Hey, my name is Matt Johnson. And today I'm going to be showing you my fast film
making settings for the Sony A7 IV which will give you access to all
the settings you need at your fingertips with very minimal
need to dove into the menus. If you film weddings, documentaries,
basically anything where you need to be able to film
very fast. This video's for you. And to start, if you want to save time,
you can click the link down to the description to download
a file that you can load into your A7 IV to immediately
start using all of these settings. No need to follow
through the entire video. It's completely free. My gift to you. But of course, if you don't want
to download that settings file, keep watching this video because you will
hopefully learn a lot about this camera. Now I also want you to know that this video is the first part of a two part series
and it will walk you through all of the menu settings you need to dial in to get
this camera working as fast as possible. For filmmaking, I've split it up because going through
the menu takes quite a while. The second video in this series will be
comparatively much faster, and we'll cover how to set up the camera's mode,
dial custom buttons and function menu so you can access all of the camera's
important settings very quickly. You're going to love that video
because it basically keeps you from having to dove into the menu
95% of the time. I'm willing to that video down below
as well. For now, though,
we need to talk about the A7 Force menu. So grab your A7 four and follow along. First off, with your A7 four turned on,
make sure that it is set to video mode by choosing the film camera
icon on the mode dial. Here, you're going to press
this little button at the bottom and then side it over to the camera icon. To enable that,
the A7 four is going to customize the menu depending on
if you're in photo or video mode. And because this is video
about the best fast filmmaking settings for the A7 four,
this camera does need to be in video mode. Also, after you have your camera
set to the camera icon, make sure that is set to the M mode
which stands for manual. At the top, you will notice that the first menu icon is a Gray Star
that says my menu. This is a completely customizable menu that will let you quickly access
the settings that you need the most. My next video will cover setting up
this menu as well as custom buttons,
the mode, dial and function menu, etc.. In this video though, we will start
by skipping down to the red camera icon that is below
that and go through this menu first up, we have image quality and for that
you're going to want to go over here to the file format. And for file format,
you're going to want to select x avc. S 4K and then for movie settings, you're going to want to set your recording
frame rate to 24 frames per second. And then for record setting,
you're going to want to select 100 M for 2 to 10 bit. Of course,
you have other options here as well. And I have a video
all about the different video formats that the A7 S3 can use and those settings
also apply to the A7 for. So I will link to that video in the
quarter and down in the video description. Moving on then let's go down to S and Q
settings and S and Q settings are great if you want your camera to automatically slow down
any footage that you film in-camera. The issue with that is that the camera's not going to record
audio whenever you do that. So because of that,
I never really recommend using S and Q mode, and instead I recommend slowing down your footage
in post in your video editing software. Next, we have proxy settings
and I have an entire video about proxy settings which I'll make sure
to link to down below. If you want to edit your videos
super smoothly, you can actually have your A7 for record proxies internally,
which is going to save you a lot of time. Up next, we have Aps-C s 35 shooting
and this mode is incredible because it's going to enable you
to crop in on your insert 1.5 times. This gives you two benefits. The first is that
if you have an aps-c lens that does not work,
typically with a full frame camera, you can put that lens on this camera
and set it to Aps-C s 35 mode and then the camp
will crop in automatically. Or if you just want to be able to zoom in
on whatever you're filming and turn, say, your 50 millimeters
lens into a 75 millimeter lens,
you can do that using aps-c crop mode. For now, I would leave this on auto
next for lens compensation. This is actually super important. You can ignore these top three things,
but down here you'll see it says Breathing compensation
on my camera. It's disabled because this lens
does not work with breathing compensation. But if you have a native Sony lens,
especially one of the newer ones that is enabled
for breathing compensation, you can go into the settings and enable
breathing compensation if you want to, and that will remove the lens
breathing that you're experiencing. It's pretty darn awesome. So if you are filming your videos
and you're noticing you have a lot of lens breathing where the video
has sort of a zoom in and out effect, whenever the focus changes,
you can enable breathing compensation and that will crop in the sensor slightly
and remove that lens breathing. It's really, really cool and I love it. And so you can turn this on in here
if you want to. All right. We've made it to menu
subheading to a first. We have the format menu. And as I'm sure you can guess,
this format, your memory card, very important
to know where this is, very useful access that if you need to next
you have your recording media settings and here's where you can select whether you want your camera
to record to one memory card or two memory cards to give you a backup
whenever you're recording video. Personally, I always recommend setting recording media
for both photo and video here. Two simultaneous recording,
which is going to guarantee that you have a backup in the event
that one of your cards fails. Also, for auto switch media,
make sure you turn this on because this is going to make sure that
even if you do not have two memory cards inserted, you can still start recording
if you need to. Next, we have file settings and
this is actually really useful by default. It's going to be set to file number series
and I would leave it at that because otherwise the camera's
going to reset the file number every single time
that you format the card. And while that can be useful
if you're filming with multiple cameras, this can get confusing quickly
because you're going have a lot of files
that all have the same name. So by setting it to series, the odds are that your cameras are not going to have
the same file names for every file, which is going to make editing
easier down here. We also have a file named format section
where you can choose how you want your video clips to be labeled
when they are recorded in camera and you can even change the title name
so you can change the file format to title and then you're going
to hear your title name and you can actually name
your different files. So in the case that you were safe
using a camera to film a wedding ceremony, for example, you could name
this camera's files ceremony. That way, you would know at a glance
whenever you're editing, Oh, there's my ceremony footage. It's very useful for now. I'm going to leave it on default, though, and we're going to go down here
to shooting mode. This is very, very important. First for exposure control type. This is where you're going
to tell the camera that you want to film in manual mode. Manual mode? Do I want manual mode? Yes, you always want manual mode. It's going to give you an option
for flexible exposure mode. You don't want that. Make sure it stays on passive
mode specifically. We care about that.
IM because that's manual. So you want that below exposure control
type, you're going to see you have options for recall camera setting,
camera set memory and memory recall media. We're going to cover all three of these
settings in the next video in this series that's going to cover all about
the buttons and modes for this camera. For now, though, just ignore these. Subheading five We have a USB streaming
and this is new for Sony cameras. Sony enabled the ability
to use your camera as a webcam just by plugging in a USB cable,
which is very, very useful. And here are the settings for that. So if you want to use your camera
as a webcam, you can go in here and select settings
like the resolution and frame rate that you're going to use it as a webcam
as well as enable whether you want the camera to be able to record video
while you are using it as a webcam. Subheading six
We have silent mode settings and I wouldn't really worry about this
because this is really only useful for photo, not video. So yeah, just ignore that for release
without lens. On the other hand, I would make sure
that this is enabled because if you are somebody that likes to use non-native
Sony lenses, a.k.a dead lenses that do not have an electronic connection
between the lens and the camera, if this is disabled, the camera's not going to record
because it's going to say there's not a lens on it,
so I don't want to record. You're like, No, there is a lens. I promise you, by setting this to enable
this will enable the camera to record, even if there is not a lens
that it thinks is connected to the camera. Anti flicker
settings are also a new setting here. You can turn on the variable shutter mode
and then you can go to a variable shutter set
and you can adjust this up and down and you'll see here on the bottom
left says 256 and then you can bring those numbers up
or down to 50 to 61, etc.. The benefit of changing your shutter
this way is that instead of you typically
seeing what you would normally see, where it's like 1/50, 1/60, 1/100, etc.,
for your shutter speed in this case, because you're using a shutter angle,
if you are seeing a lot of flicker in your footage caused by cheap lights
that are flickering fast, you can actually go in here
and adjust the shutter angle far more precisely than you can whenever
you are adjusting your shutter speed. And so you can really remove a lot of that
flickering, which is really useful. So keep this in your back pocket. I would not leave
it turned on all the time, but it's definitely useful if you ever do
need to reduce some flicker in camera. Subheading seven.
Oh my gosh. We've got audio recording. This is all really important. First of all,
make sure the audio recording is on. Definitely. That'd be bad if it was not on NEX
for audio recording level. You can set this to whatever you want. I would recommend a minimum 20 or so, but it's going to really depend
on what you are doing and if you have a microphone
plugged into your camera or not for audio out timing by default,
I would leave this set to live. But if you are recording to an external
monitor like an atomos for example, and you're monitoring the audio
through the external monitor and you're noticing that the lips
are not sinking up with the audio because there's a little bit of a delay. You can set this to lip sync, and it's
going to delay the signal just slightly for the monitor, which then enables
your audio and video to sync up. You probably won't need to use this, but it's useful to know where it is
if you need it for wind noise reduction. I would not leave this on auto
because you never really know how crazy the camera's going to get
and if it thinks there's wind noise or not and that can really mess with the audio
the camera's recording by default. I would leave this off,
but remember where it is in the menu settings in the event
that you ever do need to enable it and IQ audio
settings are going to be usable. If you have a Sony microphone
that connects electronically via the hot shoe, if you have one plugged in, which
I unfortunately do not have one with me right now, then you'll be able to change
those settings for the microphone here. Let's say you have audio level display
and as the name implies, this is going to show the audio levels
that the camera is recording and I would always leave this on
because you always want to know if your camera is recording audio or not
something. We have timecode
lots and lots of timecode settings here. If you use timecode, this is where
you can access all these settings. So keep this in mind. Subheading nine
We have image stabilization. This is also known as IBIS or In-Body
image stabilization and is whenever your camera is going
to move the sensor around to make sure your footage is stable,
even if you have shaky hands for steady shot by default,
you can leave it to standard, but you can also set it active,
which is going to do a 1.1 times crop on your video
but give you more stable footage. So this is where you can access it
in the menu. Whenever we get to the next video, though,
in this series, I'm going to show you how you can access it with a simple few
button presses for steady shot adjust. You can leave this set to auto by default,
but if you're using a non native lens that does not electronically connect
to the camera, you are going to need to go in here
and instead of auto change it to manual
and then set your focal length to the focal length of the lens
that you are using. The reason you have to do this
is that if the camera does not know the focal length of the lens
that you are using, the In-Body image stabilization
is going to be trying to compensate for a different kind of lens,
and this can cause more shaking in your footage
rather than less, which is really bad. So yeah, always make sure
that you're Dallas and manually if you have a non-native lens or just
leave it on auto, don't worry about it. Next we have Zoom
and by default, Zoom is disabled. Unless you're using a Sony lens
with an electronic Zoom feature, at which point you can
then access this setting. But as an alternative,
you can go down here to zoom range and change it from optical zoom
to clear image zoom and so you can go up here to zoom
and check this out. We can zoom in. Oh, look at that. We're zooming in and out using clearance. You eye the zoom lens on this camera
and I'm not zooming the lens. I'm zooming in camera, which is pretty darn legit
and doesn't really lose much quality. So if you need to zoom clairement
zoom is really great and I'm going to show you
how you can label this with a button. Press on the camera in the next video
for custom key zoom speed and remote zoom speed with customize key zoom speed
you can change whenever you press a custom key how quickly the zoom goes in and out,
which we'll talk about the next video. And for remote zoom speed, if you have a remote
that works with your Sony camera, you can use that
to zoom in and out in here so you can change
the zoom speed something 11. We have the shooting display and here's
where you can turn on a rule of thirds grid or a square grid
or a diagonal and square grid. If you want to help yourself
with composition while you were filming, just set this on and then you will see
the grid whenever you are filming. Also very, very important. One of my favorite absolute settings. I was so glad that Sony started
including in their cameras is this emphasize
recording display setting. Always set this on. What this is going to do
is that whenever you are recording, it's going to put a red box around your screen
and this is going to be so helpful to you whenever you're recording in the event
that you're like me and you forget to press record
sometimes or you press record twice, and so you think you're recording,
but you're not. It's terrifying when it happens this way. You can look down
at a glance of your camera. No. Oh, yeah.
It is recording this giant red box. Right. Okay, good. Believe me, I've been filming before. Not seeing that red box. I'm like,
Oh, no, I messed up. Then I press recording. It's okay, but very, very helpful. Always like this turned up. Lastly, for heading 12, we have a marker
display and this is super, super cool. So if you're someone that typically
finds himself filming in a 230 521 aspect ratio crop, for example,
you want those cinematic bars on the top and bottom. Well, you can go to here two aspect marker
and choose any aspect ratio you want. Let's say we want it to 35 to 1 and you go up here
and turn marker display to on and then whenever you are
recording a video, you're going to see white line bars
that are going to tell you where you need to crop your image and make sure
that the footage of your filming is inside that area. It's super useful,
super helpful. You have a lot of other options here. Safety zones, guide frames, etc. but I wouldn't really worry about those. I would just set it to these settings here
and then either turn, marker, display on or off if you need to. And in the next video,
I'm going to show you how you can access this marker display
very quickly to enable or disable it. Oh, my gosh, it's happening. Okay. We are at the pink menu
icon exposure slash color. We're going to start
by talking about exposure. First off, you're going to see the setting
for auto slow shutter and what out of the slow shutter by default is going to do
is this is going to automatically change the shutter speed of your camera
if you're in a darker room. And yeah, if you're filming video,
you want everything manual, you don't want your camera doing this,
okay? It can make things really weird and make
coloring your footage a nightmare. So we're going to go into auto
slow shutter. Turn this off. Never turn it back on. Great. Just just leave it
off. Don't worry about it. Next for ISO, here's
where you can change your camera's ISO settings in the menu if you don't use
the shortcut button on the back. But I always recommend
using the shortcut button. So yeah, I wouldn't worry about it. Just just leave it there. Don't worry about four ISO range limit,
an auto slash manual switch set. These are all related on a slow shutter.
I wouldn't worry about it. You can ignore these
some heading to exposure, compensation, all these settings
you don't have to worry about because you're going to be dialing
in your exposure manually. So ignore this whole section. Subheading three is one of my favorite
sections, believe it or not. And this is the metering section
and I love metering. Okay. Metering is how your A7 four
is going to be able to tell you what exposure
you should be setting your camera to. So for metering mode,
I would leave it set to multi leave face priority and multi metering on. And then for a spot metering point,
you can leave it at center, but you have the option to set it to focus
point link if you want to, which will basically enable you
to tap on the screen to tell what the exposure metering
is depending on where you're tapping, which is pretty cool. But by default,
I would just leave it set to center. Now, why is all this important? Well, looking at the screen on the back
of your A7 four, at the bottom, you're going to see that the camera's
telling you its shutter speed f stop and then it says m m and a number
somewhere between -2.0 and plus 2.0. This is the A7 force exposure meter
and in this case mine says -0.3, which means that it is point
three stops underexposed. This is super useful
because it's going to enable you to tell at a glance
whether your footage is over. Underexposed love the setting,
make sure you have multi metering enabled for face priority and multi metering. I would always have
this turned on as well. This is way when a camera detects
a face in the scene, it's going to prioritize
telling you the exposure of the face. When you're recording your image, it's really important that you properly expose the skin tones of people
that you're filming with the A7 A74 so having this face
priority on will help with that. Next, we have white balance and wow, this is arguably
one of the most important settings on this camera for white balance. Currently, by default it's set to auto. You don't want auto, okay,
we don't want auto. Let's get away from auto. You're going to want to use
either one of these presets or ideally, if you want to be cool like me,
you want to use Kelvin values. You're going to want to go down here to the K
and where it says sea temp slash filter. You can press a right and then you can
dial in your white balance manually. So I can go really, really cool over here. I can go really, really warm over here. By default,
though, let's leave it about 5000. That should be fine. As a bonus, you can press right again now
and access the white balance adjustment screen where you can add more green
or magenta to your white balance. And this can really help dial
in your colors even more for priority set. Not a white balance. You don't need to worry about this
because you are going to be manually dialing in your white balance.
And then for shock, this white balance. This is such a cool feature
that I absolutely love. By default I would set it to three
because by doing this, whenever you're recording a video
and you want to change your white balance while your camera is recording,
if you leave it at one, the A7 four is going to very quickly
change his white balance. But if you set it to three,
the white balance is going to gradually and smoothly change over time. So whenever you're changing
your white balance while recording, it's not going to be
abrupt and distracting to your audience. It's going to be super smooth. So love shock loss, white balance,
set three. Have a great day. Next, we have subheading five color
slash tone for Dynamic Range Optimizer. You're going to want to set this two off
because the only time the Dynamic Range Optimizer really
helps is if you've exposed improperly. But I always recommend exposing properly. So yeah, just leave it off. It's not really going to help you. Next for creative look,
you're going to leave this set to standard which is still you have other options here, including darker or black and white
or more vivid, etc.. All of these are really, really weird
looking sepia. Everybody loves sepia. Now we don't. Okay, now just there's a some options. Leave it to standard. Okay. You do not want to play in the creative
look toolbox. Where you do want to play
though is in the picture profile settings which you have 11 picture profiles
to choose from. Lots and lots of options here. What you want is slug three,
which I have an entire video about how to film with Slug three on the
A7 for coming out very soon. I would love if you would subscribe
if you want to see it and whenever that video is out
I will link to it on the corner and down in the video description. For the sake of this video now select pivot and let's
move down here to the Soft Skin Effect, which is a new feature
that Sony has added. And it's pretty cool because it gives you
a skin smoothing effect. You can set low, medium or high for it. But if you are filming yourself
an interesting take. I got I got some wrinkles
I might need to fix that. You can apply some skin
softening in camera to do that. Personally
I would recommend leaving it off. But thank you will play out there.
I try it out. See out looks subheading six
we have zebra display and this is another one of the most incredibly important
features of this camera for Zebra Display. I would always turn it on and then you're going to able
to choose your zebra level, which is where you're going to see
zebra lines appear on the overexposed parts of your image. As for zebra levels, the level that you choose is really going
to depend on which picture profile that you are filming with. But if you are filming in Slug three,
for example, you're going to want to go into
the zebra level and go down to see one and change it from STD
plus range to lower limit and then set it to 94
plus press the center button and that is going to save that
zebra level. Incidentally, if you download my
A7 for settings file by default, you're only going to have all these
settings. You're not going to have to remember them. That preset file down below
if you want to get it. Oh my gosh, we made to the purple menu
and we are to autofocus and manual focus settings. Tons of options in here. Let's dove in. Starting off with focus mode by default, that's going to be set to continuous
autofocus, which yeah, autofocus is really good
on the A7 for even on continuous autofocus, that's a good idea
for autofocus, transition speed. This is going to change
how quickly the camera's going to rack focus from one thing
to another when it changes focus. I would play around with the setting
and see what looks good to you. I have found that three
usually looks pretty good to me. Next for autofocus subject shift
sensitivity. This is going to set how sticky
the autofocus of the A7 four is. If you want your camera to focus on
an object or person and stay stuck on it, you can set this all the way down to one. Or if you wanted to quickly shift
from one person to another, set it to five by default,
I go with three. I think it's a good mix, but if you find your autofocus
looks too jumpy, lower down to one or two. Next we have a new feature
called AutoFocus Assist that Sony added to the A7 four. And if you turn it on, you can adjust the manual focus
ring on your lens at any time and that will override the autofocus
and adjust the focus manually. It's pretty cool. Definitely recommend
playing around with it by default though I would leave
it turned off. Next we have focus area and by default
I would leave this set too wide. And then four focus area limit. You have a lot of options
for different settings that you can choose for focus area. But because we chose wide,
I wouldn't worry about it. Focus area color. You can choose what color
you want it to be. Otherwise it's all these other settings
because we set the focus area too wide. You do not need to worry
about any of them. Moving on, we have face
I auto focus and first you're going to able to set the priority
of whether you want the camera to prioritize focusing on faces or eyes
versus just people's bodies. For example,
I would recommend leaving this set on. And then for a face slash eye subject,
you can set human animal or bird depending on what you're filming. Most likely going
to want to leave it on human though. So we're going to be non-human by default. But if you need to change it, it's right
there in the settings for right slash left I select. I would leave it to auto, but in the event that you're filming
somebody at a very specific angle and you're wanting to guarantee
that focus is on their right or left eye, the camera gives you the option
to do that, which is pretty cool for a face
such eye frame display I would turn this to on,
which is going to make a nice little white box appear around the subject's eyes
whenever you're filming. And this is going to help
you just be able to tell at a glance that your footage is properly in focus. Subheading For now we got a new feature. This is called the Focus Map. And if you turn the focus map on, whoa,
look at this. This is so funky here. So what you can see here
is you have blue up here at the top and you have clear, then you have red
clear means it's in focus. Blue means
that's out of focus in the background. Red means
that it's out of focus in the foreground. So if you play around with this here
and I bring this up here, some of the autofocus is going to change. It's going to say, hey, here's
this camera in focus right there. And then if I go over here, okay,
this pulls in focus now. So if you are doing manual
focusing or focus pulling and you're trying to make sure that your stuff is in
focus or not, this is a really great way for you to have an overlay
that shows you exactly what is in focus. It's pretty cool. Please note by default I would recommend
keeping the focus map off because otherwise
you're going to have a lot of strange colors on your screen
and make it difficult to film. Next, you have Focus Magnifier and this is going to let you zoom in on
anything that you're filming to make sure it's in focus for focus
magnification, time limit set to no limit. And then for initial focus magnification,
I would set it to X four. We're going to set this up as a custom
button later on. But by setting it to the initial focus
magnification of x four, it's going to save you a button press
which is always great, always recommend
saving a button press here and there. Next we're on to Subheading five
and we have peaking display. And peaking is really useful
if you are manually focusing and you want to be able to know
if your footage is in focus or not. So for peaking display, you can set it on
and then you can set your peaking level either high, mid or low, and you can even change the peaking color
from white to red, yellow or blue for the sake of these settings,
I'm going to leave peaking display off. But this is how you turn on in the menu. Next we have the blue playback menu. First off,
you can select your playback media. So if you want to check your video
files, you've recorded on a specific memory card here so you can select
the memory card that you want to playback. Subheading three is selection slash memo and here you have options
for protect rating and rating set. And this is a weird setting because Protect is going to enable you
to protect your photo and video clips. They can't be deleted
whenever you're previewing them by pressing the trashcan icon. But if you format your memory card, the video files are still deleted,
so it's kind of useless. And then as far as rating goes, rating is going to enable you
to rate the photos that you've taken. After you've taken them,
which sounds really useful, right? Because then you can tell at a glance
where your best photos are. But unfortunately this doesn't
work for video, so kind of useless. Let's not worry about it. Something for is the delete menu
and delete here does exactly what it says. It deletes images. I recommend never deleting
your video files this way though. As I've read horror stories of people
deleting their video clips from their memory cards in camera,
and then the camera's file structure was corrupted
and they lost their files. That's just terrifying. Instead, I would always format your card
in-camera before filming anything which will wipe the card completely
and ensure the file structure is correct. Every time that you're filming, the seven four gives you a new feature
where you can delete by pressing twice. Basically press the delete button twice
and delete whatever you're looking at. That's terrifying.
Let's leave. That turned off. Also delete confirm. It's going to give you the option
of whenever you press the delete button. Do you want the menu to be selecting cancel
or do you want it to be selecting delete? Which is also scary,
so leave it set to cancel and then never try to delete your images
or videos in your camera. Just don't do it. Not a good idea. Subheading eight is edit and it's going to give you
a lot of options to crop or copy etc. The only one that I would concern yourself
with is the rotate tool, which is actually going to enable you
to rotate your video clips in camera. Why would you want to do that? Well, the A7 four comes with a built
in gyroscope, so if you're holding your camera horizontally,
it's going to film horizontally video. But if you're holding your camera
vertically, it's going to record vertical video, which sounds great if you're recording
something for TikTok or Instagram, but if you happen to be recording something like, say, a wedding reception
and everybody's dancing and you're filming handheld and you press record on your camera while it's at your side
as you're bringing it up, the camera may think, Oh, we film
it vertically. Okay, cool.
So I'll film everything vertical. And so your footage
is all going to be sideways and you're going to be like,
This is wrong. What is wrong? Good news is that you can
then fix that in camera or in your editing software,
but it's easy to do it in camera just by going to rotate. And then you can select your video clip and rotate it back to the proper
orientation. Lastly,
let's jump down here to Subheading seven and you're going to see an option here
for display rotation. Remember how we were just talking
about a gyroscope? Yes. Set your display rotation to off
which to be clear, the camera can still want to film things
vertically if you're holding it like this. But the screen's not going to go
vertical too, which is a little helpful. You still may need to rotate your video
clips back though, if you happen to hit record
and then bring it vertical or horizontal. Lastly for this,
you have an image jump setting and this is really useful
because you can set your dials to scroll through all of your video clips
you filmed. And if you want to get through them quickly, you can set, say, the front dial
from one by one, two by ten images, which is going to then enable it to scroll
through ten images at a time, help you get through
previewing your clips faster. If you are somebody that likes to check
your video clips you've recorded on your camera. So set by ten if you want to. By default, though,
I would leave it all to one by one. We've made it down to the green world,
which is the network menu, and you have a ton of options in here to select how you want
to connect your phone to your camera, if you want to, to transfer video clips
or use your phone as an external monitor. I don't really recommend
doing that, though. It can be a little slow.
I don't ever do it. You can if you want to though. But what I would concern yourself with
is down here under Bluetooth, make sure that you have
Bluetooth function turned off and then for network option,
make sure that airplane mode is turned on. This is going to help you save a little bit of battery life
because then your camera is not going to be constantly
trying to connect to things and every bit of battery
life is always helpful. All right. We are to the last subheading,
The Yellow Toolbox. There are a ton of settings in here,
though, and a lot of them are super important.
So we've got to cover them. Start off
with subheading one area slash date here so you can select your language
and your date and your time zone, etc. and NTSC slash pal. Of course, language and area date and time are pretty obvious, but
NTSC pal may be a little confusing to you. In short, Sony has made
the A7 for its work around the world and there are two different video
standards worldwide. One is NTSC and one is PAL. NTSC is what you will typically use
if you are in the United States and PAL is what you will use
if you are in Europe. But what does this mean for you
as a filmmaker? Well, if you notice that your camera
is only capable of recording at, say, 100 frames per second in ten ATP
instead of 120 frames per second, or you're not that's trying to record at 50
frames per second or 25 frames per second. You're like, Huh? Shouldn't it be like 24 and 60? It could be because your camera
is set to POW instead of NTSC. So I would dove into your settings
here and change it. But I would also be aware
that if you are in another country that is typically a pal country
and you set it to NTSC, you may get some flickering in your video
clip. So test things out and see what works
best for you. But in general, if you're in the U.S., set it to NTSC, if you're in Europe
or other country, said to PAL. Subheading two
We have reset and save settings. Setting reset
as the name implies, will completely reset your camera's
settings back to basically nothing. So if you ever get stuck
or you're confused and you've changed settings
and your camera is messed up and you're upset about it,
just go in here, reset your camera back to the factory settings
and then you can customize it again. I've done this more times
than I would like to admit because I messed something up. It's good to know where that is next. You have save slash load settings and this is one of my favorite features
that Sony added to their newer cameras. And the reason that is so good
is that you can save your settings to your camera, to your memory card,
and then put that memory card in a new camera and immediately
apply those settings. So if you download
my settings file for the A7 four, which is still linked down below,
you can go to this menu setting and load those settings immediately
onto your camera and have all the settings immediately
available at your fingertips. It's really awesome. Next up, you have Operation Customize,
which is where you can customize all of the buttons
and some of the menus on your camera. It's really, really awesome. And the next video in this series
is going to cover all of these settings photo, video, playback, function, menu,
all these things, all of that's going to be covered
in the next video. For now, let's
go to here to screen display settings. And here's where you can select all of the different information
that appears on the sides of the screen. By default,
I would leave all this enabled, but if you want to change any of it,
you can. Next, we have a record with Shutter,
which is very important and very useful. I would highly recommend turning this on
and what it does is see this shutter button and say,
Do you have any pressed this red record? But you can press the shutter button
for video and it will start recording your video. It's really useful. I love having it right here
at my fingertips, so I always turn the setting on. Subheading four is dial customize
and see this mode dial appear at the top. You have a one, two and three. You can actually set these up as presets
for your 874, which is really awesome. And the next video is going to cover
how to do that. It's going to blow your mind. So yeah, I highly recommend
watching that video. Subheading five is Touch Operation. First, you're going
have the option to enable touch operation, which I would definitely leave it on because that's gonna let you
touch your screen to adjust your focus when using native Sony lenses. Subheading seven We have finder slash monitor
and this is really, really important. So first off, it's
going to give you the option to select finder slash monitor, which is basically
what is going to tell the camera whether you want to be watching your video
preview on the monitor, on the back of the camera
or in the viewfinder by default. This is set to auto and see here
on the back of the A7 four, there's a tiny little infrared beam
that gets shot out right here. And so if you bring your face up
to the camera, then it is going to switch to the viewfinder instead of using
the monitor on the back of the camera. Sounds great, right? Well, in practice it's not so great because if you bring your hand by it
or you try to press the buttons, the camera's going to be like,
Oh, did you use a viewfinder? And it's going to go to viewfinder.
You're going back to doing the viewfinder. I want to look at the monitor
on the back of the camera. I'm shooting video, so by default
I would go in here and Select Monitor Manual and do not worry. In the next video
I'm going to show you a custom button you can set up
that will enable you to swap between the monitor and the viewfinder
very quickly. Next,
we have monitor brightness by default. This is set to manual, but I would recommend going in and setting it to sunny weather,
which is going to make the monitor brighter
so you can see it outside on a sunny day. Very useful feature. I usually my view find brightness on auto
and then for finder color temperature I leave that on zero next year
for display quality. I would actually leave this set
to standard. You may be thinking,
no, I want the quality to be high, right? Well, no,
because what this actually controls is the frame rate that the preview monitor
plays with on the back of the camera. It affects the refresh rate
of this little monitor. This does not affect the quality of video
that you are recording. And so by leaving it on standard,
you're going to get better battery life. And so I recommend doing that. Also, you can leave your finder frame rate
set to standard as well. Subheading seven We have display options,
you have timecode settings. If you want to use those,
you have gamma display assist which is going to be very, very useful
if you're filming in SE Log three, I would leave it turn off by default. I'm going to show you a custom button in the next video
that will enable you to set that quickly for gaming displays. This type you're going to build customize
s on to select three, LG, etc. I will leave it on auto. You can ignore remain shoot display
and auto review. Those are for photo. We're not doing photo ignore
that next were in power setting options auto monitor off is also for photo
we're not do photo id know the auto monitor power save
start time. Though this is important.
I would leave this set to one minute. It's basically going
to turn off the camera after one minute. If you are not recording, help
you save some battery life. If, on the other hand,
you want your camera to stay on, you can set this two off. Next, you have power saved by monitor
and by default it's going to be set to both linked. But if you're using, say, an outermost external recorder,
for example, you can change these settings to make sure your camera doesn't turn off
while you're using that external monitor. Next,
we have one of the most important settings in the entire camera because I see
so many people get this setting wrong. By default, the camera is going to have
the auto power temp set to standard. You are always, always going to want to go in and change
the auto power off temperature to high. This is going to help ensure that your A7 Ford does not overheat
whenever you are filming video because by default Sony does not want
the camera to get too hot to the touch. So they set the auto power off temperature to standard, but hot to
the touch is relative. You're not going to get burned by this. Okay Don't worry about my camera's
pretty warm because I've had it on this whole time
and it's fine. So set your auto power off temperature
to high. It's going to enable the camera
to get a lot hotter and prevent it from overheating. Always have this enabled subheading ten. We have sound options
first up or volume settings. This is where you can adjust the playback
volume of the tiny little speaker or the headphones
that you have connected to your camera. By default I would leave to seven,
but adjusted if you need to. The A7 four also includes
four channel audio monitoring. So if you're using a SLR adapter to the
A7 four, you can then record for channel. Audio is pretty cool, but by default
I would just leave it set to channel one slash channel two audio signals. This is so important and so annoying. By default the A7 four
is going to make these little chimes. Any time you press record a stop it.
It's like doo doo doo doo doo doo. I hate it. It's terrible. Go into audio signals. Turn that off. Never turn it on again
somebody ten we have UCB. First up, you have a USB connection mode. It's going to give you option to select
when connect. I would leave it set to that USB lens
setting make sure that set to multi and then USB power supply definitely have
that turned on, which is going to enable you to power the A7 four via
its usb-c port. You can then power the A7
for virtually indefinitely. It's pretty awesome
and I recommend having that enabled. Subheading 12 We have external output. So if you are using your camera
connected to an HDMI adapter
into a computer like me using a ELGATO or if you're using an external monitor
like an Atomos, etc., here is where you can adjust
the settings by default. Leave it auto. You can adjust these
to all these settings though however you need to depending
on the output that you want to have. One important note is that by default
HDMI info display is turned on, but if you have it turned on,
that means that whatever external monitor using is going to show
all of your camera settings. And I've literally seen people that did not know that
and they recorded an entire wedding with those settings visible on the screen
and they didn't record in camera that was a nightmare that cropping to tend
to remove a lot of those settings. It was horrible. So to avoid that happening,
you can go into a HDMI info display and if you're using an external monitor,
sure, that is set to off, but after leave it on now
because otherwise you wouldn't see this preview menu.
So we're leaving it on right now. Subheading 13 The last setting of first
you have the video light mode and is set to power
link or record link or standby. This is if you are using a video light that connects to the camera's
hot you by default. Yeah,
I wouldn't worry about that or use that I'm not a big fan of on camera lights,
but here's where you can change the settings
if you want to. Next to the auto dust function
and this is really great in here. Go into the settings in turn shutter
when power off on do not leave
the device exposed to strong light source. Do not touch the shutter
blah blah blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going to want to make sure
that you have shutter when power off turn on, which
is going to close the shutter whenever you turn off the camera and help
protect it from getting dust on it. This is an amazing feature. I wish that every camera on the planet
had it. Lastly, you have version
and if you go in here, it's going to tell you
the firmware version of your camera. And if you have an update for your camera,
you can start to a memory card and then go in here to software update
and update your camera with that. Those are all the settings you need to change in the menus
to get your a74 up and running. But there's so much more to do. There's the mode dial, the custom menu,
the custom buttons, the function menu. Do not worry. My next video is going to cover
all of the settings for that and you're going to love it because once you have your buttons
and settings customized, you will basically never need to jump
into the maze of menus that we covered in this video ever again. So you can click down below
to watch the second part of this series, which will walk you through
setting up those custom buttons. And don't forget, you can actually skip
watching that second video. If you choose to download my
A7 for Settings file, it's completely free and you can load it on to your camera
and then immediately have all of my settings and custom buttons set up,
which is going to save you a ton of time. You can download that file down below. Also, I will link down below to my A7 for Memory Cards Guide video,
which will walk you through which memory cards to buy. All right. See you in the next video. Thanks so much for
watching. Have a great day.
