Hey it's a Meredith here and if you confused about the manual settings on
your Canon DSLR camera, well a few videos ago I walked you through my YouTube
studio set up here in my home and today I'm going to show you the DSLR video
settings that I use on my Canon camera now I use a Canon 70d it's a few years
old but it's a great camera and this should apply to the updated versions to
the 80D and 90D but I don't have those so I can't tell you for sure now I got
this question from my friend Lindsey Hazel over on Instagram she mentioned
that she has a Canon 70d but the manual settings are a little bit confusing and
so she usually just uses her phone or her webcam to create her youtube videos
and I was like girl if you have such a great camera you can really use that to
level up the quality of your videos with a DSLR the secret is to use your Canon
70d in manual mode and it's really easy to become overwhelmed with all of the
settings on your DSLR in manual mode but I'm going to keep it really simple for
you in this video so that one once you nail the settings for the space that
you're normally recording in if you have a studio or a home office like I do then
you pretty much can just turn your camera on hit record and you're ready to
go or - you'll understand what settings to tweak just those minor tweaks if your
shooting environment changes and if learning DSLR video settings in manual
mode and creating YouTube videos or social media videos is your jam like
mine then hit that subscribe button and let's degrade it now there are two ways
that you can look at and adjust the settings on your camera one is on the
camera itself which I'm going to show you in this video and two is using
canons EOS utility app on your computer but I'm gonna save that for another
video I will let you know when it gets published and I'll put a link down in
the description to that as well but we're gonna dive into the settings that
I use why I use them and what they mean if for your Canon DSLR in manual
and I also have a really great hack for how to prevent your battery life from
draining when you are shooting your YouTube videos first I'm going to turn
my camera on and you can see that I'm in video mode and this is where you can
toggle between photo and video so I can see what I'm shooting here on the LCD
monitor and as we change our settings we can see the effects in real time here on
this and monitor and I'm going to put the camera in manual mode so using the
mode dial on top press the lock release button in the middle and turn this dial
so that the M is selected and before we get into the settings on the monitor
though let's go into the menu and go to the second video settings tab and tap
movie rec size movie recording size I keep mine at 1920 30 all I which means
I'm shooting 1080 so it's 1920 by 1080 resolution that's the highest resolution
I have on the 70d and my frame rate is 30 and the all I refers to the
compression I find these settings to be just fine so I'm gonna hit that menu
button again and now we can change the actual shooting settings you can use the
LCD screen and buttons here on the top or the LCD monitor on the back which is
a touch screen so for shooting videos I tend to use that touchscreen monitor to
change my settings because my camera is usually facing me and then the screen
flips out and it's also facing me so looking at the monitor we can see a few
different settings and numbers here if you don't see any settings on your
monitor or if it just looks different hit that info button above the monitor
and press it a few times to filter through the different options until you
see something like what I'm seeing here and on the bottom left you'll see servo
a off which means that when you're shooting a video the autofocus will
continue to focus on the subject as that subject moves around in the frame that
little green light is on so that means that this is enabled the next setting
over is the cameras shutter speed now remember we're in manual mode here
so we need to actually tell the camera what we want our shutter speed to be
what we want our aperture to be and what we want our ISO to be and the shutter
speed is easy when you're shooting a video it should be double the frame rate
so I'm shooting 30 frames per second my shutter speed is set to 60 and as long
as I'm shooting videos not photos I can leave it there and never touch it again
the next setting over is aperture and the aperture refers to how big or small
the opening of the lens is which controls the amount of light that's
coming in and this is also the setting that helps you create kind of a blurry
background or bokeh effect but before we play around with the aperture we need to
talk about ISO or ISO first so the ISO refers to how sensitive your camera is
to the light that's coming in to it and this is where different lighting
situations are gonna come into play here so I could give you my ISO settings
which I will but it's not really gonna make that big of a difference to you
because your lighting situation and where you're recording is gonna be
totally different so generally speaking you want your ISO to be as low as you
can get it to create the best possible image quality in your videos this is one
of the reasons why having decent lighting is so important with videos
because the more light that you have coming in the more detail your camera
can pick up and then it doesn't have to work so hard to create that image so let
me show you what I mean if I turn my lights off which I have a handy little
button down here then it's pretty dark in here and I can raise my ISO up a
little bit I should be able to do this on the fly here so I have to bring up my
ISO I'm all the way up a thousand right now so that you can see my face I'm a
little blown out over on the side I have a window over here in a lamp over here
look in these dark shadowy corners and over here you might see a lot of noise
in just a lot of like fuzziness and that's what we mean by image quality if
I turn my lights whoa back on then I'm way way blown out and
then I don't remember where my ISO is at by the way I put a link down in the
description to all of my gear including the lights that I'm using and the Handy
switch that I use on my floor to turn them on on the fly so with my lights on
in my eye so lower not only an eye lit up so I should be looking a little
better at least but the shadows and all like the dark spots behind me should be
a little less and noisy right now my ISO is set at 250 sometimes it might be 300
sometimes it might even be 4 or 500 kind of depends what's happening outside of
this window the one thing you want to pay close attention to here if you're
new to this is your exposure meter so if you hold that shutter button down
halfway the camera will take a reading and give you a little mark on this scale
generally you want it to be in the middle so you can play with your ISO
until you get it in the right spot so this would be for you if you don't
really know what you're looking for in your image if you're like I don't know
if this is overexposed or underexposed I don't know what I'm looking at that
meter will help you out there but to keep it really simple what you want to
do is just look at your whites and your blacks and ask yourself are my whites
weight and my blacks black but you still want to see the detail of them so look
at the shadows if they're so dark but you can't see the detail then your ISO
might be a little too low and then you want to look at the whites or the
lighter areas and again you should be able to see the details of your face you
should be able to see the details of anything that is you know that is white
you know without it being so blown out that you can't really even see the
object so let me just adjust mine for you here if I go way low you can hardly
see the edge of my arm compared to the shadows right so that's way too low if I
go up high all the way up to you know 1250 that's pretty crazy look you can't
even see where my cheeks in my eyes and you can't see part of my eyebrow over
here and really the best thing you can do is a play around with it shoot some
video at the different ISO settings and then
look at them on your screen and see how they look to you don't just rely on what
you see in the camera and that's the best way that you're gonna actually
learn what the different settings actually do now that we have ISO out of
the way let's go back to aperture this is often also referred to as the f-stop
if you've heard that before and this determines your depth of field and your
lenses really what's at play here so generally with my kit lens here I
keep it at low like 3.5 or 4 with my lighting and the really small size of my
office that gives me the best sort of setup to
have some blur in the background I don't know if you can read that focus on my
face and back here is blurry if I come back here my auto focus is going to keep
me in focus and then I'm closer to that stuff so it's not as Lori and if I come
closer then I'm still in focus and that stuff gets even blurrier 3.5 was the
lowest of mine will go if I had a bigger room and my bookshelves were further
back behind me then they would be even more blurry so your aperture is another
one that you're going to want to play with a little bit if it's just you face
on camera it's pretty straightforward if you have multiple people or things
moving around a lot or there's a lot that you want to be in focus then you're
gonna want to bump that f-stop number up which means you're gonna also have to
bring your ISO up a little bit because the amount of light coming in through
the lens will be less so when you're shooting your youtube videos on your
DSLR in manual mode first thing you want to do is your shutter speed set that to
double your frame rate and then observe your space and your lighting and see
what is my ISO need to be around here maybe make some test videos for yourself
and then figure out what you want your aperture to be based on the depth of
field look that you are trying to accomplish with your videos now I
promised you a battery hack to save your battery life but before we get to that I
want to talk about white balance real quick so you can leave your Canon
on auto white balance and then you can just kind of let the camera figure out
what the white balance is supposed to be a while ago I had somebody reached out
to me on Instagram shout out to Michael King who let me know a way to actually
adjust the white balance he recommended that I change it based on
the color temperature of the light bulbs in my softbox lights and that's what
I've been using but you feel free to keep your cannon in auto white balance
mode or a play with the color temperature look at the actual light
bulbs on your softbox lights if you have those or even your overhead lights you
should have a color temperature there you can actually set your white balance
to match that color temperature and it will just correct for you now the
battery hack you may have noticed on my camera that I have a cord coming out of
my Canon 70d here and this is so that you can just plug the camera into an
outlet and not even use a battery so batteries don't last very long when
you're shooting videos and I got really sick and tired of having dead batteries
and actually draining a battery in the middle of a video so I finally googled
this and I found this $22 power adapter coupler that goes in just like a battery
you can actually close the door and everything and then your battery will
never die again this thing is brilliant and it's only twenty-two dollars it's so
worth it so I put a link down in the description below to the exact one that
I am using and if you want the whole walkthrough of my YouTube studio with
all my gear and my whole setup and everything I've cued that up for you
here as well hey if you're creating videos for YouTube and social media to
grow your audience Authority and income online that I created a free guide that
I think you're gonna love it's called the social video blueprint you can grab
it in the link right here or I'll put a link down in the description below on
your way out hit that like button if this video is helpful for you and don't
forget to subscribe to talk to you next time I