Figure 4.15

Manual controls give you more freedom for composition. In this example, we used manual focus and aperture controls to go from an image with a sharp, focused background to one with a soft, blurry background.

Manual What?

We’ll discuss the theory and use of manual iris and shutter speed in Chapter 7.

A good auto focus mechanism is also important. It used to be that serious camera operators avoided auto focus, but a well-designed auto focus mechanism can be a boon if you are running and gunning, shooting in a situation where it’s hard to see the LCD to determine focus, or if you simply aren’t comfortable with focusing manually. How responsive is the auto focus? How fast is it? Does the camera offer the capability to adjust the point of focus to areas other than the center of the frame?

Focusing Is Part of the Lens

If your camera has interchangeable lenses, the ability to auto focus and manual focus may change, depending on the lens’ capabilities.

Shutter Speed

Most cameras automatically select a shutter speed based on the aperture setting, a process called shutter priority. Many cameras also provide manual shutter speed control, which gives you an extra degree of creative control. By switching to a higher shutter speed—1/200th to 1/4000th—you can stop fast-moving action, such as sporting events. A faster shutter is great for picking out fine detail, but faster speeds eliminate most motion blur, which can result in an image with very strobic, stuttery motion (see Figure 4.16).

Unfortunately, lower-end digital video camera manufacturers frequently provide fast shutter speeds, but they often skimp on slow ones. If you are ultimately planning to transfer your finished video to film, it’s a good idea to look for a camera that can shoot at 1/60th of a second. At this speed, you’ll tend to get a better film transfer.

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Figure 4.16

(Top) At a somewhat “normal” shutter speed of 1/60th of a second, the moving car has a pronounced motion blur. (Bottom) At 1/4000th of a second, moving objects in each individual frame are frozen. When played back, the video can have a somewhat “stroboscopic” look.

Frame Rates

Most HD cameras record a variety of frame rates, starting at 24fps and going as high as 60fps. (See Chapter 3 for the lowdown on all the possible frame rates of HD.) However, pocket-sized video cameras, point-and-shoot still cameras that record video, and cell phone cameras do not always offer a full selection of frame rates, especially when recording full-sized HD. Be sure to check the camera’s specifications before you buy.

True Slow Motion

Many cameras offer a “slow-mo” setting, but they don’t offer true slow motion. True slow motion requires the ability to shoot at a higher frame rate—at least 60fps. Digital cinema cameras can often shoot up to 100fps, and there are some special consumer-grade camcorders that shoot at high frame rates as well. If your camera doesn’t offer true slow motion, avoid the in-camera slow-mo and save the motion effects for postproduction.

Aperture Control

Like the iris in your eye, the iris in your camera’s lens lets you control how much light passes through the lens to the image sensor. Being able to control the size of the iris, or aperture, manually is a crucial camera feature. Shooting video is all about movement. Even if you have the camera locked down on a tripod, odds are something within the frame is moving and when things move, the light changes. A camera set to auto iris will try to correct for these changes, and the result is often an image that gets brighter and darker as things move around.

A classic example of auto iris is when a person holding a camera enters a house. For a few seconds, the image is very dark and then it suddenly brightens up. An experienced shooter with a camera set to manual iris control can walk into the house and quickly change the iris as the threshold is crossed, making the transition feel seamless. The auto iris feature has no aesthetics; it simply aims for always having an image that is bright and easy to see. So, if you are shooting a crime thriller and want a shot of a dark figure in a dark room silhouetted against a bright window, an auto iris control is going to mess up your shot (see Figure 4.17).

Test Your Camera

Be sure to do a test shoot before you begin your main shoot.

Faux Progressive Scan

On some cameras, the progressive scan mode doesn’t shoot a true 30 full frames per second. Instead, it shoots a single field and duplicates it to create a full frame. Very often, it does this at a much slower frame rate of 15 frames per second. Although this can look a lot like a regular progressive scan, you’re only getting half the vertical resolution. Stay away from these faux progressive modes.

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Figure 4.17

Sometimes, artistic choices, like this blurry silhouette, are technically wrong, so you’ll need to disable auto focus and auto iris to get this effect.

Faux Widescreen

If you need a widescreen image (and most of us do these days), be sure to get a camera that offers a native aspect ratio of 16:9. Some lower-end cameras include a non-native “widescreen” mode that lets you shoot in a 16:9 aspect ratio, but they achieve this by cropping the top and bottom of the frame to letterbox the image down to 16:9. The downside to this “hacked” 16:9 effect is that you lose a lot of vertical resolution. If your CCD only has 360,000 pixels and you’re using a third of them for black areas above and below your image, you’re effectively shooting with much lower resolution than your camera is capable of (see Figure 4.18).

Figure 4.18

The widescreen feature on some cameras simply masks the top and bottom of your image, effectively wasting a third of your vertical resolution!