Hey, my name is Matt Johnson, and this is the second video in my series
All about fast filmmaking settings for the Sony A7 IV
The first video was a deep dove into the menus of the camera.
Well, this video is going to expand on that and show you all my settings
that I use for the mode dial custom buttons, custom menus and function menu.
So if you film weddings, documentaries, basically anything
where you need to be able to shoot
very quickly, I'm going to be showing you how to put the exact settings
you need at your fingertips so you can film fast with your camera
and not waste any time trying to remember where certain settings are now.
To start.
If you haven't watched my menu settings video, I will link to that in the corner
and into the description, and I highly recommend watching it first
because this video builds on that 1/2 and more importantly,
if you want to save time, you can click the link down
in the description to download my settings file.
You can load onto your A7 for to immediately
start using all of these settings.
No need to follow through this entire video and customize your camera.
You can do it instantly and the settings file is completely free.
My gift to you down in the video description.
So with that out of the way, let's get started by talking about custom
buttons, starting off with the mode dial setup.
Now the mode dial here at the top of the camera
is going to enable you to switch between frame rates and resolutions very fast.
Now let's begin customizing
these three presets on the model, starting off with preset one.
Preset one is going to be for anything
that you want to film in normal speed, meaning not in slow motion.
This setting is especially important for any video clips that you need to use
the audio for, such as a wedding ceremony, wedding toasts, etc.
It's important that for any video clips, the record of people speaking their lips
match up with the words
that they're saying, which won't happen if they're recorded at a higher frame rate
and slow down.
So having 24 frames per second in mode preset one
is a great way to have this setting accessible whenever you need it.
First, make sure that you have the right video formats elected, so
go to shooting image quality file format and make sure that Xbox 4K is selected.
And then for movie settings.
Select 24 P with the record setting set to 100 M for 2 to 10 bit,
then for your shutter speed set to roughly double the frame rate, which is 1/50
shutter speed aperture I would set wider to F 2.8
if you can with this lens that I'm using for this example,
it's only F four, so we're going to do that.
But in the preset file that I'm going to give you, I'm going to set it to F 2.8
for ISO set to the base ISO of SLUG three, which is ISO 800.
And then for white balance, which you can access under the exposure
color menu for White Balance, set it to 5000.
Kelvin, 5000 should look great for any outdoor or daylight shooting.
Of course, you may need to tweak this
if you're filming indoors or under different colored lighting.
Finally, to save these settings, you're going to want to go to the shooting menu,
shooting mode camera, set memory and then select preset one.
Now, any time that you want to access these settings on the mode dial,
simply switch the camera to one and you are in 24 frames per second
with all of the settings that we just covered next for Model Preset
two, we're going to want to set this to 4K at 30 frames per second.
30 is a little bit slower than 24 frames per second.
And whereas on the A7 has three, for example,
I would have set preset 2 to 6 and preset 3 to 120 frames per second.
Well, the A7 four cannot do one taps.
So the way that I would set up your camera is have preset
one be 24 frames per second, preset to be 30 frames per second
and preset three be 60 frames per second.
So dialing in these settings, going back to file format,
leave this at CBCS 4K movie settings, change the recording, frame it to 30 P
and then for record setting, make sure that it is set to 140
M for 2 to 10 bit for the highest quality next
because this is 30 frames per second change your shutter speed to 1/60
and otherwise the white balance aperture and ISO are all correct.
So you can press menu, go back to the shooting mode menu
camera, set memory and select preset two.
Now if you go to preset two, you'll be filming and 4K at 30 frames per second.
Lastly, we have preset three and this is the exciting preset because
it's 60 frames per second slow motion, love it.
So for that, let's go up here to image quality keep that it CBCs 4K movie
settings you're going to want to change this to 60 P and record setting.
You're going to want to like 200 M for 2 to 10 bit.
This is going to result
in very high quality slow motion video going back out to the main camera screen
such as shutter speed to one 1/25, which is roughly double 1/60.
And otherwise, all of these settings are good.
So you can press the menu button,
go back to shooting mode camera set memory again and select preset three.
All of the frame rates the camera can film it are now at your fingertips.
Model 124, Model 234 and Model three six apps.
This makes filming so fast and easy.
Moving on now to Custom Buttons.
These are what people commonly think of whenever they think of customizing
a Sony camera.
The camera's covered with buttons that say C1, C2, C3,
where the C stands for custom.
So all of these buttons can be customized.
What's cool, though, is that basically every single
button and dial on this camera is customizable.
You aren't just limited to these C1, C2, C3, etc.
buttons.
Now that said, you don't necessarily want to change a button
that is already labeled for doing something
too much from what it's already labeled for.
Because then if you borrow
a friend's camera to use, it can make using it a major pain.
So we're not going to go completely crazy with customizations,
but we are going to make some really nice tweaks.
Open the menu now and go to the toolbox operation.
Customize and here
you will find the custom button settings for both photo mode and video mode.
Now what you will see here is that if you go to the video mode, it's
going to say that it is going to follow all of the custom buttons from photo mode.
So if you're just using the A7 for as a video camera,
you can go in and customize the photo buttons
and they're all going to apply to video as well.
Or if you really want to make sure that you keep things separate photo and video,
you can customize the video buttons in this case because we're
just talking about video, we're going to be customizing
the photo buttons, which are then also going to apply to the video mode.
And that way there's no weird overlap in any of the settings.
Everything is going to be properly customized starting off in the custom
key dial settings.
Then first off, you're going to see that you have rear controls
and the camera shows
you a nice image on the right that tells you exactly where the button is
that you are customizing, starting off with the rear one buttons for button one.
We have ACL hold.
Instead of having this set to a hold, we're going to click in here
and we're going to change this to the zebra display.
What's great is that
this is going to let you instantly toggle on and off your zebras.
You can see if any parts of your footage are overexposed.
I love this feature.
Next you have the AF on button and we're going to tweak this slightly
because by default this is
going to let you hold down the button to turn the autofocus on and off.
But I'm going to set this to a toggle instead.
So we're going to go up here to AF MF, select your toggle and select that.
And this way you can press this button once
and it will instantly switch between autofocus and manual focus,
which is great if the autofocus is getting a little bit squirrely
and you're saying, No, I know what I want you to focus on.
You can quickly switch to manual mode and begin focusing next for three.
We have at C one and this is currently set to white balance
and you can leave it to white balance if you want to.
Alternatively though, if you're coming from the A7 three,
you can set this button to record if you want to.
So it feels more similar between the two cameras.
That said, though, if you set C1 to be the record button, make sure that you
change the red record button on the A7 for to be your white balance button.
So you still have a way to access that for four, which is custom button C three.
This is super cool.
You're going to want to change this to Aps-C c se 35 full frame,
which is going to enable you to change your camera from full
frame mode to crop super 35 millimeter mode with one button press.
It's awesome. Look at this. You can zoom in and out.
It's a magical one button press.
I love it. Lastly, four, five, which is the trash can.
That is also for on the back of the camera.
You're going to want to change this to zoom and with C4 set to zoom
because in the previous video you set Zoom to clear image, zoom in the menu.
You can now use C4 and zoom in and out on your sensor
and you can do this in conjunction with the Aps-C crop mode as well,
which is pretty magical.
So you can crop in and then you can zoom in even more.
Another 1.5 times moving on to rear two for button one, you have the control
joystick on the back and you're going want to change this to metering mode,
which is going to easily let you switch between multi and spot focus metering
and double check your proper exposure for two, which is currently not set.
We are going to want to set this and you're going to want to set it to
focal length.
And what's great about this is that if you are filming with a manual focus
lens, you can press the center button to adjust the focal length of the lens
to make sure that the ibis of the camera matches up with the lens focal length
and that your footage is super smooth and stable.
Button three Here is the left button on the control wheel on the back,
and for this one, you're going to want to set this to
Gamma Display Assist, which is available under the toolbox down here.
Select, Gamma Display, Assist, select.
And this is going to enable or disable gamma display assist,
which is great whenever you are filming in S log button four is
ISO and it's already labeled as ISO and I've always found that ISO is great
there, so I would actually not change and customize this button.
Just leave it set the ISO
button five is the down button and this is super, super useful.
You're going to want to go to Finder, slash, monitor, select and choose that.
And what's great about this is that any time you need to toggle
between using the monitor on the back of the camera
or the viewfinder,
you can press the down button and toggle between the two of them.
Moving on, we're now to the top buttons and we have two of them.
The first one is set to movie shooting.
And as you can see, it is the red movie shooting button on the top of the camera
by default.
You can leave it to this if you want.
I also personally use the shutter button as a record button too,
but it's nice to have this accessible here on both of them.
That said, though, you can also set this to your white balance button
if you want it to be more consistent between the A7 three and A7 S three.
Next for button two, which is the C two button.
It's set to focus area, but we're actually going
to want to change this to Focus Magnifier.
And by doing this you can then press C2 to punch in on your image
and make sure that is in focus next for the lens.
A lot of lenses,
not this one unfortunately, but a lot of lenses have a custom button
on the side of the lens that you can then program.
By default. It's set to focus hold.
So basically you can hold it down and it will not adjust the focus.
I would just leave it at this, but if you want to change it to something
else, if you have another thing you want to customize, you can change it.
But for now,
we're going to leave it at the default and that is your custom buttons
for the A7 four.
We got to move on though because we have the function menu to talk about
and by default this is not as customized as I would like it to be.
So let's dial in some settings for the function menu, go back to the main
menu and go onto the FN menu settings which stands for Function Menu.
And here you have settings for both photo mode and video mode.
Because we're editing things for video mode,
we're going to go down to video mode here.
The first menu option you're going to see is set to audio recording level.
And I think this is actually great by default because you're going to need
to be able to adjust the volume that your camera is recording.
And so keeping this set to audio recording level is great.
Next here on the function and you're going to see
the next to options here on the menu, say follow function menu,
which basically means that whatever it is set to appear in the photo function menu
also placed in here to the video function menu and these are actually okay
because we want to focus mode and focus
there to be accessible in the function menu.
So these two settings are great and you can leave them.
Focus mode is going to enable you to change between different focus modes
and focus area is going to let you choose where your camera is focusing.
So it's nice to build access these settings from the function menu.
Next, by default, Sony gives you the option
to change your picture profile from the function menu,
but this is not something you're going to be changing often.
So I would just keep that in a custom menu, which we're going to talk about
in a little bit.
So instead of having this here, I would actually swap this out for face
I priority in AutoFocus, which is basically going to help you
turn that off
or on if the camera is trying to focus on somebody's face or their eye
and you actually don't want it to you want it to focus on something else.
So being able to tell you this off and on is really powerful.
Next we have zebra display and you actually are going to want to have
zebra display enabled as well as zebra level.
These are two great things.
Keep those there by default.
Really, really great for you to be able to turn your zebras off
and on and adjust your zebra levels if you need to run to the bottom row now.
And we have peaking display and peak level by default.
These are both great as well.
They're going to help you whenever you're focusing,
you can turn peaking off and on and you can also change the intensity
of the peaking, which is great.
Next, we have white balance here, but we don't need white balance
because we've already set that to a custom button.
So instead of having this set to white balance,
instead I recommend going up here to shooting display
and changing this to grid line display, which is going to enable you to turn your
grid lines off and on and these grid lines or things like that too.
35 to 1 aspect ratio, if you want those lines turn on you can have them on.
But if you ever need to turn them off for any reason,
having that accessible in the menu here is great.
Next on the function menu have steady shot adjust and this tool
is going to enable you to adjust your stabilization in camera
from standard to active stabilization, which is going to make your footage
more smooth with the cost of a 1.1 times crop by default.
This is already set and it's great, so leave it set to that.
Next you have focus map and this is also fantastic
if you to be able to check your focus.
So leave this at the default as well.
Lastly, we have the recording media settings.
As great as
is to be able to access your recording settings,
you're not going to be doing that very often.
Instead, we need to replace this with a really cool feature.
So go up here to the read option, go to image quality and score
all the way down to breathing compensation.
It's hidden down at the bottom.
But this is incredible because by you being able to toggle this on and off,
you can remove the lens breathing that your lenses have.
So having this accessible
in the function menu where you can easily access it is great.
So you can toggle it on and off whenever you need to
and that is it for the function menu.
Last thing that we need to do, we need to talk about the custom menu in the camera.
Yes, this camera has a custom menu as well.
Go up here
to the top of the menu and there's this gray star that says My menu setting
and you can populate this
with whatever settings you want from the rest of the menu,
which is incredible for accessing things quickly that you don't necessarily
need to access all the time, but you're going to need access occasionally.
So going in here, the custom menu, the first thing that I want you to do
is go over down to display from my menu and turn this to on.
This setting is really awesome.
Basically, it makes it so the menu is going to always
open to my menu any time that you press the menu button this way,
if you're buried down here in one of these settings,
but you're trying to get back
anytime you press menu, it's going to automatically go back to my menu.
Going to save you time, help you film faster.
Let's start populating this custom menu now by going to add item.
And the first thing you're going to want to
add is file format and you're going to add that under my menu.
Subheading one This is great in case you ever need to change your file format.
Likewise, I would also select movie settings
and put that right under the file format.
And lastly, we have one more setting that I'm going to add in here.
I oftentimes find myself using my Sony camera as a time
lapse interval ometer, so enabling the interval shoot function
and adding that here under movie settings makes it easily accessible.
If you're somebody that films time lapse is two, you can add this if you want.
And that's it for subheading one here.
Now, anytime you press menu,
you can select all of these three items, but we have more to add.
But that's all we're going to add to my menu.
One, we're not going to add more to my menu to add these settings,
we're going to add to my menu to our little less
often accessed but still nice to have them pretty quickly accessible.
So we're going to go ahead add item and we're going to go to media
record media settings and add that under my menu to
then we're going to go down to color slash tone and select
picture profile and add that under my menu to as well.
This way, if you ever find yourself needing to switch between Slug three
and S Silverton, for example, you can do that very quickly.
Next, monitor brightness. This is very important too.
You're going to oftentimes find yourself going from indoors or outdoors.
You may want the monitor to be brighter so you can add that right there.
Very important here as well.
Go to shooting mode and select camera set memory
as well as memory
recall media camera set memory is going to enable you to customize
your mode, dial at the top in case you ever need to, which is great.
I would also go in and add custom key slash dial settings to my menu to in case
you ever want to make any little tweaks to your custom buttons as well as function
menu settings.
Also very useful and accessible and that's it for custom and you too.
So you have quickly accessible settings, settings that are still quickly accessible
that you don't need to access quite as often.
And now we have one final thing to add.
So we're going to go back into here, go to media format
scary and we're going to add that to my menu three.
So you're oftentimes going to need to format your memory cards,
especially after you copy all your footage before you have a new shoot.
You're going to need to copy things,
but you do not want that to be super accessible.
So by putting it in its own custom menu three off to the side,
you can get to whenever you need to, but it won't be quite as scary.
And that is how you customize your A7 for for fast filmmaking.
Remember, you can still download my A7 four settings file.
It's completely free and you can load onto your camera
and immediately have all these settings and custom buttons set up.
No need to dig through the menu.
You can download that settings file below.
I will also link down below
to my other videos for the A7 four as well as my color presets.
Who is Matt Lutz that worked great with the A7 four
and make the footage that you film with it look incredible with that.
Thank you so much for watching and have a great day.