Sony ZV-1 - Beginners Guide on How-To Use The Camera

hey guys how's it going it's jay from sony alpha lab and what i got in this video is the sony zv1 and this is a beginner's guide type of video so i'm going to cover a ton of material i'm going to show you how to use the sony zv1 if you're a beginner in particular so i'm going to show you how to set the camera up like when you first take it out of the box you know putting the battery in the memory card all the basic stuff like that and then i'm going to go into much more detail and show you all the new features that this camera offers like product showcase it's got the background defocus button feature a couple of cool things like that it has a really good mic on the top and of course it has the flip screen but you know the camera is quite complicated because it has so much power so i'm going to go over those settings in the lab scene i have set up behind me so you can you know visualize what these features do and how they work in like real time now there's going to be a lot of material covered in this video it's going to be pretty lengthy so below the video you will have navigation links in the description area with the given topics that i'll be talking about in addition if you look at like the playhead like that red bar that goes across as the video progresses that is now chopped up into chunks to reflect the navigation links that are below so when you put links below in the description area it now chunks up the uh like the little playhead there and if you hover over it it'll tell you what each section is it's it's a pretty cool little thing that's kind of new to youtube so i just wanted to share that with you so all right let's get right into it alright guys so here is the sony zv1 in my hands and as you can see it's a very compact camera and it really packs a lot of power it's very lightweight and it's a more affordable solution to the rx100 series cameras which are you know made more out of more metal than this one this one is definitely a more plastic design it's got a plastic body on it but the cost is much less this goes for 750 where the rx100s are well over a thousand dollars for those cameras now when you take this thing out of the box for the first time you are going to have to put the battery in it and you're going to have to charge it so the battery goes in the bottom here it's got this little slide lever right there and that pops open and there's a little blue tab there that you can hit with your finger and that's where the battery goes so you just got to put the battery in there like so and you can see the little arrow point points towards the blue tab and it clicks in and then the memory card goes right behind the battery like so and it goes with the label the memory card label facing that way away from the battery and it just clicks in like that and that's all there is to it then you can do like so then what you need to do is you need to charge it up so what you do is on the side here you have a door for multi it says you just open up that door and they included a cable right here a usb cable and you just plug the little usb the micro usb in there plug that sucker right in there like that and then you plug this end into any charger you have laying around i did not get a charger in the box with the zv1 so i do not believe it comes with one but nowadays everybody pretty much has chargers for anything so you just got to plug it into something and when you do that there's a light that'll light up yellow on the on off button right there there's a little led that lights up and that'll light up yellow indicating that the battery is charging and i actually have a another a sony plug here that i from a previous camera my um a6400 or i just have it laying around so i use this to charge it or i just plug it into my computer and i charge it when i take the pictures and the video off i just leave it leave it plugged into the computer and it basically just sits there and charges and when i'm not using it you know so that's what i've been doing and that's the easiest way i also have this awesome remote control accessory which is really nice for vlogging and just holding the camera it's very easy to use so i'll go over that in a little bit in another video as well i just wanted to give you a heads up on that and then the other thing is this dead cat they call it which is basically just a microphone diffuser it keeps the noise you know the wind noise and things like that that's what this thing is for and it basically plugs in the hot shoe here so you just slide the hot shoe off and then it has a little hot shoe adapter on the bottom of this thing right there and you just slide that into the hot shoe like so and now that covers the microphone to you know help with wind noise and things like that so i'm just going to pop it out for now though because i just want to show off some of the buttons on the camera here so you have the on off button of course that turns the camera on and off you have the mode button here now normally there's a mode dial on sony cameras but this particular camera has a mode button so when you hit that button i'll show you in a minute once i turn the camera on a simulated mode dial will come up on the screen and you basically just turn this wheel to scroll through the different modes then what you have here is the record button for recording video you have here the shutter button when you press that that will take a picture and then you have your zoom lever so that'll zoom the lens in and out from an effective 24 millimeter all the way to 70 millimeter now on the back you have a nice little thumb grip here on the front you have a nice little grip for your fingers as well and in addition on the back you have a menu button right here that will bring you into the menu system the function button which will bring you into the function menu which is basically a shortcut menu that you can program for key features such as focus modes and things like that i'll show you that in a minute and then you have your control dial here that you can turn but you can also push the control dial in on all four sides it's a button like as you push it in as well and then in the center of the mode dial is another button then what you have here is the playback button that will bring you into the playback menu so you can check out your photos and videos and then you have the garbage can button here which is also c2 programmable c2 button now i hit the playback button so automatically turn the camera on so i'm just going to turn it back off and up here is c1 and that is custom button one and that is programmed to background defocus mode and that's a really cool feature for newer users to photography basically what it'll do is it'll put the camera into the widest aperture available in this case that would be f 1.8 at 24 millimeter and that will help get separation between you and the background if you were filming in front of the camera for example let me just show you this screen here now the screen swivels out so when you do that the camera will automatically be in orientation like so so you can see the screen while you're recording yourself but what's cool is the camera screen also flips around completely so if you're shooting low to the ground you can aim the screen up like so or you can aim the screen down if you want to if you have it over your head but what's also interesting is you can close it this way and now have the screen in like an armor mode so you can put the camera in your pocket with confidence that it's not going to scratch the screen because the screen is hidden and i really like this feature it's uh definitely worth using if you're going to put this in your pocket i would definitely put it this way and then when you take it out the camera will automatically turn on like so so once you get that battery charged up um go ahead and turn the camera on and i will walk you through this procedure it's really easy it's not rocket science but if you've never done it before this will just walk you through the process so i'm going to select english i'm going to click enter there for the time and i live in new york so i'm going to select enter again for that daylight savings time you can turn that on or off i'm going to turn it on and then the date i'm gonna set the uh date and time here all right so at the time of this recording we're looking at september 25th 2020 and it is 12 48 so it's gonna be 12 p.m 12 48 all right and then you just hit the center button here that's like the enter button then i'll go down and i'll click enter and there you have it and it's telling you about the imaging edge software that's the software you're going to need to download so you can push the photos and video to your smart devices i actually prefer just using the um usb cable to get the pictures off but occasionally if you want to grab a photo off the camera and put it on your phone so you can share it on social media that is a great feature you just boot up the imaging edge app on your smart device and then you can basically push the photos to your device now looking at the back of the camera you have a lot of different options here there's different all these different buttons and displays and right now it's an intelligent auto mode so basically the camera is going to do everything for you and it's going to recognize the scene for you as well as you could see on the top there right now it sees that i'm really close to something so i put the camera in macro mode and it's trying to focus on the table that i have right in front of it now let me just go around and show you how that works so let me just pause this video quick and i'm going to actually put it on this little tripod so the camera doesn't move hang on one second so what we got now there's the scene in the background here that i'm going to use to demonstrate how this works but first thing i want to do is show you so when you hit the mode button it brings you into this simulated mode dial and if you just turn the wheel here you can select whatever mode you want now you have a whole bunch of modes here you have scene rec selection mode you have sweep panorama mode you got manual exposure mode shutter priority mode aperture priority mode and notice it gives you a description here as to what each mode does then you have program auto mode you have intelligent auto mode which is what the camera is on by default when you take it out of the box you have intelligent auto video mode then you have movie mode then you have high frame rate mode this is for super slow motion footage then you have memory recall mode so you can have the camera set up with different settings pre-programmed and then you can recall them with that mode so let me go back to intelligent auto mode here so if you are new to the camera intelligent auto mode is a really good place to start and it'll basically just look at the scene and it'll try to figure out what it's you know what you're taking a picture of and it'll make the appropriate settings for that picture now what you're seeing is it's selecting the face there because there's a face in the scene if i zoom in a little bit you can see a little closer see i have that little model there and there's a little square around the face and that's because facial priority is on by default so if it sees a face in the scene it is going to focus on the face not the closest subject in front of the camera which is this can right here on the right hand side that can is basically the closest thing to the camera but you can just override that by touching anywhere you want and the camera will then focus and track where you touch by default so it's focus tracking so now if i move the camera you can see that little tracking box is staying on the can which is really cool i could put it right there i'll put it on the second can and now watch i can move the camera around and notice how the tracking is staying on that can so that is on by default and you can always just touch the screen where you want it to track and it will automatically track now to cancel it you can hit the center button here on the dial or you can hit that little button on the top that has an x it's a little bit hard to see on the screen i usually just hit this button to cancel it though and now it says cancel tracking so that's how that works and then again you can zoom in and out with this zoom lever here and that works quite well if you hit the shutter button halfway it'll focus and then if you push all the way it'll take the photo and that's basically how you take a picture if you hit the record button here it'll start recording video and notice how it crops in a bit when you record video you can zoom out while recording video and notice how it zooms nice and slow if i stop recording and zoom notice how it goes much faster now you can control the zoom speed inside the menu and you can actually make the zoom go faster and slower during video by default it's set to slow however all right so what i wanted to show you quickly was this other button up here this is the background defocus button and when you hit it it automatically puts it into background defocus mode so it's going to put the camera to the fastest aperture which at this zoom range is f 2.8 so this is a cool feature and if you want the background to be blurry this is just a quick way to do it if you don't understand what aperture does you can just hit this button and it'll automatically put the camera to the fastest aperture which will inherently give you the best out of focus background in relation to what you're focusing on so you can see here the background on that can is out of focus and the canon front is sharp i'll show you what that picture looks like and now watch when i hit this button again now it says background defocus clear so it actually stopped the lens down to probably f 5.6 or so if i hit the display button here it will change the way that the screen looks yeah one of the options here this one this display mode will actually show you the aperture so now the camera is set to f 5.6 which is going to give you a sharper result from front to back so now the canon the back is going to be much more sharper than when i had it in the background defocus mode and you could see it when you look at it you could see the background sharpen up and see on the details of the lamp so to cancel that you just hit the mode button and again why you would want to use this feature is if you're filming yourself and you're recording yourself and you want the background to be blurry like you would hit that button it will focus on your face and the background will then butter out a little bit and it'll create more separation and a more 3d look for your vlogging video or whatever you're trying to create and it's a great feature they just put the button right on top of the camera so you don't even have to know how to use the camera really when it comes to aperture and all that other stuff you just hit that button and it's it's good to go it takes care of it for you notice how i change the display by hitting the display button and that is the top of the wheel here if you just hit the top of that wheel it'll cycle through the different display modes on the screen like so and then if you hit left on this dial it'll bring up the different drive modes you can see here on the left there's different drive modes and you can scroll through different drive modes continuous shooting for example then you have self timer here which you can change there's little arrows to the left and the right of the self timer and i apologize it is kind of hard to see with this lab scene set up but right there you have a self timer and you can change it to five seconds two seconds is what i normally have it set to and this is continuous shooting so if you want a rapid fire i'll show you right now watch see that it just took like 20 shots really quick because remember this thing shoots 10 frames per second so that's what rapid fire mode does and that's great for sports and action shots the next thing i want to show you is the function menu here if you hit the fn button here on the back of the camera that'll bring up this function menu and now because i'm in intelligent auto mode i have only a few options here that i can change so let me go over those real quick this first one is the drive mode which i just showed you so this is another way to get to the drive mode you can just hit this button here on the back on this control wheel you can push it in to get there or you can get there through the function menu right there and it'll tell you what mode it is right there notice how it says drive mode so that'll help you navigate now this is focus mode and there's different focus modes here you have auto focus single shot you have auto focus automatic and then you have auto focus continuous continuous will just continually focus and when you hold the shutter button down halfway see how it's just blinking it'll just continually continuously focus no matter where i move the camera and right now it sees the the human or the face so it's gonna it's focusing on the eyes of the face there and if i go back here now it's going to switch back to the can if i move over here it'll switch to the camera see it's just continuously focusing so if i go back into the function menu and change it back to afa that will automatically switch between continuous autofocus and single shot focus single shot focus is this when you press the shutter button down it just locks on the subject and it doesn't change see how the focus is not changing it just locks on the subject and doesn't really change unless you move a lot if you move a lot then it will change automatically because it's in af a for automatic so it will move if you move the camera quite a bit and it depends also on what focus area you're using so that's the next thing i want to show you if you hit the function menu you have this next box and this stands for focus area and by default it is set to zone which is what i tend to use most honestly zone will basically restrict your auto focus to the area of this zone see those white boxes and you can move them around the screen and it'll restrict the focus to those areas so notice right now it's not focusing on that face even though it does see the face it's not focusing on it because the focus is restricted to that zone now watch when i change the focus area to wide now it's basically using the whole sensor and now notice how it's focusing on the face you see because the focus is not restricted in any way it's using the whole screen so that's what focus area does and that's a really good feature if you want to limit the focus of something and then of course you can just touch the screen at any time and limit the focus to where you touch so very versatile as far as focus modes and stuff like that now this feature here is product showcase and this is a cool feature because what this does when you turn that on the c2 button is also a shortcut it's a custom key and that will also turn the camera into product showcase so now i have product showcase on and basically what that does is it turns off facial recognition so if you put something in front of the camera so basically when you're recording video and you put something in front of the camera it's going to automatically focus on it see that it's going to automatically focus on it even though there's a face in the scene and that's if you're going to show off a product for example now if i turn that off i have to stop recording and i'll turn product showcase off okay now it's going to prioritize that face there so if i hit record and i hold this up in front of the camera it will not focus on it you see that because there's a face in the scene because it has facial priority recognition so in order to get it to focus on this i have to cover the face and usually if you cover the face it will focus on what's closest to the camera like so see that you cover the face and then it will focus now the focus is a little bit fast on this camera by default so i'm going to go into the menu here and show you how you can fix that because i don't really like the way it's set up by default all right i just stopped recording there all right so let me go into the menu system by hitting this menu button here so here is the menu system now this this menu is really really vast it's got a lot going on in here so i'm going to try to walk you through some of the basics so but the first thing i want to do is show you how you can change that focus speed because that is kind of annoying when you're recording video so if we scroll to the right here here it is af drive speed see how that's set to fast you want to change that to normal you might want that on fast if you're tracking moving subjects or something like that but i don't particularly like it because the focus changes way too quick so now i have it set to normal so watch what happens when i'm recording all right so you see how the focus is quite a bit smoother it just gradually switches as opposed to that harsh you know hard switch let me show you drive speed set to normal let me put it back on fast and show you what it does it's a little more clearly you see how quickly it changes it like instantly changes focus and it's not very pleasing to the eye so watch what happens when i turn it to slow and the reason why i'm spending so much time on this is because it really makes a huge difference as far as cinematography goes and it looks so much better when it changes focus more slowly now watch when i have it set to slow see it takes a really long time to switch watch comparatively it takes a long time i mean it doesn't take that long but you can see it goes back nice and smooth see that so that's the responsiveness that's what that does and by default they had it set to fast for some reason which i don't really like it's too herky-jerky and it doesn't look good in my opinion so i would definitely change that option i would leave it on normal to start and then af tracking sensitivity responsive this is basically how quickly it will change focus and they put it on responsive which again i don't really particularly like i mean it does work pretty good but standard is a better place to start in my opinion and what that means is when you put something in front of the camera for example like this lens it'll take a second before it changes so like if you talk with your hands like i do and you're you're putting your hands in front of the camera constantly you see how it takes like a second before it switches it just gives it like an extra buffer before it activates the autofocus that's what the uh sensitivity does you see so it just gives it like that second before it starts to change focus as you can see here it doesn't change the focus speed that's still set to normal it just changes the actual sensitivity like when it focuses so it just gives it a little extra time and that's a cool feature to know about if you're having problems where like i said if you're talking in front of the camera with your hands and you put your hand up the camera might switch and focus on your hand and then switch right back to your face and you don't really want that you know it doesn't look very good so i just wanted to make you aware of that that's where you would change that option back on into the menu system here let's just go back up to the first page here so what we got is we got file format and this is basically whether you want to shoot in jpeg or raw quality now raw quality is going to yield you better results ultimately because the files have more latitude when it comes to editing on the computer but if you don't want to do that if you don't want to use a program like lightroom for example and process your raw files then just to have the camera set by default leave it on jpeg mode and the camera will do all the work for you and that's basically what that is now if you go to the down here you got quality you can set it to extra fine for the best possible quality jpeg size it's default large 20 megapixel but you can make it smaller if you want if you only want 10 megapixel files and you want you know just to take more pictures and you don't need 20 megapixel you can change that there you can also change the aspect ratio to all these different modes whichever whatever suits your needs one by one would be a square 16x9 would be like a widescreen tv very cinematic looking but three by two is the default i usually leave it there and panorama size and panorama direction you can change those when you have the camera set to sweep panorama mode and here's a sample image of what a panoramic looks like as you can see it looks pretty darn cool and i took that with this camera just the other day in panorama mode so it was a lot of fun i like using that mode now you got long exposure these options are all grayed out because i'm in intelligent auto mode so let me just change the mode here to a more powerful mode which would be program auto so program auto is basically full auto except for the fact that it gives you the ability to change more options in the menu and also in the function menu if i hit the function button again see how i have all these options now i didn't have near as many options when i was in intelligent auto mode so while i'm in here in the function menu let me show you a couple more things real quick now that i'm in a different mode you have steady shot you can turn that on and off that's the image stabilization now you also have soft skin effect so this camera by default will soften your skin and it's set to medium it will not work in raw quality but it does work in jpeg quality and it also works in video so when you're standing in front of the camera it'll actually smooth your skin out and make you look you know extra pretty and you can click that and you can change the power of it or you can just turn it off it's default set to medium but you could set it to low medium or high or you could just turn it off altogether so i'm just leaving it on as medium because it does soften the skin it looks pretty good so that's what that does let me just go back into the function menu now here you have white balance white balance is basically how the camera decides what color is what so for example if i change this to sunny weather you see how the camera color drastically shifted and that's what white balance does so if you're out in the sun you would want to have the white balance set to daylight for example auto white balance is going to try to figure it out for you and it does a really good job in most cases but the problem is when you're recording video in auto white balance for example or taking photos in auto white balance it'll sometimes shift if like a cloud comes over or something like that and then the skin tones will suddenly change while you're in the middle of recording a video and you don't want that you definitely want to have your white balance hard set to a value when you're recording video and taking pictures for the best quality results now what i like to use is the color temperature when i'm inside a studio like where i am right now because my lights are operating at 3 400 degrees so if you hit the right arrow button here it'll bring you down to the temperature and now i can dial my temperature in to 3 400 which is exactly what my lights are calibrated to and then i'll click ok and now i have a custom white balance set to 3400 it's not a custom white balance it's just the color temperature and that's what white balance does now here you have creative style creative styles will is basically how your camera is going to process your files so when you take a picture it's going to process it in the standard color profile and you can actually go in there and you can manipulate that to your liking if you like but they have defaults in here as well they have vivid so that'll give you extra punchy colors portrait will subdue some of the saturation a little bit and make the skin tones look a little better landscape is going to jack up the sharpening a little bit it's going to make more emphasis on the greens and the blues for example then you have sunset obviously these modes are optimized for sunset you got black and white there if you want to take some black and white pictures you got sepia so that's what the creative styles do but by default it is set to standard and then over to the right here there's one more option here you have the nd filter so this camera has a built-in nd filter and that is great for slowing down your shutter speed in whatever circumstance you might want to do that recording video it's great because you want your shutter speed to be the correct shutter speed when you're recording video so if i'm recording at 24 frames per second i'm going to want my shutter speed to be at 1 50th of a second so you basically double the frame rate and the nd filter makes that really easy to do otherwise you'd have to put a filter in front of the lens which is not exactly easy on a camera like this so you can turn that on and off or just leave it on auto so that's how the function menu changes when you're in a different mode so let me go back into the menu here and i'll continue on so you have long exposure noise reduction that's basically just going to help clean up your images if you're in a super low light environment and your iso is extremely high your iso is basically the camera's sensitivity and the higher the sensitivity the more noise that there's going to be in your images so by default that is turned on and the high iso noise reduction is set to normal you can change that if you want but i would recommend leaving that on unless you're trying to take pictures of stars or something astrophotography then you're going to want to turn that off because it'll think that the stars themselves are like artifacts and it'll end up getting rid of a lot of them so you want to turn that off if you're taking pictures of stuff like that now if we go over to the right we have shooting mode and i showed you that before if you just hit the mode button on the top of the camera you can change your mode and that's what that is scene selection is a really cool mode let me show you that because most of you guys are going to be new to this camera so let me go into scene selection mode here so in scene selection mode you can basically now select whatever you're taking a picture of look here on the left you got portraits you have sports you have macro landscapes sunset night scene you got handheld twilight which is really good for super low light when you're hand holding it'll actually take multiple shots and combine them and then you have fill flash mode which this camera does not have a built in flash but if you had one in the hot shoe it would automatically fire the flash and give you a nice fill and then you have anti-motion blur which will just help with low light again then you have pet photography food photography fireworks and then high sensitivity mode so if you're not sure how to set the camera up because you're new to photography new to video for example but in particular photography you can just go into scene selection mode and select the scene that you're currently in you're trying to take pictures of food we'll put it on food photography gourmet mode it's called you're taking a picture of your pet put it on pet mode so that's what scene selection is for and these are great tools to help you get the best possible quality from the camera and don't be afraid to use the tools okay these tools are here for you to help you so don't feel like you're an idiot or what or whatever because you're not using full manual mode or something like that use these modes and uh they will help you out dramatically and as you get better with the camera you will learn how to use the settings more and you might not need to use these modes but just know that they're there for you so don't be shy and if you want to use them use them let me just switch back to program auto here and i will go back into the menu and then we have drive mode which i already showed you bracket settings bracket settings is basically for hdr photography and things like that and self-timer during bracketing i would recommend turning that on two-second self-timer so if you do use bracketing and i just hit menu to go back you just hit that menu button to go back if you do decide to use the bracketing you would most likely want the self timer and that's great if you want to take like a multiple images at different exposure values and again that's basically mostly used for hdr photography and i have tutorials specifically on hdr photography so if you want to learn about that check out those videos in my how to area on my youtube channel now below that we have interval shooting function this is for time lapse photography and if you go in there you can turn that on and that will enable it and then you can change your parameters for the interval shooting and basically what it'll do is it'll set the camera up where it'll automatically take a picture like once every three seconds for example and it'll go for a total of 30 shots and it'll tell you it's going to the total shooting time is going to be one minute and 27 seconds and you can go in here and manipulate those settings and here is an example of what a time lapse looks like and this was about a 10 minute time lapse i'm just going to hit the menu button to go back and by the way if you don't know what any of these options are at any time you can hit the little garbage can button here on the bottom right of the camera and it'll give you a description of what that feature is and does so you can see right there and then just hit menu to go back and if you go to bracket settings and then again hit the garbage can it says sets bracket shooting i mean sometimes it doesn't really give you much information but other times it will drive mode sets this shooting method to continuous shooting self timer etc and just so you know there you just hit the garbage can anytime and it'll give you a little more information now here's memory modes now this is where you would go to set your memory and you can go in there and this is where you basically set the camera how you want and you could then save it to one of these modes or you can recall one of these modes at any time and that's a really cool feature and there's quite a few in there that you can set up so you can basically have the camera set up for different things like you can have one for video one for photos one for sports shooting for example one for portraits or something like that and you can change all the different parameters in the camera and then save it to a memory slot and it'll it'll recall all that information for you because depending on what you're doing it might require changing a lot of settings and that can be very time consuming so this is a great way to save a lot of time in the field when you're changing modes or you're taking you know doing a variety of different types of photography and video now if we keep scrolling over to the right you have more features here face i select let me go in there this is where you control what you're taking pictures of when it comes to faces so you can turn this feature on and off and then subject detection if you go in here you can set the subject to either human or animal it does not automatically detect whether it's a human or an animal so if you want to focus on your dog or cat's eyes for example you're going to want to change it to animal so that's where that option is and then you can switch which eye all sorts of stuff like that really amazing power on this thing pre-af that will basically have the camera automatically focus on something before you press the shutter button it'll like pre-focus for you and you can turn that on and off it will save the battery a little bit if you turn that feature off but it is a nice feature to have on because it'll speed up the focusing of the camera in most situations you can change the focus frame color default is white but you can change it to red and that's basically the box that'll be around the focus frame af area auto clear that's a more advanced feature that i would save for another video and here's some more stuff iso that's the camera sensitivity again and you can change that but you can change that by going into the function menu as well if you go to the function menu right here it's set to iso auto so if you click that you could then go in here and you can change your iso and if you hit the right side of the navigation wheel that'll bring you down it'll bring over to the right down here where you can set your iso auto minimum and maximum so you can raise the maximum up to like whatever 12 800 if you wanted to i recommend leaving it at 6 400 though and then the low you can raise and lower to your desire if you want so you can have it set wherever you want right there is pretty good though for default and then if you go up here you have multi-frame noise reduction so you have to actually set the camera to that mode in order to use that feature but remember you can go into the mode dial and go into scene selection and you can also select those different scenes and it'll automatically set the camera up to various settings like for pet mode for example it'll turn the facial detection to animal mode it'll do all that stuff for you if you use the scene selection modes it just it configures the camera properly for those given modes and it just saves a lot of effort so you don't have to really be that knowledgeable on how to manipulate all these different settings now metering mode that's another feature that you can get to from the function menu if you hit the function here you can go to metering mode which is oh wait a minute metering mode's not in here oh wow okay sorry about that normally metering mode's in here on the sony cameras but it's not here on this particular camera because it has the product showcase in there it looks like instead so if i go into menu here and i click on metering mode notice here on the left you have different metering modes so you have multi metering mode which basically it's going to use the entire screen and it's going to try to find the best exposure value for the given scene when it factors in everything now this is center weight average so now the camera is just going to use the center area of the screen to expose and if i put something in front of the center you can see how bright it gets it's trying to expose properly for this black lens so you can see how much it brightened up see how much brighter it gets and now if i switch that to multi it'll still brighten up but not near as much you see because it's still factoring in that light in the background and everything so that's what metering modes do it basically has the camera exposed based on different criteria now spot metering just uses a small little spot in the very center of the scene so in this case it's that going to be that can there in the center and it's going to use that as the exposure determination area and then you have the entire screen and then you have highlight now highlight's a really cool one i wanted to point out because it'll expose for the highlights so notice how it just got much darker because of that bright light in the background because it's making sure that none of the highlights blow out and if i put it back to multi-mode which is what it's on by default it works pretty good in that mode and this camera will prioritize faces automatically as far as exposure goes so it will try to maintain proper exposure on a face automatically just so you know and you can also turn that feature off in the menu system as you can see right here face priority and multi-metering so by default it's set to on so it'll try to prioritize your face even though the background might be really bright or really dark and that feature is on by default but you can turn that off right there now if we move over you have some flash settings and you got white balance here dynamic range optimizer now and auto hdr if you go in here you can actually set the camera to auto hdr which is a cool feature you have to be in jpeg mode to use it but it's a lot of fun and if you scroll over to the right by using the navigation wheel down here you can change the ev value i always have it set to 4ev in auto hdr mode and if you do that and now if you take a picture notice how it took three shots and now it's going to combine those three shots and create an auto hdr so if i hit the play button here on the back of the camera that'll bring you into the playback area and now you can view your photos and you can see this one is the auto hdr you can see the shadows are much brighter and then here's the regular shot so there's an auto hdr and here's a standard jpeg so you can see how it brightened up the shadows quite a bit and it also toned down the highlights quite a bit so when you take an auto hdr it'll actually take two photos it'll put the regular jpeg in there and then it'll also put the auto hdr photo in there which is a pretty cool feature and also while you're in playback mode you can hit the display button here on the top of the wheel and that will change the way it displays when you're looking at the photos so this one here of course gives you the most information and then if you want to zoom in you can use this lever here and it'll zoom in on your photo and you can zoom out like so and then you can use this to navigate around the scene as well which is pretty cool so let me just hit the playback button again and i'll hit the display so now if i just go to a video here notice how it looks like a little movie there you just hit the center button on this control wheel and it'll start to play the video as you can see and then you can turn this wheel to scan forward and backward frame by frame and now if i zoom out even more by using the toggle up here it'll go into a grid view and you could zoom out even more and it'll go into a calendar view so if you're on vacation for example you can like navigate to a certain day and then zoom in on that day and then zoom in again and it's just an easy way to navigate your photos and then on the left hand side you have the different files as well so you can sort by file type if you go over here right now it's in calendar view but you can go to just photos you can go to videos and so forth so there's many ways to navigate the playback area just to let you know let me just turn auto hdr off i'm just going to leave it on dynamic range optimizer set to auto and that'll just help with the highlights and the shadows a little bit creative style i already went over that in the function menu now picture effects is a really cool fun feature if you turn this on you can you have all these different modes you got toy camera mode pop color mode posterization color retro photo you have to be in jpeg to use this feature but it is pretty fun to use and there are some cool features you have partial color here and if you scroll right and left you can change the color you got yellow you got red you got green and then you got high contrast black and white which is awesome and then you got soft focus painting hdr painting black and white and if there's arrows to the left and the right that means that there's more options and if you hit left and right it'll give you the different options and then you've got water color mode illustration mode i love illustration mode check this out let me show you what that looks like i'm just gonna hit the playback button and i'll zoom in here so you can see check out what illustration mode looks like isn't that cool makes it look like a cartoon a lot of fun using that mode i like that mode a lot i use it with the kids a lot i'm just going to go back into the menu and i'm going to turn that off and again you do have to be in jpeg mode to use that feature so i'm going to turn that off however creative styles you can change whether you're in raw or jpeg quality and then picture profile this is a more advanced feature for i would say like more hardcore video users but this is a vlogging camera so this might you know fall into your criteria so in here is where you can change your different picture profiles and this is where you can get s-log 3 s-log 2 hdr or h-l-g and so forth and you can see up here on the screen this is what the different pp numbers are and what they do so it's more advanced but you can get much more dynamic range and stuff like that out of your video if you use the picture profile modes i actually don't use these modes when i record my videos because it does require more work on the computer you have to then grade your video it's called and it's just more work and for my purposes the camera does a really good job so i actually just leave it off but it is a very very powerful function and worth noting if you are somebody that wants to do some hardcore video work now soft skin effect we already went over that that's on by default but you can turn it off right there and then if we scroll over to the right got a couple more features product showcase we already went over that now face registration you can actually register fascias in here and then you can set a priority on the faces so if you're taking pictures of a group of people and you want the camera to prioritize like your kid for example you can do that in here by using face registration and then face registration priority and then we have smile shutter so that'll make the camera automatically take a picture when somebody smiles pretty cool feature auto object framing that'll basically auto crop your images for you if you want i don't really ever use that self-portrait timer that will basically put up a clock if you're taking a picture of yourself and you have the screen facing towards you and you hit the shutter button it'll automatically put a timer on the screen and it'll count down to let you know you know five four three you know type thing that's what that is and now we're into the second tab so what i want to show you real quick up here in the menu system you have tabs along the top that you can scroll quickly if you go to the actual tabs but then when you go down you have pages as you can see here so i'm just scrolling through the different pages like i just did but you can shortcut by going up to the top and then navigate by tab then go down to get to the individual pages within that tab i'm sorry i meant to mention that earlier now in here is your file format for video and stuff now i would recommend shooting in 4k uh for the best quality all right so there's 4k and then you can go into record setting and i always use 24p for mine and that's what i always record in and that's where you can change those settings now if you want to record in 120p for slow motion purposes you would change it to this mode hd then you can go into record setting and you can change it to 120p right there and that will give you the ability to do slow motion in post processing it won't create a slow motion video on the memory card for you but it will record at 120 frames per second so you could then go into your video editing software and you can slow it down by like five times and get some nice slow motion effects now in here is your high frame rate mode settings and that's for super slow motion so what i would recommend doing is setting this to 24p and because that's normally what i would film in i film in 24p so i want this to end up in 24p as well so it matches up with my video now if you're recording video at 30p then you would want to have this at 30p and 60p for example if that's what you're recording at but i like i said i have it at 24p because i record at 24p and that's what i my videos that i upload to youtube are also in 24p so and then here is your frame rate and you can set your frame rate to 240 480 or 960. now 240 is definitely going to yield you the best possible quality because what happens is in order to capture that many frames per second the camera has to jack up the iso which is the camera sensor sensitivity and what results is noise so the higher frame rates the more noise you're gonna get so i would recommend shooting at 240 frames per second and i would also recommend having it set to quality priority but if you want more time because this mode will only record for a couple of seconds you can't just record indefinitely in this mode it actually like buffers and stuff i have a whole video dedicated on high frame rate mode so be sure to check that video out for much more detail on how this works but if you want more time you can set it to shoot time priority and that'll give you a couple of extra seconds but you might it might sacrifice the quality in some ways and then timing there's different ways to time the way you're recording high frame rate mode like i said i have a tutorial dedicated on this so be sure to check that out and it'll go into much more detail on how to use that now dual record you can actually record in multiple qualities so you can shoot in raw plus jpeg for example if you're taking photos but also if you're recording video you can dual record and that's a pretty cool feature now because i'm not in video mode a lot of these features are grayed out now so let me change my mode here all right so then you have some more advanced features here i have the camera set back to 4k now just so you know 24p and all these features are now available proxy recording so what the camera will do it'll actually record a separate file of video at a lower resolution and you could use that to post-process faster on a program like final cut pro for example and you could use proxy recording to speed up your workflow it's a more advanced feature but it's worth noting that it's there now the af drive speed and tracking sensitivity i already went over and i recommend having it set here normal and standard auto slow shutter i would leave that set to on audio recording you want to have that on audio level display on wind noise reduction i usually have that turned off and then steady shot active mode active will give you the most stabilization but it does crop in on the image a little bit so if you don't want it to crop in as much you can put it to standard but the stabilization won't work as good so if you're using a tripod you could just turn this off but if you are walking around like if you're using this selfie stick and you're filming yourself as you're walking you're going to want to have the active stabilization on for sure so i recommend just leaving it on that unless you're using a tripod of course then you can turn it off marker displays this is more advanced features as to how the framing on the video looks when you're recording video it'll just put more stuff on the screen for you know which you might want but that's what that is when recording video record lamp there's a light on the front of the camera right here that light right there there's a light right there and that will light up when you're recording video that's what that is and you can turn that off right here if you want but i kind of like that feature but if you want to record people and you don't want them to know that you're recording them you can turn that off and then that light on the front won't light up but it's kind of helpful to know when you're recording and then movie with shutter you can make the shutter button the record button if you want i would just leave it off because there's this nice big record button there anyway steady shot on zoom setting check this out so if you go into zoom setting you can change it to clear image zoom if you're in jpeg mode and that will allow the camera to zoom in more watch this so if you see this line right there there's like a line on the top and that's basically where the actual optical zoom stops so this is all digital zoom basically but it's really high quality so this is a good way to get some extra zoom and still maintain pretty darn good quality now here we're back to optical zoom and that's a cool feature to use i recommend using clear image zoom if you need more zoom range for sure but um it won't work in raw quality just so you know now zoom speed you can change that to normal or fast and this applies to video so if you want your zoom to be fast during video you can switch it to fast here and that will speed up the zooming drastically when recording video because as you saw earlier the zoom is quite slow when recording video now these are more advanced buttons um just like the display button here it's going to show you all all the different options for what the screen looks like when you hit the display button and you can turn that on and off all different stuff there you can program that zebra settings is a more advanced feature that'll actually put what's called zebra on your screen and it'll help you expose for highlights and stuff like that it's a pretty advanced feature but it's very helpful in tough exposure situations especially if you're having a hard time metering the highlights now grid line is a cool feature you can turn that on and off i like to have the rule of thirds on and now if i hit the shutter button you can see how i have the rule of thirds you see those crisscrosses on the screen that's the rule of thirds grid which i really like it helps keep the horizon straight and frame images for the you know most visual interest exposure set guide we don't need to worry about that live view display you want that on auto review will basically after you take a photo it'll pop the photo up on the screen so you could look at it if you want and you can turn that on and off here by default it's set to off it's kind of annoying so i like i prefer to have it off now custom keys this is where you can control your custom keys by default like i said the top right button c1 is programmed to the background defocus feature and then c2 down here which is also the garbage can is set to the product showcase feature so i actually think that's a good way to have it so i would just leave it like that for now but you can actually set the custom keys per mode so when you're taking photos you can have the custom keys do one thing when you're taking video you can have the custom keys do something else and then when you're reviewing your photos you can have the custom keys do even something else and now if you go in here to the function menu set this is where you can actually configure your function menu so you can make you can fill up your function menu with whatever you want remember earlier how i said that the metering mode was not in here well you can add that in here and get rid of something that you don't use for example you can manipulate this all you want and that's a really really powerful feature i recommend playing with once you get used to the camera and you know what settings you want and and stuff you could then configure your phone your function menu to your liking now function of touch operation if you go in there by default the camera is set to touch tracking but you can change it to touch focus or touch shutter so if you just want to touch the screen and have it take a photo you can have it set to touch shutter really cool feature some people want to know how to do that and they had it on a previous camera for example and they really liked it this is where you can change that feature and you might not want touch tracking you might not like that tracking feature so just put touch focus instead if if you prefer but i actually really like the touch tracking it works amazing and i recommend leaving it there the movie button i i'm just going to leave that at default now audio signals you can turn those off so you don't hear the camera beeping all the time when you focus you hear that beep you can turn that off there if you turn the audio signals off and now if we move over we're going to go into the network settings and send to smartphone function this is where you would send pictures or video to your smartphone you can just click that and i have i have several videos actually dedicated to using the imaging edge mobile app which unfortunately is kind of finicky but it does work for me pretty darn good most of the time i use it for my samsung here it's a s8 it's an older phone but it works pretty good for me pretty much all the time control with smartphones so you can actually control the camera with the imaging edge app using this feature here if you click that it'll basically put the camera in a mode where the imaging edge app will then be able to communicate with the camera and you can control the camera to a limited degree via the smart device like a cell phone for example which is a really cool feature and then of course airplane mode you got wi-fi settings in here location info link so you can actually use the gps on your phone to add the gps information to a photo if you like that's what that feature does there and you got bluetooth settings and then you can edit your device name and stuff if you want to change that now playback you got a bunch of different settings in here you can protect images you can rate your images stuff like that beautify effect now this is a cool feature the beautify effect will allow you to go in and and edit an image that has a face so it's not going to work because i don't have a sample image with a face right now but basically if you had a picture of a portrait of somebody's face you can go in here and click the beautify effect and you could then you know make the eyes pop smooth the skin there's a bunch of different features you can do and that's pretty fun if you're editing if you want to edit your photos on the camera and then send the pictures to your smart device or whatever and share it to social media this is great for people that don't want to use a computer or a tablet for editing and stuff like that now motion interval is for motion video and i'm gonna have to do another tutorial on that feature because it's a little bit complicated but that's where you would adjust that now continuous playback for interval interval shooting that will basically if you took a time-lapse interval shooting session you would have maybe a hundred pictures or something like that you would click here and it would then play that time lapse back for you and give you a preview of what the video looks like and then you can change the speed of the playback here depending on what you had the time lapse interval set to so you can control that option there really powerful now here you can set the camera up for a slideshow so you can use the hdmi port on the side of the camera and if you plug a cable into the hdmi port a micro hdmi you could then plug the other end into your tv for example and then you can play a slideshow on your television for your family like to you know show off vacation photos or something or video and that's where you would enable the slideshow and it works really good it's a lot of fun to use and rotation automatic that'll switch between portrait and landscape just leave that set to auto now in setup here there's a couple features i wanted to show you so monitor brightness now this is one of the most important features here because this camera has no electronic viewfinder so you have nothing but the screen to look at so if you go into monitor brightness and you just click the center button here on the dial you change it to sunny weather mode that will make your screen way brighter and it's so much easier to see outside in the sun when you have it set to sunny weather mode now of course it's going to eat up the battery faster when you have it set to this mode but if you're in sunny conditions and you can't see the screen very good you need to change it to sunny weather mode now in manual mode you can also change the brightness of the screen left and right like so so if you're in a really dark environment you could lower the brightness so your screen isn't so bright you know like a recital or something like that and in a like a theater environment you'd want to lower the brightness but that's where you would manipulate the monitor brightness volume settings that's the volume that your camera plays back at like there's a little speaker built into the camera you can change your volume there tile menu is the old menu style system that sony used to use it's a little bit more user friendly if you're very very new to cameras because it's more like picture oriented and it's a completely different menu system basically and that's where you would enable that if you want auto monitor off does not turn off yeah the monitor will automatically turn off after a certain period of time if you enable that and power save start time two minutes is a good place to have it the camera will automatically turn off after two minutes power off with monitor that's basically if you turn if you close the screen the camera will automatically turn off i recommend leaving it to power off like it is auto power off temperature you're going to want to change this feature it's set to standard you're going to want to change that to high make sure you put that on high and your camera will not shut off after five minutes if you have that set to standard the camera will only record for five minute clips in 4k and then it'll shut off to make sure it doesn't overheat but just set that to high and it won't do that you'll be good to go now ntsc versus pal that's where you change that feature so depending on what your frame rates are in video mode i'm in north america so i use ntsc but if you're in a european country your camera is going to be set to pal by default so your frame rates might be 25 frames per second for example 100 frames per second instead of 120 frames which is what my camera has you would this is where you could change that option if you're somebody that does not like to touch operation and you keep touching the screen by accident or something and it's driving you crazy you can turn the touch operation off right there i recommend leaving it on though now this is time code stuff where you could basically sync cameras together and using time code and stuff like that um that's where those settings are hdmi settings you might need to change these if you are hooking the camera up to a tv you can manipulate your hdmi settings in here default usually works though for me but depending on what kind of monitor you're hooking up to you might need to change those settings and that's where they are usb power supply it's on by default so you can have a power pack basically plugged into your usb port or you can just have your charger cable plugged in and you could use the camera like while it's charging and the camera will work off that power supply which is a very very nice feature and it'll give you much more battery life if you're doing extended recording because the battery life isn't very good on this camera make sure you get a couple extra batteries now in here is where you have your language settings and stuff date and time area format this is where you can format your memory card you can change your folder that the files go to and stuff like that file settings you can change the name of the files in here and stuff like that version if you click on version that'll tell you the current firmware version of your camera so right now i'm at version 1.0 and firmware comes out from time to time and you can update that i have a tutorial on how to update the firmware on sony cameras it's pretty straightforward and you want to make sure you do that so you get the latest and greatest features and stuff and then setting reset this is where you can set the camera back to factory default now here is the my menu setting and this is a really awesome feature that's relatively new to the sony cameras and what you do is you can add items in here that you like to use most so for example what i like to do is i like to have file format in there and i'm just going to add it to that location and all i'm doing is using this wheel to navigate and i'm pressing the center button to apply so if i hit menu now to go back and notice now how i have file format set there in my menu you see that it's in the first position and there's two pages my menu one of two so if i go to the right now i'm in page two of two and i can add an item you can sort them you can delete them you can delete a whole page a really really powerful feature so i'm going to click this center button again to add another item and i'm going to scroll left this time because i want to add format because i like to format the memory card a lot so i'm going to add format in there file format i'm going to edit right there so it's going to show up below file format and now i'm going to go to the right and i'm going to add a couple more options here these are settings that i like to use most so i want to have file format for the video i'm going to add that and then i'm going to have record setting as well i'm going to add that and now i'm going to hit menu i'm going to go back to page 1 in the my menu area and now you can see i have these settings in here these are the settings that i used most i change from jpeg to raw quite a bit depending on what feature i'm using and then i format the memory card a lot and then i also change video modes a lot um in between you know 120 p i use for slow motion a lot of times and then 4k so this is what i like to have my menu set to at bare minimum i usually end up adding more stuff but that's where i usually keep it at default and that is pretty much it for the menu system and that is pretty much the basics on how to use this camera so i really hope you got something out of this video if you guys have questions be sure to ask below in the comments area because i still have to do the full review for the this sony zv1 so if you do have a question be sure to let me know and i'll try to address it in my full review that's coming up but as it stands now this video is like an hour long and i pretty much went over everything i think you need to know but like i said if i did miss something i apologize please just let me know and uh you know i will cover it in the full review or i'll make another tutorial video on that particular subject so do me a favor guys please be sure to hit that subscribe button hit that notification bell and please give me a thumbs up if this video helped you out and links are below in the description area for recommended accessories for the sony zv one including this cool shooting grip which i highly recommend this thing works awesome you can zoom with it you can take photos with it and video with it and you also have access to the custom button and it works as a little tripod and everything really really awesome accessory i highly recommend but in any event i will catch up with you guys next time and please have a great day alright take care

Channel: Jason Hermann - SonyAlphaLab

Views: 563,257

Keywords: Sony ZV-1, Sony zv1, sony zv1 beginners guide, how-to use camera, sony zv 1, sony zv-1 unboxing, sony zv 1 setup, sony zv 1 video settings, sony zv1 accessories, sony zv1 camera, sony zv1 camera setup, camera gear for beginners

Id: HKi4cROY4gI

Length: 66min 28sec (3988 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020