- Hey, my name is Matt
Johnson with www.whoismatt.com and this video is the second in my series, all about my run and
gun filmmaking settings for the Sony A7S III and FX3. The first video was a deep dive into the menus of the camera. While this video is gonna expand on that and show you all of my settings that I use for the mode dial, custom
buttons, custom menu and function menu. So if you film weddings or documentaries or basically anything else
where you need to shoot fast, this video is gonna show
you how to put the settings that you need right at your fingertips. So you're not stuck
digging through settings, like, hold on, I know the
setting was here somewhere. No, it's gonna be right there under your thumb or
possibly your other fingers. Now to start, if you haven't
watched the first video in this series, my menu set up video, I will link to that up in the corner and down to the description, and I would definitely
recommend starting there because we're gonna be building on top of that for this video. Second and more importantly,
if you want to save time I've actually created a settings file for my A7S III that you
can download for free at the link in the video description, and you can then load
that onto your camera and skip having to watch
the rest of this video because you will immediately
have all of the settings that I'm gonna be talking
about in this video. Custom buttons are what
most people think of when they think of
customizing a Sony camera. The camera's covered with
buttons that say C1, C2 where the C stands for custom, and so all of these
buttons can be customized. What's cool is that
basically every single button on the camera is customizable though not just these custom buttons. Now that said you don't
necessarily want to change a button that's already labeled because if you say borrow
a friend's camera to use, that can make using it a major pain. So we aren't gonna go completely
crazy with customizations but we are gonna make some nice tweaks. First thing that you're gonna want to do is make sure that your camera's mode dial is set to the film strip icon. There's a video about run and
gun and filmmaking settings. You need to make sure that your
camera is set to video mode. Start by opening the menu and scroll down to the yellow toolbox, go to the subheading
three operation customize and right there at the top you'll see the two things
that we're looking for. Custom key setting with
a picture next to it and custom key setting with
a film strip next to it. Now, why are there two options? Well, the A7S III is really nice about letting you set different settings for both photo and video because we're customizing
this camera for filmmaking, let's go down and pick the film strip that says custom key settings. Now when you opened this
up you may be confused because all of these custom
buttons say follow custom with a picture icon. That's because the camera wants you to set all of the custom key
settings for the photo mode and then have those
also apply to video mode but we're not gonna do that. We only want to mess with the video mode. The camera's already in video mode. Let's focus on video. So let's now begin customizing
the custom key settings for video mode. Selecting rear one now, we'll dig in here. The first custom button is
actually this scroll wheel on the back of the camera and I don't like having
the set to do anything because it's way too
easy to bump this wheel and have it switched through a setting. So to avoid that happening
next to one, I'm gonna punch in and I'm gonna change it to not set. Moving on to the second button that is actually this
AEL button on the back. I would set that to zebra display select so you can turn on and
off your camera zebras with a single button press. This is great for checking
if a shot is overexposed. The third button we're
gonna customize says AF on on the back of the camera, and I'm a big fan of keeping the buttons pretty close to how they're labeled. So I would set this button
to AF/MF selector toggle. This makes changing your camera from auto focus to manual focus as easy as one button press, which is awesome if you
find yourself fighting against auto-focus. Button four, this is very important. This is C1 on the back of the camera. Now I have mine set to white balance so I can quickly press this button and immediately access
my white balance settings to change the white balance of the camera. But if you're coming from the A7 III, you're gonna remember that
this button right here is the record button so, if you have an A7 III
and you're also shooting with the A7S III, to
keep things consistent between the cameras, I would set C1 to be
your movie record button. That way it's not weird whenever
you're going between them. Option five is C3 on
the back of the camera and C3 I have set to steady shot to allow me to toggle between standard and active stabilization. When you're shooting on a
gimbal standard stabilization should be plenty, but if you're shooting handheld and still dealing with some shake, switching to active stabilization
can make a big difference. Option six is C4, not an explosive. This won't blow up your camera,
just another custom button. I have my C4 set to zoom and so by pressing C4, I can
use Sony clear image zoom to zoom in and out and
recompose my shot in camera. We're onto rear two even more buttons on the back of this camera. The first custom button in this section is for this multi selector. You can use it with your
thumb to go through the menu but you can also press in on it and it will act as a custom button. I have mine set to metering mode. This is gonna let you quickly switch between multimedia thing
and spot focus metering, so that way you can double check that your image is properly exposed. Oh, the center button, this is a good one. The middle of this wheel,
another custom button. I have this button set to focal length which is under image stabilization. If you're someone like me that
uses a lot of adapted lenses on your camera, making sure that the in-body image
stabilization knows the focal length of your lens is very important. So by having this center
button set to focal length I can press in on this button
quickly and tell the camera the focal length of the lens
that I'm using very fast. Next up is the left button
on this control wheel, and this button I have set to
gamma display assist select. If you oftentimes shoot in
a flatter picture profile, having this left button
set to gamma display assist will enable you to toggle on
and off your gamma display let that's built into the camera so you can preview how
your image will look after its color graded. Next, we have the right button and as you can see, it's labeled ISO. So we're gonna leave that at ISO. Lastly, we have button
five, the down button and this is one of my favorite tweaks to make to this camera. I go in and change it to
finder slash monitor select. If you remember from my menu setup video one of the things that I
really hate about this camera is that it will automatically switch from the monitor to the viewfinder. So to avoid that by
setting this bottom button to manually switch between
the monitor and viewfinder, the camera will only
switch when you want it to. So if you find yourself filming outdoors and it's really bright and you can't quite see what's
happening on the monitor just bring it up to your eye,
press the down button, boom you're shooting through the EVF. We are on top almost
done with custom buttons. The first custom button is of course this dedicated record button, and by default, this should already say movie
shooting in the settings. If it doesn't feel free
to change it to that. The only reason that I
would consider changing it is that if you are
shooting with Sony A7S III and you've set C1 to already
be your record button in that case, you need a button to change your white balance. So you can change this record button to then be your white balance button. Lastly, we have C2 the last
custom button on the camera. For me, I love to have mine
set to focus magnifier. This way if you need to
punch in to check focus especially if you're
using a manual focus lens, it's only a button press away. Lastly, we've made it to
the end of custom buttons. You'll see that there is one last button available on the lens. Note that this is only available
on certain Sony lenses. This lens don't have a custom button but other ones do, so
you can set this button to do whatever you want by
default is set to focus hold which is nice 'cause it's
right there on the lens you can press it in and that'll keep your focus from changing. If you don't have a lens
that works with it though don't worry about it, okay,
custom buttons are done, they're behind us. We can now move on and turn
our attention to the mode dial. Look at the top of this camera, you'll see that you have
a one, two and three. These are amazing presets
that you can customize to enable you to virtually
instantly change things like your resolution and frame rate, easily, one of my most used
features of this camera. Like before, make sure that
your camera's mode dial is set to the film strip which is where we're gonna be
customizing these settings. Now we need to select which
video settings we want to have for each of these three presets. I've already created a
video that walks through my recommended frame rates and bit rates that you should shoot at to get the best quality from this camera. I'll link to that video up in the corner and down in the description. For the sake of these presets, I'm gonna be using those video settings. So feel free to tweak these if you want to use something else. Now let's set preset one, press the menu icon, go
to the red camera icon, image quality, file format
and select XAVC S 4k. Then under movie settings
for record frame rate I would set it to 24P and record setting, I would set it to 100 M 4:2:2 10bit. This setting is especially important for any video clips that I
need to use the audio for such as a wedding
ceremony, wedding toasts, letter reading, et cetera. I want to make sure
that for any video clips I'll record people speaking,
their lips match up with the words they are saying, which won't happen if they're recorded at a higher frame rate
and then slowed down. Everybody's gonna be talking
slow and we don't want that. So having 24 frames per second as an easily accessible
preset on the camera is great to have. Back out of the menu, for shutter speed I would set it to 1/50th which
is double the frame rate, aperture, I would set to F4 or F2.8. I wouldn't leave this wide open so a little stop down is good. For white balance, I choose 5,500 Kelvin which should look great for
any outdoor daylight shooting. Of course, though, you
may need to tweak this depending on whether you're
filming indoors or outdoors. Lastly, I set my ISO to 640 which is the base ISO for S log three, but of course the ISO you
choose may be different depending on your picture
profile and lighting. With all of these settings dialed in let's save this preset, press
menu, go to shooting mode, camera set memory. In this menu that will
appear, you'll see at the top it says one, two, three,
and M1, M2, M3, M4. This one, two and three coincides
with the one, two, three on the mode dial. Let's now set this as preset one by pressing the center button and the camera will say registered. Now here's where things get really cool. Go to your camera's mode dial switch it from the film strip
to one and a menu will pop up that says one and there are your settings just like you saved. Press in on that tadah. There are all of your settings,
4k 24 frames per second 4:2:2 10bit all your shutter
speed, aperture everything as you saved and you're
ready to shoot, awesome. Can you see why I love this? Can you see why this is so powerful? Okay, let's make it even more awesome now. Go back to the film strip,
press the menu button, go back up to image quality and for movie settings, change it the record frame rate from 24P to 60P and make sure that the record setting says 200M 4:2:2 10bit. Press menu again, to go back out and now the only setting
that you need to change is your shutter speed because you always want your
shutter speed to be double the frame rate that you're shooting at. In this case, 1/50 ain't gonna cut it. Go up to 1/125th. With those settings dialed in, let's now save this as preset two. So press menu, go back
down to shooting mode, camera's set memory,
move over to option two and press the center button. It will say registered and just like that if we go up here to the mode
dial and switch it to two, oh, hello there, there's
4k 60 frames per second switch to one, 4k 24. It's so great, it's so quick. It's nearly instantaneous. Last thing now, what are we
gonna do with preset three? Well, this camera goes up to
4k at 120 frames per second. We should definitely do that. Switch back to the film strip now, let's go back into the
menu image quality again, movie settings, change that
to 120P for record frame rate and for record setting make
sure that says 280M 4:2:2 10bit. Back out again, change the
shutter speed of higher to 1/250th so that's roughly
double the frame rate and that's it for settings, press a menu back to shooting mode, camera's set memory
three registered, tadah. Let's check it out. Preset one, 4k 24, preset two,
4k 60, preset three, 4k, 120. All of your settings are
saved, ready for you to shoot and so you really only
need to make minor tweaks as you film throughout
the day, it is awesome. Also side note here, you may have noticed there are more presets that
you can save with the A7S III, we just saved presets
for one, two and three but there is also an M1, M2, M3 and M4. I would not come into
using these presets though as they're saved to your
camera's memory card and not the camera, meaning that if you
format your memory card, they'll be deleted and
you'll have to recreate them, because of this I would just make do with presets one through three which are saved to the camera's memory. All right, congratulations. You have now set up your mode dial and you can now change
your settings very quickly. Can you see how much easier
the camera's already getting because you don't need to dig
into the menu for everything? All of this is becoming accessible
right at your fingertips. Let's make things a
little bit easier though by customizing the function menu now. Press the FN button on the
back of the camera here and that will bring up the function menu. This is a really great visual menu that's quick to access,
but especially helpful if you're somebody that forgets
what your custom buttons do. You can set some redundancies in here as well as choose some settings that you're not quite
as easily able to access from the custom buttons. To customize the function menu, press the menu button,
go down to the toolbox operation customize,
function menu settings. The first thing that you'll
notice when the function menu is that just like the custom buttons where the camera gave
you different settings for photo mode and video mode, the function menu also
gives you different options for photo mode and video mode because we wanna use this
camera for video though, let's go down to the function menu with the filmstrip icon next to it. By default, all of these settings are going to mirror the photo settings. We need to customize that though. Also make sure your camera's
set back to the filmstrip icon if you've changed it, that's important. Starting at the top left you're gonna want to
set this to focus mode. This way just like one
of the custom buttons you can toggle between
auto-focus, manual focus, from what I found it's nice
to have this as a visible menu that you can quickly access and
not just as a custom button. Second on the top row, we're gonna go back to auto-focus again, and we're
gonna select a focus area. This way you can easily select if you want your focus to
be wide or zone, et cetera. Third, we're gonna go
over here to auto-focus manual focus again, noticing a trend here at
lots of auto- focus stuff, go down to face/eye AF and select face slash eye
priority in auto-focus. This setting is great
if you want to disable your camera's face and
eye tracking quickly. If you're trying to film something and there's one person's face
that keeps trying to focus on and you're like no, focus
on the tree over there, which can happen, having
the option to turn this off is very useful. Fourth option, we've got zebra display. Go to the pink icon, go
down to zebra display and select zebra display. This way can toggle your
zebras on and off very quickly. I prefer to leave mine on but there are times
whenever I really wanna see what the image looks like without zebras so being able to turn off is very helpful. For option five, we're gonna
go back to zebra display again but right underneath it on the menu we're gonna select zebra level. Normally I don't change the level of my zebras often when filming but there are sometimes
whenever I want to see at what level a part of an
image has started to overexpose. So by being able to adjust the zebra level I can do that quickly. Lastly, slot six, this is very important. You need to make sure that your camera is recording good audio. So, go to the audio
recording section of the menu and select audio recording level. This way you can press
the function menu quickly and change your audio
recording levels as you go if you need to, we made
it to the bottom row. Option one, we're gonna select steady shot which is under image stabilization. This is a really great feature
to have easily accessible because it's gonna enable
you to turn on and off image stabilization in camera but also you can enable active
mode for image stabilization which is gonna slightly
crop in this image sensor but can result in more stable footage. So, very nice to have
this easily accessible. Next slot two at the
bottom, let's talk peaking. Peaking is really awesome to have so go to the auto focus section
and select peaking display. This is gonna enable
you to turn on and off the peaking lines in your footage which is great for you to
be able to check focus. Third slot now, we're going
back to peaking display again but we're gonna select peaking level. This way if you ever need to
change your peaking intensity you can access it very quickly. Slot four, go into the red camera menu and select marker display. This way if you're using
something like 235 to one borders for that cinematic aspect ratio, you can toggle this on and off quickly. For slot five we're
gonna go up to metering and select metering mode. This is already accessible
via custom button, but I find that it's
really nice to be able to visually look at the menu and turn on and off the setting. Lastly, slot six, here's
a little bonus for you. You can set this to whatever you want. As far as the accessible
options for the function menu, I feel like this covers nearly everything that you're going to need for the camera. So, if you find that
there's another setting that you want to use often, you can set this to whatever you want, but if you don't want to use it go into the setting here
and change it to not set. That way, nothing will come up and that is it for your function menu. We are almost done. There is one last thing that
we need to talk about though. Even with the mode dial custom buttons and function menu set up, you will still need to dig
into the menus occasionally. Thankfully, Sony gives you
an option called my menu which is a customized menu
that will only include the settings that you want. I've gone through all
the menus of the camera and narrowed them down
to the very few settings that you actually need. So, let's set up the my menu now. Press the menu button
and go to the gray star which you will see says my menu setting. This is where you can
add items to my menu. Also notice down here there's an option that
says display from my menu. This is a really awesome
feature because it makes it so that anytime you press the menu button the menu will always
open to the my menu page. That way the settings that you need are always basically instantly accessible. Once we're done customizing the menu feel free to turn this
on, I think it's great. Let's go up here now to add item and let's start adding items to my menu. I prefer to set up my
menu into three pages. The first page is the
most important settings that I access fairly often, the second page are the
settings that I access sometimes and the third page are the settings that are really dangerous, so I want to be able to access them but I don't wanna accidentally press them. Let's go here to add our
first item to my menu now. Select add item, go down to file format with the film strip next to it. Be careful you don't
select the file format with the picture next to
it because that's our photo and you won't get any video settings. Select file format,
then select my menu one, you'll see a red line appear on the right, select one more time
and it will say added. Backing out here now,
you'll see that there's now a my menu one page and
there is file format. So now we don't need to
dig into the red icon and then dig into file format, it's right there, easily
accessible for us to change which file format we're recording in. Back to my menu settings now, select add item and go
down to movie settings which is going to let you change your frame rates, et cetera. Select my menu one again and then for the red line,
put that below file format. The menu will say added,
and we're ready to move on and add the next thing. For the next menu setting,
go to the red icon, go to drive mode and select
interval shoot function, add it to my menu one, put the line there, put
at the bottom, added. Interval shoot function is
actually a photo setting but it enables you to shoot
time-lapses with your camera. I shoot a lot of time lapses so I like to have this easily accessible, if you don't though, feel
free to not include it. Next it's time to start adding things to the second page of my menu. Yeah, there's only three
settings on the first page because I only ever really need to access those three settings, but,
there are other settings that you will need to
access a little less often. Select add item again go over here to media,
record media settings and move down to my menu two which will be the second page of my menu. Select, select again, it will
say that it's been added. Record media settings
are where you can set if you want the camera to
record the two memory cards instead of just one, if
I'm recording something that isn't as important to
like say a random YouTube video in that case, I may only
want the camera to record the one memory card instead of two. This setting enables me to change that. By default though, I would
usually keep your recording to two memory cards just
in case something fails. Next thing that we're gonna
go to the pink menu icon, go down to color slash tone
and select picture profile. Add that to my menu two
under record media settings. Picture profiles are great, sometimes you may wanna record logs, sometimes you may wanna record
with more saturated color, having this option easily
accessible and menu is awesome. Next setting we need to go
down to the yellow toolbox now. Go to finder slash
monitor, monitor brightness and add that to my menu
two under picture profile. This way if you need to change
the brightness of your screen you can do that very quickly. Let's go on back up now to
the red icon to shooting mode, camera set memory, and we're
gonna add that to my menu two under monitor brightness. I access camera's set memory pretty often because anytime I'm using one
of these mode dial presets at the top of the camera, I sometimes want to make
little tweaks to them such as changing the white balance that is saved to the preset. So by having camera set
memory available in the menu I can quickly make
tweaks to these presets. Next, let's go back down to the toolbox and select operation customize, custom key setting with the film strip. Add that to my menu two
down there at the bottom. In the event that you ever need to update your custom buttons which
can happen from time to time, it's nice to have this quickly
accessible in the menu. Lastly, for the second page of my menu, just like the custom key settings, it's also nice to have
the function menu settings easily accessible, so we'll
also add that to my menu two. All right, we are now
done with the second page. Now it's time to go to
the third page of the menu which is where the
dangerous stuff is saved and honestly there's really
only one dangerous thing but it's important. Let's go up here to the red camera icon, go down to media format,
go down to my menu three add that here, I like being able to
easily access the menu to format my cards because
I do that before every shoot but it's still dangerous enough that I don't want to be
able to quickly access it. I want to put its own section of the menu, place that I'm not gonna
accidentally bump it and then bump the camera
like three or four more times to accidentally format
something, it terrifies me. So, by putting this in
page three and its own area it's a way to keep things
a little bit safer. Let's go back now and
here you have my menu one, my menu two, and my menu three. There are all of the
settings that you need to access for this camera. Between the custom menu
that we just set up, the mode dial the custom
buttons, the function menu, you should never need to dig into the depths of this
camera's menu system. Everything should be
very quickly accessible. If you are a run and gun shooter like me I really hope these settings
have helped you out, and I want to thank you so much for watching through this entire video. Also remember you can still
download my settings file for this camera. In the event that you
accidentally reset your settings or your camera gets corrupted and you have to completely restore it to its original factory condition, in that case, you'll need to go through all these settings again, but
why would you want to do that if you can download my
settings and save time. So, those settings will be available for
download for free below. I will also link down below to all of the other A7S
III videos that I've made. So a video about the memory
cards that you should use or other settings, all of that will be linked below. With that, thanks so much for
watching and have a great day. (gentle music)
