How to set up your A7S III for Filmmaking - Full Guide!

this video is brought to you by storyblocks hey guys it's max i just got two of the three sony a7s threes that i purchased i'm extremely excited to be able to use these cameras and have unlimited 4k 60 recording and no record limits access to 4k 120 10 bit all of that and these are the cameras that we're gonna be using going forward for a long while and today i'll be sharing with you guys all of my settings and my menu options for filmmaking with the sony a7s iii i'll help you guys best set up your camera and along with that i'll be sharing what sd cards you should be buying if you guys are like me this is gonna save you over a thousand dollars because a lot of people are overspending on the sd cards and there's only two settings that really require you to buy ultra fast cards or the new cf express type a so that's gonna save you a ton of money we'll also be talking about codex and how you can get the best quality while still having a very easy time editing your footage and not having to make proxies in transcode and finally i'll be sharing my custom picture profile settings the three different options that i am using to go from the type of videos that need to get cut quickly you don't have time to grade and it just needs to look great out of the box to an option where you have a little bit more flexibility but you still have a quick time grading and then finally when you have the time to really dive deep and make the footage look its best let's start out with the sd cards and i think most people should be buying the sony m with the little m like max cards these work for almost all of the settings and frame rates and options with this camera they are very inexpensive it's about 70 bucks for 128 gig and the read speed is 277 megabytes per second meaning that your transfers are going to be super quick now my second suggested card is the sony g cards or these sandisks these are v90 cards and if you're going to be shooting all i we're going to talk about codecs here in a second you do want to get one of these faster cards and i would probably pick up one of them for that use case now the last card and what many people are pre-wording right now are these cf express type a cards it's about 400 bucks for 160 gigabyte card now people think that you should buy these because the camera can actually support two of them but literally the only time you need this card is if you want to shoot 4k 120 frames per second in all i and using the slow and quick function the sloan quick function gets that data rate even higher now on the a7 s3 and it also removes the audio so you don't have any audio there personally i shot a bunch of 4k 120 a ton of it and honestly it looks fantastic just as good as 4k 24. so unless you absolutely need to have an all i codec you do not need that cf express type a card now i did some comparisons um the one other time you might want to buy that card is if you have to offload footage very quickly and for 400 bucks you can offload 128 gigs of footage in about three minutes but for most people these m cards are a fantastic value now let's talk about codex and sony gives us a ton of options and i tested pretty much all of them out you can shoot the standard h.264 8-bit just like we had before or now you can kick it up to 10-bit but personally unless you have a very old computer i would not choose that option the problem is you still have that same 100 megabit per second but now you're cramming 10 bit of color in there this will edit easily but you are gonna lose quality and i would not select that option if you have an old computer then i would go to the si 4k option now this you do need a faster card but that's going to give you an all i codec with a much higher bit rate and then you'll have 42 10 bit but for most people what i would suggest is going to the hs option and that is h.265 now if you bought a computer within the last three years all the processors and the graphics cards can now decode this and you should have an easy time editing if you select the proper option i would go into movie settings and then go into the record setting and you can have 10 bit with two options you can have four two zero or four two two now everybody wants four to two that's what the new canon r5 has but it is a pain to edit because no computers have decoders for that i would select the 420 10-bit option that gives you 10-bit color but modern computers can actually very easily handle this footage and that's why fujifilm is going with this a codec option panasonic is going with this codec option they don't even give you the option for four to two this compression method is much more efficient so you're actually getting twice the quality at the same size along with that i found that for low-light footage this option actually looked the best because it's a perfect blend between the compression algorithm the file size and how much color information is trying to be crammed in there and even the all eye codec it actually looks worse because it's a much less efficient compression now before we move on to the menu settings customization and picture profiles let me tell you about a super helpful video editing tool our sponsor storyblocks many of us find that the youtube and social media videos or even commercial videos that we make can use just that extra something but once we're done shooting we often have to settle for what we have well that's where storyblocks comes in with over 1 million assets including hd and 4k footage music and images and even after effects templates and motion backgrounds new media is regularly added and everything is royalty free for one low subscription price go to storyblocks.com max to learn more and the next time you're in a bind or just want to make your video better you'll have access to a huge stock library at a fraction of the cost take your video to the next level with storyblocks let's start out with my custom picture profiles before i show you how i set up the my menu the function menu all the little buttons because that are customizable to have a really nice efficient workflow so out of the gate you get picture profile off i would not use that the highlights end up being lost you can't really pull stuff back very much the details are crushed the first profile out of the three that i consistently use and there's gonna be one more that i'm gonna add is picture profile one now i do make a couple different tweaks i bring the black level up to plus two and then i also bring down the saturation by minus two and the last one is detail also to minus two so basically what that does is some of the shadows are kind of lost some details it brings the blacks up just a little bit the saturation is brought down just a tiny bit and i think it's kind of over sharpened out of the box it's also brought down just a tiny bit still looks great and this is what i use for videos like this where you guys are seeing me right now when i need to be able to not have to color grade or adjust anything just cut get a project done and out or delivered footage to somebody this is a great profile the other benefit is there is about nine percent of highlight retention so if you blow something out you have some room to pull it back and recover highlights which is very handy the second profile that i like to use is picture profile six based off ascended two now this is great for a nice natural look something that looks a little bit flatter than the picture profile one you can gray this further you can send it off to somebody and they can tweak colors just a little bit you can use one a lot on there just to make maybe look a little bit more film like now in here i did make a couple tweaks i brought the black level down to negative 10 adding a little bit of contrast saturation positive plus 10 here a little bit of saturation and then in the detail i kicked it up by two just adding a little bit of sharpening now this gives you a nice look something looks a little more cinematic if you want to call it that and it actually has better dynamic range as well compared to picture profile one the only thing is here you do have to be careful with your highlights because anything above 100 does end up clipping so be careful the third one that i'm using is s-log now i used to use s-log 2 because the 8-bit codec would fall apart with slot 3 look terrible now we're going to be using s-log 3 because the 10-bit codec in the dynamic range is excellent now i did make a couple customizations i'm using both picture profile 8 and 9. one is for lower light situations one is for bright situations now out of the box this will default to s gamut 3 without the cine so i switch both to cine because it's a little bit easier to work with the colors with that and then for one of these i'll go into detail and i drop this and defaults to negative seven so very little sharpening i kicked it up to negative three for the daylight option because i always add it in post anyways and for a lot of cameras you don't want to do that because you'll see extra noise for daylight footage with the a7s3 the low light performance or the noise performance is very good very little noise so i'd rather just kick up a little bit of sharpening not a ton baked into the file so you don't have to do that later but if i'm shooting in low light then in this situation i make sure that it's set to negative seven out of the box because if you're going to want to denoise later you don't want that sharpening there now the last profile that i'm not using yet but i'm going to is i'm going to use hlg for hdr dynamic range is great it does have color and contrast now i'm going to be switching this to hl hlg 3 based on gerald and dunn's suggestions so this is going to be for hdr and i'm going to be exploring that way more now that we have a nice 10-bit codec here now let's jump into the menus i'm going to be going quick i'll be skipping over some things that i just don't use or don't touch and then i'll show you how i customize the camera we're going to start out with the file format as i mentioned i like the hs because it's a great blend between quality color compression you have 10 bit options um and the file sizes are small and then as long as you go into the movie settings here and you select four to zero you're gonna have a much easier time instead of four two two i use a hundred for most things but if you're shooting an interview and somebody's just sitting there and they're not moving around much you can drop that down to 50 or even 30 because remember with h.265 which is what this is your quality is just as good using half the file space so you can double this if you're going off of h.264 bit rates slow and quick settings i rarely use this because i like my audio to be there even for 4k 120 frames per second but in here you can select whatever you want proxies if you have a slow computer we have that ability to write two files you can connect edit off to 1080p and then you can reconnect the 4k i don't use that because i like having a good computer let's go down here for my media settings usually i keep it just set to standard meaning it'll use one card and then i have an auto switch to the other one which is great if you're doing things like weddings or interviews your card fills up now you can go in you have dual card slots and go to simultaneous so it's going to record the same file to both so i would only use that for very important things you're duplicating the files but that is great to have here's a feature that is fantastic with these no cameras i'm going to go into file settings and here you can customize if you wanted to go in a series if you want to reset the timer because sometimes you have multiple cameras they all start with the same file number at times i had five sony's and it's such a pain syncing stuff up so you can actually go in here the coolest thing is you can actually just set the title name so you can have a camera b camera c camera and that just makes it so helpful if you're doing multi cam let's jump into the audio recording modes so we want to record audio as far as levels i typically keep it at about 25 to standard if i'm recording externally which i almost always am and then if you're using something like the rode videomic go i typically have it set to about six um and then that gives you a nice middle ground where you still have some control and then for that i'll leave it in the kind of the medium gain setting and then one thing i like to do is turn the wind noise reduction off it might sound like a good idea to reduce that but it's doing it electronically and sometimes you get this terrible kind of sound and then audio level display i have a shortcut for this but i'll go ahead and turn that on if you want to monitor audio if you're going to be recording internally jumping down to image stabilization with this camera i'm using active so typically i'll flip between off or standard active actually crops a little bit doesn't crop into your 4k video because the sensor is actually slightly higher than 4k it definitely helps out with the stabilization and thankfully you don't get any weird wobbliness or anything like that so i would definitely use active now if you want to use the gyro setting later and then you want to stabilize in post using sony software you want to turn this off and make sure your lens stabilization is off as well let's go into the zoom setting and this is actually something i do use i only use the clear image zoom i don't have a lens that can zoom so that would be the optical setting and clear image zoom will actually digitally crop into the 4k video and then up sample it and still keep it 4k so it's kind of fake zooming and it might sound like you'd never want to use this but it can be handy i would only use it in good lighting situations with low isos then it can actually look pretty good and with this camera specifically you can't use aps-c crop in 4k because it's a 4k sensor but you can still use clear image zoom and i'll show you where i map that in just a bit now as far as the shooting display i don't usually use grids that's more for photos the next one i actually use is the marker display there's two things that are handy here and i map these as well so the first is aspect marker so if you're gonna be shooting for a wider aspect ratio or even a square one you can go through and adjust it here and then you'll get some lines i can't show you that because i'm recording externally right now and it's not showing up the next one is the safety zone 80 or 90 basically just shows you a box in your image and 90 is very useful if you're gonna be shooting for the web and you want to make sure that nothing gets cropped out if people with widescreen phones end up zooming in on your video 90 is really good for say iphones and your typical ones and some of the even wider ones um like the sony phones are super wide you can use 80 the next thing i change is in the metering section here there's a couple different things so metering obviously you change if you want to see how your exposure is but i like having face priority in multi-mirroring on so if you're using the multi which is this one right here it will actually see people's faces and show you the exposure for their faces so if i'm shooting people i want to expose for them so i keep that on and then for spot metering you can change it so that it'll move around with your focus point which is great because if i want to see if something's too overexposed or an s-log i want to make sure that a certain area of the frame is two stops overexposed it's great to be able to move that focus point around moving down to white balance there are a couple things that i change first off priority in auto white balance i use standard and yes i do use auto white balance sometimes if i'm shooting run and gun moving from inside to outside i use the standard or i use the ambience mode now the ambience mode will try to match the room so if you're shooting a wedding it's low light there's lots of warm lighting this will match the environment it won't make it too cool and fake looking because the camera's trying to correct for that you don't want that and then there's a white mode and i never use that but if you want whites to look pure white and you want to just force everything to look like it's normal outside you could use that but i don't now the shockless white balance is also great i would keep it at two this makes it so that an auto white balance instead of quickly just changing abruptly and being horrible it will smoothly adjust and so you could use either three for slow or two i wouldn't do fast and it just makes auto white balance for continuous recording so much better here we get into the picture profiles i do not use dynamic range optimization if you use a picture profile it won't work anyways creative looks i also don't use those and there's some different colors and there's black and white and stuff like that i don't use that to keep it at standard and the picture profiles we already went over and for zebras i definitely use zebras i keep them on pretty much all the time and i love using the zebra level 100 plus in at least in standard picture profiles which i use probably ninety percent of the time we'll see what the a7s three uh what ends up happening how often i use s log three but i wanna see everything that is blowing out so i would use spot metering or multimetering for my exposure and then i want to see what's blowing out so if i see a huge wall that's blown out because it's window lighting coming in or the sky is way too overexposed that gives me just at a glance i can see what i should expose if i need to bring it down a little bit and then bump it up in post which of course with the 10 bit isn't going to have an issue now focusing mode i do use continuous autofocus and i did tweak a little bit i'll show you guys as far as the transition speed and sensitivity this is my default i like to have it right in the middle but sensitivity with this camera specifically and especially with some of the tamron lenses i like to be a little bit more responsive because i find it to be a little bit slow and then let's go into the focus area um so i switch it depending on what i'm doing um i like to have the wide which the camera will look at faces for face tracking if i want to limit it say there's a crowd and i'm shooting bride walking down the aisle i still wanted to find her but i want to ignore the side so in this mode you guys see the box that moves around that is really nice and handy to use and then i don't really use center and then i use my spot metering depending on the size or the spot mode which also adjusts the metering and then let's see what else do i change here now for face autofocus and eye autofocus which you can do in video now this is super nice and handy i do keep it on a lot of the time i have it kept set to human here and i don't care about which eye as long as the face is in focus i do want to see the face so this is going to frame the face that the faces that are there and what it's focusing on and then the ability to prioritize if you register somebody's face if you're shooting a bunch of people but you have one subject you can actually register the face which is cool and then for focus magnifier i do have this mapped and i'll show you guys that and then i like this set to four so for manual focusing you can punch in and then we have peaking here and then for the playback settings i typically don't change any of that i do sometimes connect to my smartphone and transfer images over typically pictures not video so that's in there and then in this little toolbox setting there's definitely some things that i change so over here this reset save settings you can actually download all my custom settings and i'll leave a file in the video description to make it easier especially for the custom button and function menus um so that's how you load it in and then below is where you actually customize your buttons i'll be showing you that in just a second and the next thing that i change which is very important for me is the display quality so i'm going to go in here change it to high and then viewfinder frame rate i also want it set to high now if you set it to standard it's going to save battery life but man i want to see the sharpest image that i can see and with the least amount of um i don't know latency or delay or any of that kind of stuff so i'm going to change that and then jumping down over here auto power off temperature i'm setting this to high it's going to allow the camera to heat up hotter but not shut off i don't want it shutting off so the if you set it to standard it's going to try to keep itself much cooler and before it even gets warm it'll want to shut off on you and then power start save time this i typically keep at five minutes because if i'm adjusting things i move over to do audio i don't want it to try to save power and the batteries are so good in here the battery life is excellent okay let's go back down audio settings i don't change and i think all of this i keep just the way it is out of the box hdmi is automatic which i'm using right now and now let's take a look at how i set up all of my custom buttons for very fast and efficient shooting you can have a different setting for photos and videos i'm just going to cover video so right here at the start we have this control dialer the control wheel i use that for iso so i can have three separate wheels that i can quickly adjust i have my aperture my shutter speed and my iso number two right here is for focus magnifier so i can press that button and right away it just punches in if i'm manually focusing the next one over controls autofocus and manual there's some sony lenses and these cameras that don't have a autofocus or manual focus switch so i just press that button and that will toggle back and forth and the one below that will toggle between face detection on or face detection off so if i want to have fine control and i don't want it focusing on faces that is great and then the one on the very left controls audio so if i'm shooting all i have to do is press that button and then i can use the touchscreen or i can just go over and adjust my audio which is great if you're recording sound internally if you don't set that to that when you're recording then you can't just jump into the menu to change that and the last one this page i didn't change and if you press on the little trashcan button it basically will turn off the touchscreen which can be handy now let's go into the second section this is your little joystick you can actually press into it and what i set that to is my focus area so i'm going to press down you guys can see it's switching between all my little focus points that i want so wide zone center spot so as i'm adjusting it if i need to go larger bam and you go a little bit larger bam it's very handy to have it set that way the next one which is the center button is zoom and this is for clear image zoom so i can press in here and i can do my 1.5 crop which right now i'm on a wide lens you don't see that much of a difference but on a telephoto it definitely makes a difference the third one which is pressing left adjusts my monitor brightness so i can go between manual and sunny mode which is great for outside the fourth one is customizing my picture profile so i can quickly change into s log three it used to be two now three to get uh you know the best dynamic range from a shot and then down below is white balance at the top i didn't change my record button which they call a movie shooting button but i did set the custom two to metering mode so that allows me to quickly go through in between multi which i use often or i can use my spot metering and then right there with the joystick i can move around so we can see how much you know the exposure is we're underexposed over here overexposed here and then probably proper i don't know somewhere here and then for the last one um i don't have very many lenses that have the custom button on there so i didn't change that at all and now let's take a look at the function menu which is the only menu that you can actually access while you are recording so you want to be very particular about what you add here so this is great for something you don't use all the time so you don't need to you know add it to one of these custom buttons but you still want to have access to it as you're recording because you can't access the my menu or the regular menu while you're doing that so on the left here i have peaking i can turn it on or off and adjust the level which is great for i have a couple manual lenses i have zebras same thing autofocus transition speed so as i'm recording if i want to lower it down if i'm doing a long gimbal take and i notice hey it's being a little funky i can adjust that i can adjust my auto white balance what it's going to prioritize and then for my stabilization i can turn it off if i'm on a gimbal or on a tripod i can set it to standard if i want a wider aspect like with this wide lens or active which crops in just a little bit but that's the one that i would use if i want stabilization now going back here i can change my recording media card one card slot one or two um usually i have an auto switch if i'm recording and switching from one card to another but sometimes you're getting close you notice you only have five minutes left on one card you don't want to split the file for you you can just go in bam we're going to switch to card slot 2 and then it'll start recording on that one marker display it's not working right now because i'm recording externally but if i want to use my safety guides uh or if i want my aspect ratios it will pop up there and then gamma assist so won't do anything right now because i'm not an s-log but shooting s-log you want to see a sharper more contrasty image to judge focus on you can turn that on and then for exposure mode i'm in manual almost all the time but if i need to do aperture priority or shutter i can go through and change that but almost always in manual so that is my function menu very handy to have and be able to access and then i'll show you guys lastly the my menu so this is stuff that i have to go i can't map to the function menu i can't map to the buttons but i still want to have quick access and i only have two tiers here you could do a bunch so my menu one file format if i'm going to switch to a different format for hd for example you have to go down and change it there before you go into settings frame rates if i want to do 60 120 or 30 and then bit rates you have access to that if i want to format my media if i want to go through and change and do backup recording the aspect markers in the safety zone i have a quicker way to find that and then face priority and multi-metering if for some reason i want to use multi-metering and then not go off of somebody's face if that's not what matters in that scene i can switch that off and then the second menu is just for face priority where you can register people's faces so there you guys go that's exactly how i set up my camera to work quickly to be efficient to give me everything that i need especially while i'm recording to still have access to some important things once again you guys can download the little file and put it into your camera to give you a nice starting point to work off of and then you guys can customize it for your needs if you guys enjoyed this video let me know down in the comments section below once again a huge shout out to storyblocks for sponsoring this video they're very affordable with lots of great content it's great for editors to have on hand thank you guys for watching has been max and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Max Yuryev

Views: 103,153

Keywords: Sony A7s3 review, Sony A7s iii footage, Sony a7s 3 SD cards, Sony A7s iii sd cards, Custom button settings, A7s3 best picture profiles, A7s3 S log 3, S-log 3, A7s3 vs r5 lowlight, A7s iii vs R5 dynamic range, color science, HLG, 10bit, HS, All-I, downloadable footage, Menu settings, custom button setup, Max yuryev, Gerald Undone, Phillip Bloom

Id: PU0GZES-Kxw

Length: 27min 36sec (1656 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020