Nerd alert.
I have a canon M6 MK1 that I am going to try out some indoor filming with (that place on my insta if you must know) Got a samyang 8mm fisheye (it’s incorrect mount, but I got an adapter ring) to use with it.
Does anyone have any tips on what rough settings should be? Like basics. Or what I should do to set it up
Like shutter speed, iso, exposure compensation, white balance? Or absolutely what NOT to do?
I haven’t got a clue
I generally film at 1/100 shutter speed. Set the ISO as low as possible, open the aperature as much as possible (you should be able to do this either by turning the wheel on the lens itself, if not the camera will tell you to set it to something specific and then you can adjust it on the camera itself (hint - lower aperature number = more open / brighter if you didn’t know. f3.5 = brightest, f22 = darkest)). From then you can adjust to get it to a brightness level you want. If it’s still too bright then lower the aperature. If it’s too dark then turn up the ISO. Higher ISO = more grain so don’t turn it up if you can avoid it.
Exposure compensation just leave it if you can. White balance you can use your judgement looking at the screen. Have a flick through the presets and see what looks good. When indoors I tend to use the fluroescent preset as the lights are generally a bit yellow
If you find the image is flickering it’s because you’re filming under fluro lights and the frequency is out of sync with the shutter speed of the camera, so you’ll need to tweak it slightly to stop it.
I need to buy a set up.
Great intel here, thank you
I think they’re sodium lights but will find out soon enough. Test run on Thursday I think. Some of this is coming back to me when I was more into still photography, never really bothered with video.
So:
Shutter 1/100
Aperture: low as poss (2.8 is lowest on this lens I think)
ISO: so basically just adjust that until it looks ok, but start from lowest and work up.
All pretty sound info from Wayout.
Some added tips anyways.
You usually want your Shutter double the frame rate you shoot at.
When you’re shooting with no intention of slowing down then shoot at 25fps. Which would mean you shoot 1/50 shutter.
HOWEVER if your cam can do 50fps then if you want to slo footy down in post then shoot at 50fps and 1/100 shutter.
If you can shoot 50fps on your cam then it’s probs best to just shoot at 50fps 1/100 all the time as you’ll not notice then non-slowed downed footy not being shot at 25fps.
For your FStop I tend to shoot F10 - F18 on fisheye if I can as you’re looking for as much to be in focus as possible and very little shallow depth of field.
Like Way says for long lens F1.4 - F2.8 Is lovely and shallow.
One other tip would be to invest in some ND filters for your lenses. Pretty cheap and it means you can adjust your brightness without changing any settings.
What should I buy @Bish
Fooo there’s more technically minded people on here than me mate hahah!
I like the Sony A series cams for shooting skating. Nice and light, good image quality and also small.
As long as you get the weighted handle it’s perfect to film with.
That said unless you get the add ons for the lens you can’t do any zooms easily and it doesn’t have the feel of a chunky cam.
Wait you said ‘f10 upwards’. So f2.8 is more ‘up’ than f10?
Sorry was typing fast!
For fish I shoot
f10 - f18
For long lens tend to go
f1.4 - f2.8
These are flexible, this is just what I like!
Get a good memory card or 2.
There are different classes of sd card and the class loosely relates to the bit rate it can write at, but the package usually gives a number. You get what you pay for basically and you will wanna pay a bit.
Just adding to this. ISO is all dependent on the camera’s sensor type.
For example I shoot on Blackmagic now and they have a dual sensor. The native ISO for daylight is around 400, but it performs amazingly in low light when pushed above 1250 which is counter intuitive, but once it goes past that point is activates the other side of the sensor and uses the higher native end of 3200.
So it all depends on the camera.
Always a class 10 with the highest write speed possible.
For shutter I like to go a bit higher. Sometimes I go as high as 1/200, but I tend to stick to between 1/100 and 1/125. But essentially what @Bish said, a shutter that divides by 25fps if you’re shooting PAL…
I don’t shoot footage at all any more, so take all this general knowledge with a pinch of salt.
f2.8 = wide open aperature on your lens, so it lets in more light. This will also give you a shallow depth of field, which is the area in Z-space, going away from the lens, that’s in focus. Fisheyes work a little differently as pretty much their entire field of view is sharp, so if you’re using f2.8, it’ll be a little flddlier to get that sharp point and easier to accidentally knock it out of focuse. However, it also means any dust, scratches and assorted shit on the lens can be often made invisible.
f22 = super tight aperature on your lens, so lets in less light. Main thing with narrow aperature is that everything in your shot then become super sharp.
You then have to balance the aperature with a higher shutter speed, which will make the image darker as this how long it stays open for. Sport or any high speed or slo-mo-ing of footage is kept sharp and crisp with a high shutter speed. ISO is like exposure, so on a sunny day outdoors, you’d want it at ISO 50-400 tops. Grotty indoor skatepark in winter? Fuck knows - 1600 maybe? It depends on the low light capability of your camera body.
You might want to invest in a Canon f1.8 prime (ie, it doesn’t zoom) lens. They can give a really narrow depth of field which is amazing for portraits, product shots, general close-ups on spiders or whatever.
tl;dr - stick it on auto.
Whilst a joke, when beginning it’s actually a good idea to do some test shots and see what the camera wants to do to get the best picture. It’s a good way of testing the capabilities of a camera.
As an example, the auto video settings of an A7S are going to be a lot different to a less low light capable camera (eg Spanky’s M6), so you might get a better idea of what you can do/get away with.
