(upbeat music)
- No matter which camera you use,
diving into the menus
and adjusting the settings to suit your needs
is the best way to get the best quality for your videos.
Quite a few people have asked
what my settings are for the Canon EOS R.
So today, I hope you're all set
to dive into the settings of the EOS R.
Some of it's right here on screen
and some of it's hidden away in the menus.
But before we dive into that,
I do wanna say these are just my settings that I use
that I have found that work best for me,
they are not the definitive best settings.
They're just the ones that I like
and the ones that work for me.
Oh, and I should mention,
I'm going to move the EOS R off the tripod
and replace it with the 6D Mark II.
So for the rest of this video
as I'm going through the camera settings,
it's going to be the 6D Mark II filming from here
and the EOS R you'll see the menus up on screen.
I've got my computer here so that I can record the menus
and you can see all the changes that I make.
So this is the 6D Mark II recording over here.
This can be our subject Gene from "Bob's Burgers".
There we go, perfect.
Let's start with the settings that are immediately on screen
on the info display
because those are the ones
that I change and use the most often.
Down at the bottom the exposure settings.
Typically when I'm filming in here,
I keep my ISO either at 125 or 160.
Usually I'm using this lens, the Sigma 24, 1.4
all the way wide open at 1.4.
And when I do that, I keep the ISO at 125.
If for some reason it's just not bright enough
or like right now I'm using a 2.0 lens,
then I change it up to 160.
I do tend to like my stuff to be brighter.
My aperture right now is set to 2.0
but that's because that's as wide
as this 35 millimeter lens goes
and shutter speed is one 50th of a second
because I do shoot at 24 frames per second.
So let's press the Q button on the back and just start going
through some of these settings.
So, first thing is Auto Focus.
I use the tracking Auto Focus,
the art has a bunch, got One point, Expand, Around,
all these different things.
For video, I use Face Tracking.
And then I also turn on the Eye Auto Focus.
So right now if I press info, I can enable or disable.
Eye Auto Focus on the EOS R
is really kind of the key feature.
If I turn the camera towards me
you can see the white square on my eye
and that is what makes this camera's Auto Focus so good.
So, with the EOS R, especially when you're filming
wide open at like 1.4,
having that Eye Auto Focus is what locks on
to your subjects eye and no matter how they move,
it just does not lose focus.
Going back through the menu,
I do film at 24 frames a second or 23.98.
Very important though,
I think with the EOS R
there's a lot of different movies settings that you can use.
I always film at All-I compression.
It's going to be a bigger file,
but it's gonna be the best quality
and especially since I upscale my footage to 4K for YouTube,
having the best quality file is really important.
You can do IPB if you want to reduce your file size
and still film in full 1080,
but All-I is really the way to go.
Of course, there's 30 frames a second,
all these options there as well.
The HD options are all at 720.
The only time I think you'd really need that
is if you're doing some kind of live streaming
and your bandwidth is low
and you need to reduce to a 720 output.
And it does have 59 or 60 frames per second
with All-I compression as well.
And I use that a lot of times
when I'm filming B-roll footage.
Very important though,
if I do switch the camera into 60 frames a second,
I also switch the shutter speed to one hundredth of a second
and that's going to stop lights
from flickering in the background
especially if we slow your footage down.
And that usually means you need to bump up the ISO.
The EOS R is native ISO, it's best performing ISO is 400
but usually since I use wide apertures
and low shutter speeds
400 is a little too bright,
so that's why I film usually about 160 or 125.
And of course on EOS R you do have 4K but it's cropped 4K.
I actually use it a lot when I wanna punch in
and make my 24 millimeter lens
feel like it's a little bit more of a zoom.
So sometimes for B-roll footage and stuff, I'll switch to 4k
just so I can switch focal lengths,
or it makes it feel like I'm switching focal lengths
without actually switching lenses.
But typically, everything I film is 23.98 frames a second
with All-I compression.
We'll skip over audio for right now
'cause I'll explain those settings in a second.
And then we've got headphone volume.
Usually I'm not using headphones,
so I don't really adjust those.
We do have Image Stabilization on the EOS R.
You can either turn it off,
which is gonna even give you a wider shot,
you can enable it, which is gonna crop in a little bit
and you can do Enhanced Stabilization
which is gonna crop in a lot more.
This is all electronic stabilization.
I usually keep it on the regular.
So if I kind of shake my hands just a little bit,
this is no stabilization.
This is regular stabilization.
And this is Enhanced stabilization.
Going over to the other side of the menu.
I'm going to skip over White Balance for right now
and jump into Picture Style.
So, the R does have C-Log which is very flat
and great for color grading.
My sort of dirty secret shame
is that I actually just use the automatic Picture Style.
And the reason for that is because that's one of the reasons
I like Canon cameras
is because the colors straight out of the camera look great.
Once I have the footage put in Final Cut.
Usually all I'll do is adjust some of the exposure sometimes
and I might like boost the mids and boost the highlights
and usually not too much of the shadows
and that's really it.
Otherwise, I like the colors straight out of the camera.
That's one of the reasons I like Canon cameras.
I'm comfortable using it on Auto Picture profile.
It does a good job.
I've gotten lots of good feedback about it.
So, clearly it looks good.
But I think the reason that it looks good
is going back to White Balance.
White Balance is one of those things that will make or break
your footage in a lot of cases.
When I'm filming in this room,
I set it to 4400 degrees Kelvin and I keep it manual.
So, that way when I'm using another camera,
I can set that to 4400 and I can match them more easily.
If I go outside and I wanna film
it's very important to remember to switch White Balance
because that is set for indoors.
Most of the time, 99% of the time when I'm filming outdoors,
I also just leave it on Auto White Balance,
but I leave it on Auto White Balance with White priority.
There's Ambience priority,
which will try to match like the mood or the vibe outside.
And that's just a stylistic choice.
I like White priority because it seems to keep the colors
just a little bit more accurate
and I like the results that I get.
And when I film outside since I really want to keep
my shutter speed at one 50th of a second,
that's also usually when I'm using an ND filter
so that way I can keep my aperture open,
I can keep my shutter speed low,
I turn the ISO down to 100 and that gives me
footage that looks great
even when filming in bright outdoor,
midday light conditions.
'Cause I'm one of those people that just likes
wide open apertures all the time.
I know whatever, there's opinions about that,
but I really like it and I'm not gonna apologize for it.
But the rest of the time if I'm in a controlled environment,
I set the White Balance myself.
Those are like the immediate settings that I use.
But let's jump into the menus a little bit more,
because there's a few things that I wanna show you
about this camera.
We'll just go straight to the beginning.
Some of these are things we've already gone over
so we don't need to go over them again.
Movie cropping, the reason you would want to use this
is if you're using an EF-S lens with the EOS R.
So if you're using something like the Sigma 18-35,
which is an amazing lens,
it's not designed for full frame cameras.
You can pop that on, enable Cropping
and then it's going to crop in basically
and give you an APS-C size image.
Sound recording, this is really important.
Normally I fine tune my Sound recording on the main screen.
But if you're gonna record
with a mic plugged into your camera,
go into Sound recording and make sure
you have it set to Manual.
Don't use Auto
because the camera is gonna jump all over the place
and you're gonna get all kinds
of noisy pre-amp background hiss, it's gonna sound terrible.
Keep it on Manual.
What I have been doing is using the Rode VideoMicPro
set to plus 20 decibels because this mic
is quieter than the camera.
And then all I need to do on the EOS R is keep its audio,
literally I go all the way over to the left
and then I just bump it over one, sometimes two,
that's gonna give me the best quality audio.
Anytime you're plugging any mic or the RodeCaster
or whatever into your camera,
put the recording level really low and then bump it up
until you're at the level that you want.
You want your audio levels to be at that 12,
at that green dot and if you go back to the main screen,
you can see, I press the Info button
to put all this info on screen.
So, I just took it off.
If I press Info, it's going to take off the bars,
it can go here.
I like it with as much information as possible on screen.
And you can kind of customize this
within some of the menus too.
From there, now it makes it easier
to adjust the Audio recording levels just right there.
Movie digital IS, this is the stabilizer.
This is also where you can turn it on or off.
I don't really play with any of these for video settings.
This is also where you can set White Balance,
custom White Balance.
You can play with your Picture Styles,
adjust them as you want.
This is where you can turn C-Log on or off.
Now I've turned on C-Log,
you can see how flat the picture profile is.
So if you're trying to really stylize something
like for a narrative, then it makes sense to film in C-Log.
For my personal workflow,
it's awesome that it's here and I've used it once or twice,
but what I found is like color graded and it looks just
slightly worse than the out of camera colors
and it's just, why am I doing that to myself?
Other things, Auto Focus,
this is also where you can turn on Eye Detection.
I have noticed sometimes when I swap out lenses
or sometimes just randomly,
Eye Detection gets disabled.
So, before I record I always make sure that Eye detection
is enabled because it's really, it's just so good.
And that's also where you want Servo Auto Focus.
So, it's just constantly focusing.
Since this figure isn't a real person,
you're not seeing that Eye Auto Focus box pop up.
But as soon as I turn the camera towards me,
then you should see it, yes, pop up right on my eyes.
So, it locks on really quick.
And once it's locked on, it does not let go.
I love the Focus guide, this is really helpful,
especially when I'm filming B-roll.
And what that means is when you turn your lens into Manual,
you're gonna see these arrows here,
and as you change the focus they're gonna get further apart
or closer together.
And then once they all line up,
it'll turn green, and that's what's gonna let you know
that your subject is in focus.
Now anytime you get a camera,
it's a good idea to is dig through every option
in every menu and play with it.
One of the things I do which doesn't affect picture quality,
but makes my life easier
is I go into preferences, and I go to File name,
and I change the File name to EOSR
because by default,
it's gonna be just like a bunch of numbers.
But by doing it EOSR it just,
does EOSR followed by the number of the file.
And when you're filming with multiple cameras,
it makes it really easy to organize them.
So, automatically the footage will say EOSR
or 6D Mark II
or whatever you set it as when you throw it all
into your editor and you know what footage
came from which camera, which is very, very helpful.
Let's talk about memory cards real quick,
because with the EOS R, they are very important.
The brand doesn't matter so much,
but I use SanDisk cards.
This is a 256 gigabyte card.
And the important thing is the right speed.
This is a 170 megabit per second megabyte,
it's megabits, right now megabytes, it's 170 per second.
And since the EOS R produces such a large file sizes,
it's important to have a fast card that can handle that.
If you don't, if you're just using some old SD card
that you had for an old camera with your R,
you're gonna get a lot of errors
and start having some issues.
So, getting a fast SD card is really important.
And you know, for a long time I actually thought I was using
somebody else's cards because my name is Tom
but when you go into the menu,
it says that the card is Format.
I was like but it should be for Tom not format.
And the last settings I'm wanna go over
are my touch bar settings for the back of the camera
which I found to be kind of useful.
I don't use it all the time, I kind of forget it's there.
But every once in a while I'm like, "Oh yeah, it's here".
And it's kind of useful.
So in the menu, if you go to the Custom Function menu,
number four, you can customize the Multi-Function bar.
So, I click on the Movie recording option.
And what I have it set for is actually my audio.
So, by sliding my finger across the bar,
I can adjust audio up or down.
If I just tap the left side of the bar,
it will lower it in single increments.
And if I tap the right side of the bar,
it will raise the audio level in single increments.
And I have actually found that to be really helpful,
not so much for videos like this.
But for other projects, like if you're filming an interview,
and somebody is talking and you notice that their levels
are too high or too low,
it's easy to go behind the camera
and just touch the Multi-Function bar up or down
a little bit to just raise that level.
And then everything sounds good.
And I also do have the safety lock
at the Multi-Function bar enabled
which if we go down here, it'll tell you,
that basically means you push your finger over the left side
of the Safety button for a second and it will open it.
Well, you can also do with the Multi-Function bar,
if you cover the entire thing
with your thumb for one second,
it will take you directly to those settings
so you can change them
if you decide that you want something else.
But if I hold the left one, now it's turned on.
And now I can adjust my audio.
So, just by tapping on the bar,
you can see I'm raising the audio, I'm lowering the audio.
And if I swipe across the bar,
it almost becomes like a dial.
It's kind of a cool way to use the Multi-Function bar.
It's the most useful way that I have found for my workflow.
And that's really the most important thing
to take away from this.
I'm happy to share these settings with you.
If there's something I didn't go over
that you have questions about,
definitely let me know.
But again, these are just my settings.
Yours might be different.
It's very important to remember what works for you,
but if you take the time to better understand your camera,
you can get some really outstanding results.
I was listening to a Matt D'Avella video a while back
and he said, "The best camera isn't the one you have,
"It's the one you know."
and my mind was completely blown away by that.
So, the more you know your camera,
the better results you're gonna get.
(upbeat music)