Speaker 1: This video is sponsored by Incogni. Hey everyone and welcome back to a new video. Have you looked at the video switch on your DSLR or mirrorless camera with some amount of suspicion and said to yourself, one day I'll flick that switch but not today? Well, wait no more. In this video I'm going to take the mystery out of shooting video, give you some settings to get started and I'll include some tips that people from a photography background in particular need to know. If you stay till the end I'll answer the question many have on your minds. Can I get usable photo stills from my video frames? My name is Simon D'Entremont and I'm a professional nature and wildlife photographer living in eastern Canada. I make weekly videos giving you photo tips or taking you behind the scenes for nature photography.

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Speaker 1: By the way, this subject of a video on video, if you know what I mean, came from my viewers. If there's a subject you'd like to see in one of my future videos, let me know in the comments below. So, to start off, no, nothing bad will happen when you flick that video switch on your camera. I've seen photographers have a look of fear when they flick that switch like doves will fly out or something. The reality is that video is becoming an increasingly important part of the photography genre and many DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have amazing video capabilities. And whether you're a real estate photographer or a wedding photographer or shoot wildlife or landscapes professionally, many of your clients also want video along with photos. Or even if you're a hobbyist, most social media platforms these days are really favouring video content either in the form of shorts or more interactive media. And finally, if you're none of these, just compare this photo of mine of a flock of sandpipers compared to slow motion video. There's no doubt about it. Video is a cool format. So let's get started with some fundamentals of video so that what I say later makes sense. The first thing we need to understand from video is a feature that doesn't even exist for the photographer. And that's the playback frame rate. Note that this isn't the shutter speed. The frame rate is the number of frames that your video will display every second when someone watches it. For many applications, including movies at the theatre, this is 24 frames per second. This is also called NSTC and is popular in North America. There's also a system called PAL, which is used in Europe and many parts of the world, which is 25 frames per second. In your camera menu, choose the type that corresponds to where you live. This is important as these frame rates are specifically chosen to accommodate the electricity hertz speed in those areas. If you see flickering in your video footage, perhaps you've used the wrong one. This is a setting you only need to set once and forget it. So when your footage plays back at 24 frames per second, it's like flipping the pages on a flip book with 24 individual frames or pages being seen in one second. Our brain kind of merges these together while viewing to give the impression of smooth movement and action. Regular speed footage is then achieved by setting your camera video frame rate to 24 or 25 depending on where you live. Your camera will then take 24 or 25 frames every second while you record. I'll use 24 frames per second in the rest of this video for simplicity. Now, if you want to shoot slow motion, what then? What you do then is shoot more frames per second, but play them back at 24 frames per second. So if I shoot 60 frames per second, but play them back at 24 frames per second, I'll get slow motion at a little more than two times. If I shoot 120 frames per second and play them back at 24 frames per second, it will take five seconds to play back every second I recorded. So five times slow motion. In addition to a frame rate, you'll need to pick a resolution. 4K is a very popular standard these days with lots of detail and resolution. That's what I use for my videos. My Canon R5 camera actually shoots 8K, but that's overkill, so I don't use it. If your camera can only shoot 1080p, that's less than 4K, but don't sweat it. On a tablet, phone, or Facebook, it can still look great. Also, if your computer gets laggy working with 4K footage, try using 1080. Now this brings us to a major setting decision that is quite different for video than photography. Shutter speed. This may surprise you, but individual video frames in video footage are often slightly blurry, not tack sharp. If I wave my hand in front of the camera here, you'll see that it's actually blurry. Here's a single captured frame. If it was tack sharp, you would see this footage as jerky. Now here's what it looks like if I shoot at a shutter speed that's very fast and makes sharp frames. You'll see that the movement appears a bit jerky. Here's some footage of wildlife shot at shutter speeds that have a bit of blur, and another shot at high shutter speed that makes the footage look jerky. It turns out that there's a sweet spot for video shutter speed to get it to look natural, which involves a bit of blur. And there's a simple formula. Make the shutter speed on your camera twice your playback frame rate. So if you're shooting your video at 24 frames per second, make your shutter speed double that, 1 48th, or the closest available 1 50th of a second. If 60 frames per second, make it 120. If 120 frames per second, make it 1 2 50th. 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The bad news is that there are hundreds of data brokers out there, and finding them all and requesting to opt out one at a time would be a nightmare. That's where Incogni comes in. The way it works is that you create an account, you grant Incogni the right to work on your behalf, and kick back and watch them contact data brokers to get you off their lists. They even have a dashboard to see how many requests they've sent out and how many have been actioned. And if the data brokers object, they'll deal with that too. The result will be less junk in your email, fewer scams, and fewer robocalls. So take advantage of this opportunity to protect your data and worry less about it. You can learn more at the link in the show notes, and the first 100 people to use the code SIMONDATRAMA at the link below will get 60% off Incogni. Now we face another difference between photography and shooting video. In photography, if the image is too bright, we just crank up the shutter speed to darken the exposure. But in video, our shutter speed is essentially fixed, so we really only have aperture and ISO to play with. And with really low shutter speeds, we use like 1 50th of a second, in the full day sun, our video is often too bright. So we lower the ISO. But even when we lower it to 100, its lowest on many cameras, the video footage is still too bright. That leaves us two options. One is to reduce the size of the aperture to reduce the amount of light to the sensor. This is indeed a viable option if getting a shallow depth of field isn't that important. The other option is to darken the exposure with neutral density filters. That is, filters designed to intentionally darken the image. So you place these in front of your lens or use a drop in filter for large telephoto lenses. That allows you to shoot without blowing out your footage. In case you are wondering, many high end professional video cameras have these ND filters built right into the cameras. When I shoot wildlife video in bright daylight, I don't find using filters convenient in the field, so I either stop my aperture down or I shoot slow motion footage at a higher shutter speed, making the problem more manageable. So when you are just starting out shooting video, outdoors in a full bright sun isn't the best time to start practicing. One other big difference that the video format has compared to photography is audio. It's a whole new sense that's added to your video footage and it allows your photo to go from this to this. I think you'll agree it adds a very nice touch. But what are the key takeaways about getting good audio? I could spend a whole video about audio settings and audio processing, but here's the short version. Don't use the camera's built-in microphone and get an external microphone instead. The reality is that the built-in mic on your camera isn't very good and it's often far away from your subject. Audio quality greatly benefits from two things. One is being targeted to your audio source and the other is being close to your audio source. So the best audio options either are selective in picking up the sound you want or get close to your source. Here are five practical options. Note that for most of these you need a camera with a mic jack like this. First, if you're on a budget and just want the most basic upgrade, just get a cheap shotgun mic. This one by Comica is less than $40 and it fits on the hot shoe of your camera. This shotgun mic listens for sound where it's pointed and tries to ignore sounds from the environment. You can use this handheld for vlogging or capture more sounds at a distance. If you want to spend more, you can get better quality and more sound isolation from a higher end shotgun mic like this Rode VideoMic NTG. It's about $250 US dollars. Not only what I use for wildlife, but also what I use right here in the studio. If you're trying to record someone speaking and mobility isn't an issue, you can use what's called a lavalier mic with a cord. These are like $20 on Amazon. If you need to move around more, you can get a wireless lavalier mic like this Rode Wireless Go 2. You put the mic on yourself and the receiver on the camera. The advantage of these lapel mics is that you can speak in a normal voice even far away from the camera and still sound good. Here's what some of these mics sound like. This is me using this stock microphone on the camera. And here I am using the Rode Wireless Go 2 on my shirt. The last option is to get a field recorder like this Zoom H1n, about $100 US. These are usually designed to capture all of the sounds in the environment, not just the subject. So if you want to capture all of the forest or jungle sounds to add to your video footage, this is what you want. They can either be plugged into your camera or just handheld and the sound added to your video footage later by recording to a micro SD card. Don't forget that for all of these, you want a wind sock for windy days. Otherwise, you'll get lots of wind noise in your audio footage like this. Hey everyone. Now, one thing that people sometimes struggle with in video is getting smooth footage. While we can use high shutter speeds to freeze the action in photography, in video, how do we get the footage to look good or what some people would call cinematic? One is to use a tripod. That way your footage is smooth or steady and not moving all over the place. Second, if your camera has sensor stabilization or your lenses have stabilization, turn these on. And third, if you want to track the movement with your footage, get a video or fluid head. These heads are designed to slowly and steadily pan back and forth gradually, avoiding the sometimes jittery or jerky movement of trying to follow action using a regular ball head on your tripod. And finally, one thing that takes lots of practice is shooting handheld, especially when incorporating movement into your video, which looks really good. One trick here is to shoot in slow motion because it plays back at a slower rate. Any movement on your part is smoothed over, making it look much more controlled. And I promised you a bonus tip, and that's to answer the question, can I just shoot video of my photography subjects and pull a still frame from the video footage if I need one? The answer is you can, but you may not want to. There are two things at play here. One, you've already heard about. The video is shot at very slow shutter speeds, like 1 50th of a second. That means that the individual frames are probably not tack sharp as we're used to in photography. They intentionally have some blur in them. Now, you could shoot video at a higher shutter speeds in case you want to pull a frame out, but then your video footage won't look very good. Secondly, most camera video modes don't use the full resolution of the sensor in the same way that the photo mode does. So your still frames pulled from video footage aren't as detailed as your photographs. Some cameras only use the center of the sensor for video. Others skip lines in reading out the sensor, leading to less detail. As such, you can get still frames from video footage, but it's not a replacement for good old fashioned photography. If you're not sure you have a good enough handle on shutter speed, aperture, and ISO settings to implement what you've learned today, I have a whole video on that topic, which you can see right here. Just a reminder that there's a link to Incogni in the description below if you want help protecting your personal data. I hope you can use this information to once and for all turn that video switch on and start capturing the amazing medium which is video. I know you can do it.