April 11, 2024

Cameras and Settings

Two cameras, lots of choices.

Canon R5

First, how do we shoot movies. There is quick access to this via the button with the red dot on top of the camera. Push this and you start shooting video, push it again and you stop.

To put the camera into "whole hog" video mode, press the mode button on top of the camera, then press the info button on the back of the camera. Among other things when you do this, video stuff gets added to the menus, which is quite important.

Push menu, then roll either wheel on top of the camera to get to the first menu under camera icon. This is where you set video record size. I am currently using "FHD" which is 1920x1280 (what was once called 1280p) at 29.97 fps. There are lots of other choices, but I won't dive into them now.

Now, let's suppose you have a BR-E1 wireless remote (as I do).
And suppose you want to use it to stop and start movies (a great idea).
I have it all paired and set up for still shooting, but the darn thing just does not work for movies.
You need to do two things. One is to set the little switch on the BR-E1 to the "movie setting. The second is to go into the camera menus under shooting menu 6 and you will find "remote control enable/disable" and enable it.

Canon R5 and sound

The R5 has a single microphone built into the camera with a tiny hole on the front of the camera to admit sound. There is one place in the menus where you have settings you can fool with. See the above on putting the camera into video mode and getting to the first of the shooting menus. The sound setting is in the first of the "shoot" menus under the camera icon, and only will appear when the camera is in movie mode. You can choose Auto or Manual. If you choose manual, you get 64 levels to choose from. With a good external microphone, you would want to kick the signal up on the external microphone and keep this low to reduce noise.

The wind filter setting only works with the internal microphone.

The side of the camera has both a microphone input and a headphone jack under a rubber flap.

You can adjust headphone volume by clicking the [Q] button and then rolling one of the wheels. You have 16 levels from 0 to 15 to choose from. You also get a handy sound meter on the back of the camera when this is chosen.

Once in movie mode, you can use the info button to control how much info is in the viewfinder. Some of these selections give you a nice sound level meter at the lower left. It shows you stereo. Using the internal microphone, the same signal goes to both channels, but I suppose with an external microphone that is actually a pair of microphones you would get real stereo.

As far as an external microphone, get one with a 3.5mm plug. If you want to use an XLR microphone, you will want to get an audio interface, and this is another game entirely. You can buy XLR to 3.5 cables, but you don't want to go that route, for reasons I won't go into here.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org