(electronic music)
- A lot of people are intimidated about
stepping into trying out video.
I hear that a lot.
I was really scared too.
You just have to do it.
(laughs)
You just have to get in there.
You have to try it out.
- The number one tip for any photographer
or anybody who has a background in stills,
that's moving over
or transitioning to video or motion pictures,
would be to shoot for the edit.
- Think in terms of sequences.
Shoot the big main shot,
but then shoot little parts of it as well,
so that the editor has something to go to.
- Is this shot gonna work next to this shot,
gonna work after that shot, gonna work with that shot?
And that's something that as a still photographer
you don't really ever think about.
So when I say shoot for the edit, it's really,
how are you fitting your shots together?
- You can always tell a still photographer's
first couple of forays into video
because they hold these beautifully composed shots forever,
because there's nothing to cut to, you know?
And I was guilty of that.
There'd be a shot on the screen for fifteen seconds.
It's like, okay, okay, it's a beautiful composition,
the lighting's beautiful.
What else you got?
So you have to have sequences to do that.
- So my husband and I made this huge switch
from stills to video.
I mean, we still do stills,
and it's been amazing to me, how different the genre is,
how different the whole creative process is.
- You're doing something a little bit different
with the story.
Obviously there's many more moving parts.
- Video and photo are two different things.
Even though you're using the same device, possibly,
you might be using something like an a7R II or a7S II
or a6300.
When you're on the video side of things,
it's a little bit different.
Everything is moving towards 4K.
We want everything to look
brighter and cleaner and more beautiful.
- I have to say that I was a skeptic
and a late adopter of 4K.
I didn't at first see the reason for it.
Until I started shooting it.
- Filming in 4K is so awesome,
because of the versatility and post process.
- Then all of a sudden, I saw how crisp,
I mean, the sharpness was unbelievable,
but it also allows you to do more creative things in post.
- It gives you a better, finer edge to do compositing
in post production and after effects,
or whatever you wanna do.
- We're delivering for HD
and so we are able to zoom in on our subject
or go pan left or right or up or down.
- It gives you latitude to crop in post.
It gives you latitudes to stabilize shots that are moving.
It gives you latitude to introduce movement to still frames.
- If you've got the camera locked down on the tripod,
but you'd like a little push in, or something like that,
as long as you're outputting to an HD timeline,
you have all this opportunity to do moves
and to do a little extra stabilization.
- With 4K you can actually pull eight megabyte
and change still images from your video file.
- The thing that's made the biggest difference for me
shooting video, is carry a tripod.
You can not shoot video without a tripod,
and once you get into the discipline
of shooting with a tripod,
then you really can start seeing creatively.
- The number one tip that I would give
is to use a wide angle lens when you're starting out,
because it's always easier to get closer to your subject,
to get closer to that thing you wanna focus on,
but it's much more difficult to back up
and have that really feel like it's smooth
and it's flowing well.
So just give yourself that freedom
to go wide in the beginning,
and give yourself room for air.
- Often times if the situation calls for it,
because it's very bright outside,
maybe you might need an ND filter.
Understanding using the right profiles for shooting video
is something that you have to look into.
So I love shooting in kind of a cinematic look
and a cinematic quality.
So I love shooting 24 frames per second.
So typically my shutter speed
would be at 1/50th of a second,
and then my aperture would be kind of adjusted to taste.
Using the correct shutter speed,
based on whatever your frame rate
is something else that's super important.
So these are all things that you really have to prepare for,
ahead of shooting video,
especially if you're a photographer,
because it's not the same.
It's quite different.
- My go-to video settings when I'm shooting most things,
landscapes or establishing shots,
would be 24 frames per second, 4K,
a 50th of a second shutter speed,
and whatever the aperture is.
- [Jeff] Typically those are my settings.
I'm shooting at 24 frames, 1/50th of a second
and then I'm playing around with the aperture,
ISO and possibly an ND filter
to give me the cinematic look that I would wanna go for.
- And if I see something
that I think is gonna be good in slow motion,
I'll either go to 60 frames per second in HD
or one of the things I love about the RX series
and some of the later Sony series
is this 120 frames per second in full HD.
It's crisp, it's sharp.
So it makes buttery smooth slow-mo.
- We love to have control over our depth of field.
We're often at a really low F-stop
to get that buttery, blurry background.
We want our show and the footage to look cinematic
and I think that if you want that cinematic feel,
you want to be in manual mode when you're filming.
- I shoot almost everything in 4K video.
So it's 24 frames a second or 30 frames a second.
Every once in a while,
just because I love the look of the slow motion,
I will shoot at 60 frames a second at a lower resolution.
But I think the world is 4K.
And that's where we're all going.
(ding)