Shoot movies with your camera
WHAT ARE THE KEY CAMERA SETTINGS AND FEATURES FOR SHOOTING MOVIES?
WHETHER YOU’RE ON a family day out, enjoying a dream holiday or you simply want to spice up your social media feeds, shooting video clips alongside your photos has never been easier. While some cameras, such as Panasonic’s new Lumix GH5S, are made with video firmly in mind, even a basic DSLR or mirrorless camera is capable of delivering crisp, high-definition footage.
Shooting video requires a few more practical considerations than shooting stills. For a start, video files are much bigger than image files, so large-capacity memory cards are the order of the day if you plan to record more than a few short clips. They’ll need to be cards that are capable of recording at high speed, too, as each second of high-quality 1080p or 4K contains a great deal of data.
If you typically shoot your images as raw files, you might need to adapt your shooting workflow, as DSLRs and mirrorless cameras don’t save video in a raw format (not officially, at least — using third-party firmware such as Magic Lantern can enable this in some instances). Instead, each video clip is made of what is essentially a sequence of JPEG images. This means that image-processing settings such as white balance, colour, contrast, sharpness and noise reduction are ‘baked’ into each frame as you record, so it pays to get these parameters right when you shoot the video.
There are more options to weigh up when you select the quality and size of your movies. Most importantly, you’ll need to decide the image size or resolution — in other words, how many pixels make up the picture. Full HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) is available across the board, although 4K is now common on high-end cameras. If you’ve got the storage space, record in the highest resolution possible, as you can always reduce the resolution in video-editing software.
One thing to bear in mind is that highresolution sensors don’t automatically mean better-quality footage. In fact, video-centric cameras like the GH5S (10.2MP) and Sony A7S (12.2MP) have comparatively low pixel counts. As a result, the pixels can be made much larger than on similar-sized high-res sensors; the larger pixels capture more light, which means less noise as the ‘gain’ or ISO is increased to increase the exposure. Fewer pixels also means that the sensor resolution is closer to the pixel count required for video. For example, Cinema 4K is 4,096 x 2,160 pixels; a high-res sensor such as the 30.4MP Canon EOS 5D Mark IV offers a resolution of 6,720 x 4,480 pixels. To achieve the 4K resolution, the Canon camera crops the image. Other cameras may use ‘pixel binning’ (where neighbouring pixels are merged).
IF YOU TYPICALLY SHOOT YOUR IMAGES AS RAW FILES, YOU MIGHT NEED TO ADAPT YOUR SHOOTING WORKFLOW, AS DSLRS AND MIRRORLESS CAMERAS DON’T SAVE VIDEO IN A RAW FORMAT