What's up, everyone, Miguel Quiles here.
And today we're going to talk about shooting, talking head videos and blogs.
I'm going to give you a crash course and share everything that you need to know
to dial in your settings and achieve a quality result to demonstrate these concepts.
I'll be using the Sony a7S III,
but these ideas will translate to whatever Sony camera you might be using.
First things first, you'll want to put your camera into movie
mode by selecting the film icon on the top dial of your camera.
We want to make sure we can have complete control over our exposure.
So you'll want to press the function or
the FN button on the back of your camera and head over to exposure mode.
Make sure you have manual exposures selected.
This is going to allow you to dial in your
shutter speed, your aperture and your ISO values manually.
From there we'll select a frame rate.
The most common frame rate that you'll see
in movies and films is 24 frames per second.
This is what I would recommend any time
you're going to film any talking parts within your videos for your record
settings, I would generally recommend shooting in whatever the highest bit rate
is that's available for your particular camera.
In this case, I'm going to be shooting at 100 megabits per second with
4:2:2 10bit color. Moving back into your menus
You'll want to select the file format.
Since I'm using the a7S III, I'm going to select XAVC HS 4K,
this is going to give me the best quality that I can get from this camera.
There are times you may want to shoot
in HD, so for that you'd select XAVC S HD instead.
Now that we have all of that set up,
we can begin to dial in our camera settings to get a good exposure.
The first thing we'll adjust is shutter speed.
This part is pretty simple as the value that we're going to select is actually
dictated by what's called the 180 degree shutter rule.
It basically states that you want your
shutter speed to be double whatever your frame rate is.
Since we're shooting at a frame rate of 24
frames per second, we double that number, which would be one fourty-eigth of a second.
Most cameras don't have that as an option
for shutter speed unless you're using a cinema camera.
So we'll select the next closest one fiftieth of a second.
This will give us a smooth cinematic look to any movement within our video.
OK, so we have our shutter speed picked out.
The next thing that we want to dial in is our ISO value.
Generally speaking,
you'll want your ISO value to be the lowest available option in your camera.
That gives you enough sensitivity given your lighting environment.
If you're filming in low light situations,
you'll adjust this value as high as you need to go to get a proper exposure.
I'm going to choose ISO 100 here.
Since we have plenty of light available
now, we'll have to select our aperture value.
This number is going to dictate how blurry
our background is and how much of the image appears to be in focus.
It's at this point that many newer
creators and videographers run into an issue.
Let me explain.
Let's say that you want to shoot at a wide open aperture outdoors in broad daylight.
I'm using the twenty four millimeter,
one point four g master lens right now to film myself, and I'm actually shooting
this at F8 in order to get the appropriate exposure.
Given the lighting situation that I find
myself in, however, I can go all the way down to one point four.
We can blur some of this background, but we're going to run into a little bit
of an issue and I'm going to show you what that is.
If I take my aperture to F 1.4
you notice right away that this image is severely overexposed.
So we have a couple of different ways that we can remedy this.
And I'm going to bring us bring this back to F8.
So the first thing that we could do is we could adjust our shutter speed.
Right. We're at one fiftieth of a second.
So if we brought our shutter speed up, that would darken the image.
It would correct the exposure, however,
by changing the shutter speed to anything other than that.
One fiftieth of a second, when we're filming at twenty four frames
per second, it's going to give us kind of a weird stuttering type of movement.
And it's not something that we want to do.
So we don't want to adjust our shutter speed at all.
Once we have selected that one fiftieth of a second.
The other thing we could do is we could adjust our ISO value.
Now, right now I'm shooting at an ISO
of one hundred and the camera does go to ISO eighty.
But again, that's not going to get us
to the proper exposure that we need to be at in order to get this situation handled.
So what can we do?
Well, it's actually very, very simple.
What we could do is use what's called
a variable neutral density filter or and filter.
It basically acts like a set of shades that you would put over your lens.
So let's do that really quick.
OK, so here we are.
This is a variable and filter. This is.
Is actually made by a company called Moment, and as you turn this dial,
it actually will change the amount of and so it actually
can get darker or brighter based on how much you rotate this ring.
So with that being said, we're going to see if this is going
to take care of our problem, which is being able to shoot with that F
one point four aperture, but in this bright daylight condition.
So first things first.
We're going to go to F one point four, as you can see, once again, overexposed.
And we're going to put this filter and hey, check that out.
So this thing basically just screws in onto the front of your lens.
And by using this, you have the ability to actually control
the exposure by basically just twisting the ring on your variable and the filter.
So this is very, very useful.
And you could see so I can make it bright
and then, of course, I can darken down the exposure.
One of the nice benefits of the a7S III is that I actually have a monitor
here on the side so I could see what the exposure actually looks like.
So this is a really simple way for you
to be able to shoot with that F one point four aperture.
You blur out the background,
keeping your shutter speed at one fiftieth of a second, your ISO value at one
hundred, and then controlling your exposure with the variable and the filter.
And there you go.
That is everything that you need to know
to help you get started with shooting your first talking head video or vlog.
You guys have any questions?
Leave them in the comments section below.
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We have new videos coming out just about every single week for you guys to enjoy.
Thank you so much for watching.
And I'll see you in the next video.