From the course: Learning Your Nikon DSLR Camera

Adjusting movie record settings

From the course: Learning Your Nikon DSLR Camera

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Adjusting movie record settings

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- Shooting video on your Nikon camera offers a lot of great options. With the ability to exchange lenses, you can get creativity that's not possible on a smartphone or a traditional video camera. But, it can be a bit challenging as there are a lot of extra options. Now, you'll find additional coverage of DSLR video available in the online library. So be sure to check that out. All of your Nikon cameras are going to have the ability to record high-definition video. Some of them are 720p, most are 1080p, and a few of the newer cameras have started to introduce 4K recording, either internally or externally, it'll vary by camera model. Now, to access this is pretty straight-forward. First up, I suggest you switch the camera into a manual mode. So, change the dial here to manual mode. Additionally, on the back of the camera, you're going to want to switch the Live View switch. Go from photo mode to video mode, and then press the Live View button to open up the camera. Once you do this, you'll see that key information is displayed on the frame. Now, in this particular case, I can move my focus point around, that red dot, and set it where I want to set focus. When I half-press the shutter button, the camera, if it's using an auto-focus lens like this macro lens here, will engage. You'll notice that I've set the macro lens here to auto-focus so that it could take advantage of the camera's auto-focus system. But I could still manually focus this lens, I just need to switch it into manual mode. I do that by pressing the button here, on this particular lens and turning, and now I have manual control over focus. But the auto-focus doesn't work until this ring is pressed and rotated back into place. Now the auto-focus method will engage... And lock. There are a few options in the menu you'll want to check out. Just press the menu button to bring this up, and, what you'll see here are the overall controls. Go up to the camera settings, and you'll have the general controls here over options like white balance. The ability to choose other controls here. You'll see if we keep going down... we get to movie settings. If I press this, I see additional options. Here, I could choose my frame rate. And, on this particular camera, you see that it offers both 30p and 25p, as well as 24 and 60. If you are shooting NTSC, this is the type of format that's widely used in North America, Japan and a few other parts of the world, you're going to go with either 30 frames per second, or 60 frames per second. If you are shooting for PAL, which is widely used around the world, it's going to be 25 frames per second, or 50 frames per second. You'll also see the cinematic 24p. Make sure you check your settings and your delivery requirements before you record. Now what I can do here, is go through the different options. In this particular case, my Nikon here shoots 1280 by 720, or 1920 by 1080. Newer Nikons might support additional resolutions. Let's go here, and we'll shoot at 1920 by 1080 at 30p, and I'll press OK. You see there's also a recording quality, high quality or normal. And this will affect how much card space is used, as well as the visual quality. We'll talk more about the microphone later. And we have the ability to decide which card slot to record to on this camera. Some cameras offer two memory cards, so you could record video to one, and photos to the other. For example, my second card slot here has a lot more space for recording video. Now, if I half-press the shutter button, it will adjust, and we can set focus. When we're ready to record, it's simple enough, I'll just press the record button up top, and it begins recording. We'll talk more about these options in a moment. You see there, though, the record indicator, and, we get some additional information as it's recording. In this case, the Nikon is counting down, but more on that a little bit later.

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