I was hoping to do this outside in the sunshine,
but unfortunately it's a bit drizzly, it's a bit damp and we might hear a bit
of deluge in a moment. What is firmware, and why is it called firmware?
Firmware is the software which lives inside your camera
which is used to process an image that the sensor has captured
into an image file and then save it on to your card,
it kind of manages the camera, it's the software
which erm the camera uses in order to work, the firmware gets upgraded
fairly regularly, manufacturers release new upgrades
so erm, it's well worth checking from time to time, to make sure your camera is
up to date because
there's usually improvements. Now this is the sort of thing I absolutely hate and
hoping I don't mess this up for you
but I'm sure we'll be fine. What do you need to do
to that to get hold of your firmware upgrade, well
the place you'd begin is with your camera
let's just have a quick look now all cameras gonna be different and you might
need to look at your book to see how you do it on your camera,
on my Nikon d300s you switch it on
I pop into the menu and have a little scroll onto
firmware version click across into there,
and you can see here that there are two pieces of firmware
and there's an A and B, mines on one point nought one and one point nought nought,
and i'm embarrassed to say i haven't done this, i'm telling you to do it and i haven't taken my own medicine.
And i don't like fixing things that aren't broken,
so that is going to tell me what my firmware version is
so I'm on one point Nought one so the next thing
the you gonna need to do is to go online
and then do a little search for a firmware upgrade
but before we go there i just wanna show you other things you're gonna need.
There are two ways of doing this, you can either with your camera tether
into a computer and you can download the firmware upgrade from the computer
into the camera, you'll find the that the firmware ups,
the firmware's update website for each camera will
have detailed instructions as well but
well some of you like watching me do it, i don't know why
but anyway the other way you can do it is
download the firmware update and then put it onto a flash card
and put the card into the camera, the camera will see the update and then it will execute it a
and put it into the camera.
Now in the case of my camera, which has two pieces of firmware, the
A and the B, you can't put them both onto one card,
I'm gonna use two cards, i'm going to put the A on one card and the B on the other
and then do it that way. If you only have one card then
you can put the A on install it
and then format the card and put the B on, you have to do this with a
newly formatted card,
make sure you have you images saved somewhere safely because when you format
the card it will delete
everything of that card, okay it's really important, don't forget that one.
So i have my formatted card, I've got a card reader and I've got my camera ready
to go,
I got my glasses so I can see things clear, let's hope it works
okay so the first thing you need to do then is to wiz out online
and do a little search for the firmware upgrade
so mine is a Nikon D
300 firmware
and that's it we've got it,
we whizzed through to this page, now i did
research before did this and discovered it says not available I actually know
that it
is available by clicking on the downloads and support tab,
i don't know why it says it isn't. You just scroll down the list
until you find your camera model make sure it's the exact model,
click through
and we've got a whole page which tells you all about how to download the
software all these instructions will be on this page, it's very very specific,
and very
technically detailed.
There's this little section here which is about
how to verify which your current cameras firmware version is, which I've just shown you.
so you know turn the camera on press the Menu go through to
setup menu and then will tell you what your
firmware version. When we look at the top here i should be on
1.11 at one point nought, so you scroll on down towards the bottom where
you've got download instructions, detailed download instructions, you can sort of pop them up
on screen and
that'll give you absolute step-by-step, read the terms and conditions nicely
which I know we all do and then
begin the download. So now
here we go, we make a little folder and
put one on the desktop and i'm gonna call that
the 300 firmware update,
open that folder,
and save it into the computer so that's.. there we go you can see it, down the bottom there.
so that's downloaded or it's downloading
so the next step it's gonna be.. how do we get that into the camera?
click on the download to unpack the software, un the program
and there we go it's unpacked, there's our update
and inside those are the two bits of firmware ready to go.
Now take your card, your formatted card,
pop into the card reader, there we go. And a window has opened up
move that over, and then drag the update into
the top level of the card, make sureit goes into the very top level of the card, don't
put it into a folder
because what will happen is the camera won't be able to find it.
That's really important.
okay now all we have to do is to
adject the card.
and adject, you always do that properly because you may get a
spike
and then you've got a problem. Okay now i
can whip my card out, now this is the scary bit,
get your camera, make sure your camera battery is fully charged before you atempt to
do this
because if it isn't and your camera decides it's going to pack up midway through the
update
you could be in a lot of trouble, you may even have to take it back to the
manufacturer to get it
mended, so make sure your battery is fully charged.
This is all new territory to me because i haven't done it yet, but i hope it works.
Okay glasses on, so you can see card
into the camera
and the cards in, then switch the camera on,
we go into the menu, firmware update,
firmware update, firmware version there we go and you can see straight away
there's a new little piece that has arrivd which says update,
so now we go down there and click okay.
and it's saying which one do you want to update the current
is is actually checking it saying current version
is a 1.1 and the new version
is.. the menus just gone off,
update 1.11
so do I want to update it confirm it yes
we going a little screen on the back saying warning to not turn off your
camera during this update the update will take several minutes.
Exciting isn't it? so now we just sit here and watch the little status bar
creeping across the screen,
and its updating my firmware so in theory this should be a bit like having
a new camera
nearly there update completed turn off the camera
and that's really all there is to it. Something
that you should always do if you have your camera set up a specific way for
example I always shoot in
Adobe RGB, i shoot raw files, i make sure stuf like D lighting and auto settings
are all switched off,
go back into your menu and go through those settings and make
sure you put it back the way you want it, because the chances are pretty good that it's
gonna go back to
factory defaults. So there we go, almost got a shiny new camera.
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