
stronger signal. Now, on the back of this mic, I can set my volume here. I could go plus 20 minus
ten or just neutral. But you can also set volumes
on the camera, right? So how do you pick
the best combination? Generally speaking,
it's better to have a loud signal on your microphone and a quieter
level on your camera. The benefit of this over doing the O A and
having, you know, a low volume on
your mic and then a high volume on your camera is that the mic is designed to kind of pick up that sound
and channel it down. Was the other way, you're basically asking your
camera, can you try harder? Can you try harder to listen? So you're going to get a
lot more background noise. These are lovely because if you're in an environment that, you know, you have
a bit of control, you can take this off and put this on the end of a pole of a boom pole and put that
right over someone's mouth. So right now, I have a microphone
just out of frame here. So maybe if I could
just like bend it down, it's going to work,
don't want to risk it. I have a microphone
just out of frame here, and that's picking
up me talking. I could do the same
thing with this. I could just have
this one here and this run along cable all
the way down to the camera. Option one. Option two is, if you have a camera like this, a mirror less camera or
digital small camera. Most brands also
sell an cel adapter. So higher quality
microphones use these three pin connections
rather than a small jack. But for this to fit into
a camera is quite tricky, you don't really
just get a cable that runs one into the other, and that's where these come in. So I could put that on there. Now, I can. Now, I can run a more
professional microphone. So let's say, neither of these are particularly
great to be honest. F that's terrible. Let's not show you that
one. But this one, this is a Samson q2u, USB. So with that one, I can now run that in there and then
talk to tale in quiet. That will be better
quality than if I just had that on the camera
really far away from me. But in order to use an Exar
cable and an Exar mic, you do need this module adapter. And then same thing here, right. You probably want to
set your levels a bit higher up here and then
still low in the camera. Always try and keep the levels in your camera as low as you can and boost up the
volume on your mics or, you know, your
adapter situation. Then if you have an Exar and you don't
know how to get it out, normally they have
a little pin here, that you pull the pin, then
it comes out like that. And it's nice if you can
get good at doing a nice, little neat cable type. And last, but by no
means least. We have. T mix. So, these s are rented, and they're, as you can see, not being looked
after very well. But basically, you have
one end is your receiver. So you can get these where
they just go Jack to Jack, not Jack to LR,
so 3.5 millimeter Jack straight to another
end that looks the same. Then you can plug it
straight into your camera. That sits on your camera, and then you have over here. You set yourself
up with a T mic. There obvious reasons
to go with this. You can be a bit more mobile. Right now I'm sat at
desk with a mic over me, but if I wanted to get
off and walk over there, you're not going to
hear me very well. Was I have this on, you're going to hear me just the same. The three issues with these. The reason that I don't really use them to be honest at all. Reason number one is Russell. So when I put this on here, you can get it nice and clean and get a
really nice sound. But if people are wearing different types of material
or they move around, you're going to start to
hear a lot of that noise, and it's just going to
interrupt the sound. Reason number two
is interference. Anything wireless has the risk of being interfered with
in terms of signals. Nowadays, cheaper wireless mics use the same frequency as wi fi. So if you were to go to an event where wi fi is everywhere, loads people on their phones, let's say it's a conference, those mics are going
to really struggle, and your sound is going to cut in and cut out all the time. If you were to get more
professional microphones that use a different
frequency range, what's known as the RF range. You need a license to legally
use those frequencies. And if you do get interference, you have to know how to kind of switch between frequencies. And the final reason I
don't like using time mics, is just the interaction with
the people that I'm filming. If it's myself, it's not
too much of an issue. But if you're filming
other people, Then one, they don't look very nice necessarily
on the clothing. Two, depending what
they're wearing, it can be quite intrusive,
invasive, and three. It's very easy for someone to
forget they're wearing it, and then just take
off part of it, and then the pack
falls off and breaks. So they're not very
well you know, they're not the best
thing for people who aren't familiar
with film equipment. If it's working with actors,
fine. Absolutely great. If it's working with
clients or, you know, yourself or someone else, if you're not really,
really familiar with it, then there's a very high chance that down the line it's
going to get knocked and broken or something's going to be a stress to
the person wearing it. They're great tools, and
they have their place. I'm not saying don't use
them or go for them, but my advice is
something either like this or a shotgun mic
that I have up there. They are the best options. Nowadays, you do get
shotgun mics that have a 3.5 millimeter Jack input
straight to a camera. So they're a really
good way to go. Deity, make some, and Road is my one here,
Road NTG three. What you're looking to
do when you are setting your audio is you want to
get your audio to -12 dB. That is the safe space for
capturing good quality audio. And you want to do that with your level in your camera
as low as possible. So that might mean
bringing the mic closer. It might mean asking your
person to speak a bit louder. But if you can get
that -12 dB without having to raise the actual
camera setting of the volume, then you're going to get
to a good audio recording. Between -18 to minus
six is a good area. Anything above minus six, and you risk clipping, so it'll sound quite nasty. Anything below -18, when you try to bring that up
to -12 in the edit, you're going to
find you start to introduce a bit of noise
in the background.
7. Next Steps to Film Wizardry: Alright, so I hope that helps. I hope that kind of gets you on your way towards
creating, you know, your own videos with the
camera and your mics, of course, there's so
much more to learn. There's lighting,
there's composition. There's editing, there's
color grading performance. You know, there's no
real end to this. I mean, even now, having done
this for ten plus years, I'm always learning
something new, and I think that's
kind of why I love it because you are
never standing still. But those fundamental ways
of setting up a camera, that will take you across any
camera. As long as you know how to set your camera internally
to get a good exposure, as long as you understand what we're talking about
when we say white balance. And if you can put
the camera together, plugging in a mic, putting
it on a tripod, you know, putting the right lens on and knowing how to
use an ND filter, then that will see you
through 90% of things. The rest of it is more about the skill and looking
for the opportunities, looking for that frame,
looking for that performance, that depth, that light. You find yourself
kind of feeling like, Okay, I understand all of that. I want to
learn a bit more. Then my suggestions
to you would be to understand dynamic range.
That's a really great one. Understand a bit
more about bit depth and how that gets involved
in color grading. Look into the benefits of
recording audio separately. So rather than going
straight into a camera, maybe into a professional
sound mixer, and the key word to understand
in that is preamps. So PRE AMPS. That
will give you clean audio sounding recording if
you have better preamps. And if you still
want to learn more, more advanced than that, then
look up anamorphic lens. That's a kind of visual style when we're talking
about cinemascope. And with that comes
things like D squeezing, and then look up codex, COD ECS. That's how we kind of decide
what wrapper, you know, how we packaging our film
is in MOV and MP four. Your options will always kind of be limited
by your camera, but it's good to be aware of what that means
down the line. And hopefully, you'll kind of start to build
up your skill set. If you have any
questions, by all means, drop me an e mail or
message or Instagram, whatever, be very happy to chat. Yeah. So thank you so much. Have a great day and best of
luck with re filming. Bye.
Aram Atkinson, Storyteller. Filmmaker.
