More and more DSLR users are utilising the ability that their cameras have to shoot high quality video – but what settings should you use to ensure you get the best quality video? Dave Dugdale from Learning DSLR Video put this video together for dPS just to answer that question – particularly with Canon DSLRs in mind.
Video Transcription – Best Video Settings for Canon DSLRs
I get this question about once a week, “What are the Best Video Setting For The Canon DSLR cameras”.
So let me start off by eliminating two things you can take off the list. Those are aperture and ISO. Aperture, I really can’t tell you what to set it on because it depends on the type of look you are going after.With a shallow depth of field or not.
And the other one is ISO. ISO is kind of there for exposure how how you are going to set the exposure. I will say you do not want go too far north of let’s say 1600 especially on like the Canon T2i then it gets really noisy. Obviosly you are going to need to use aperture along with the ISO to get the right exposure but at least it gets you in the ball park. Those two ingredients are taken off the list.
So the first I can tell you about what is on the list is shutter speed. Basically if you are going for a filmic look you are pretty much going to double your frame rate, so if you are shooting 24 frames per second you are going to want a 1/50th of a second shutter speed and if you are shooting at 60 frames per second you are going to go with 125th frames per second shutter speed. Now I will tell you it’s just kind of a guideline and a rule but I have shot at much higher shutter speeds and it has worked wonderful, especially if you are shooting something like myself which is just basically a moving head.
If you just getting your feet wet with your camera I think the best setting for Picture styles is Standard. I use it 90% of the time. If you are outside filming some landscapes for instance then you might want to try Landscape, and if you are using a close in portrait shot you might want to try Portrait picture style. After you have had the camera for a while and you want to take it to the next level, you might want to create a very flat picture style so you can have more control over color, sharpness and saturation in post.
As for White Balance, the best setting by far is always going to be custom. This is where you get the perfect color temperature for your shot. This is best way to do it, but it is also unfortunately the most time consuming.
The best setting for focus is to set it on quick focus and focus to one of the many points within the view finder. This is just my personal favor way to do this, I am sure others might disagree me but I got really accurate and fast results using this method.
Disable your AGC to get this cleanest audio, AGC is automatic gain control. I use a hack method for this, but there are many other ways to do this as well like a buying a Juicelink box or a software hack if you are brave enough to install it on your camera.
Set Movie Exposure to Manual, this is the best way to go by not letting the camera to decide for you.
Grid display to Grid 1, this helps me with my composition just right.
Disable Highlight Tone Priority, I have done many tests with this and found it best just to leave it off.
Auto Lighting Optimizer is set to standard. Again I have done a lot of tests with this and I find that this setting not only helps my portrait photos but it even helps when I do video interviews if the lighting is not quite even on the person’s face.
That is about it for the best settings you can use on your Canon DSLR for video. Thanks for watching and thanks to Darren for letting me do a guest post again.
Post from: Digital Photography School