The button is hard to accidentally push (thank goodness), so you do have to be sure you fully engage it. When you do, you will see the top LCD screen display "REC" and show your elapsed shooting time. The screen on back simply shows a red dot with "REC" alongside at the upper right. The viewfinder shows this also, but adds a bar of information at the bottom that includes shooting time at the lower right.
I am using a 128G CF Express card, a SanDisk Extreme Pro. When I put the card into a card reader, I see several MP4 files, such as:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom tom 28838124 May 28 11:00 581A6132.MP4Note the file size, this is 7 seconds of video.
On my linux system I can double click on these, it launches "vlc" and displays them! I even get sound! Although the sound is often choppy the first time I play a video. I can run vlc from the command line:
vlc 581A6132.MP4
Apparently my Sennheiser MKE 400 microphone turns itself on and off automatically. Maybe. If you are lucky. I'm not sure yet how to play the game and get reliable results. Push the button first to power it on, then the red camera button to shoot, and maybe double check the MKE to be sure it has turned on.
dnf install -y mediainfo dnf install -y mediainfo-guiRunning just "mediainfo" tells me more things than I can comprehend, but some study indicates that the file is 1920x1080, progressive. Frame rate is 29.97 FPS. Sound is available as 2 channels, sampled at 48 kHz
This is good old "1080p" which is a sensible format to capture video without generating huge files that are troublesome to play back.
Running "mediainfo-gui" is nicer -- it tells me only what I really want to know in a compact display. I can use "mediainfo" when I want everything including the kitchen sink.
Using this link from my linux desktop (chrome browser), it plays just fine and I get sound!
I try it on my phone also (Android, Google Pixel 6) and it works fine, although it is choppy due to limitations on how fast the internet can transmit data to the phone.
It takes two button presses. First press "mode" on top of the camera, then press "info" on back of the camera. The same two button sequence take you out of "video mode". You need to be in "video mode" to access the various video related settings and menus.
The game here deserves its own page (and manual), but for the record, the five basic resolution choices available are:
FHD = 1920x1080 = 1080p "full HD", what we used above. 4K-U = 3840x2160 (16:9 aspect ratio) 4K-D = 4096x2160 (wide 4K) 8K-U = 7680x4320 (normal 16:9 aspect ratio) 8K-D = 8192x4320 (wide 8K)I have been told that "experts" claim that capturing 4K-U and converting it later to 1080p yields better results.
You can also dive into the menus and select frame rates.
The big 3 choices are 60, 30, and 24.
There is also an option for 120
The 24 FPS rate is what has long been used by movies, and some video shooters use it to get a "movie look" which is of little interest to me. They say the better and smoother 30 FPS video has a distinctive "home video" look.
Note that shooting at 120 lets you play back at 1/4 speed, and shooting at 60 lets you play back at 1/2 speed. No sound is captured with 120 FPS, and maybe not for 60 either.
We are getting way off track here, but as far as I know all video display software and equipment will render at 30 FPS, so choosing other rates doesn't improve quality, but just allows slow motion playback. In other words, there is no way to get your TV to display video recorded at 120 FPS at 120 FPS -- as far as I know.
Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org