Master Camera Settings using FiLMiC Pro (or other app) | Cinematic Video Tutorial

this is the sci-fi tv series we shot using smartphones the show called silent eye has had over a million views on amazon prime being recommended to viewers alongside shows made on huge budgets part of our success was using settings via the camera app known as filmic pro to create what is known as the film look so how did we do it my name is simon horox and i've been an indie filmmaker for about 25 years i've shot films on 16 millimeter film cameras and on digital cinema cameras but for the last three and a half years i've shot everything on a smartphone in many ways using a smartphone camera is like using any camera there are some key differences if you watch this video you'll be able to use your smartphone camera with more confidence you'll learn how to get exposure right and you'll learn how and when to use a manual control app instead of auto mode i'll be going over the six main elements that control your camera whatever type of video you're shooting whatever model smartphone you have getting these elements right will make the difference between amateur and professional footage these six elements are frame rate shutter speed iso aperture white balance and focus remember these six elements work together to create the look of your video imagine there's six players on a soccer team if they work together they're more likely to win but if each one does its own thing it'll end up a hopeless mess so today you'll learn how to combine all these elements for correct exposure correct focus and correct colors in your video a lot of advice out there is that you must always use manual control but that's not always true when it comes to smartphone cameras there are some situations where using auto or simply locking exposure and focus is the best option so keep watching and i'm going to talk about all those situations as i go through the camera settings on your smartphone the absolute first thing you must consider is to use an app which will give you manual control on your smartphone camera if you have a samsung or other android camera you'll probably have manual control already for photos it's simply called pro mode and for video it's called pro video mode so if you have an iphone there's no way to control things like iso shutter speed white balance and focus so you will need to download a third-party app to do that one of the best is called filmic pro i've actually made several filmic pro tutorials for this channel make sure to check those out if you're going to use this app now why can't we just shoot video with our camera in auto when your camera is set to auto it will adjust exposure and white balance and focus live even as you're recording and i just want to be clear about this this is not something a professional cinematographer would ever do filming a movie for netflix or something but why not i mean having a camera adjust to get the perfect exposure and focus for every frame sounds kind of like a good thing doesn't it well it's certainly convenient so why don't professionals just use auto mode well the short answer is it looks a bit messy as the camera moves or objects move within the frame the camera records these auto adjustments taking place and this makes the audience more aware of the camera which can be distracting that said there is an exception and that exception is to do with how smartphone cameras are different to other cameras let's not go there just yet because you need to know these basics of manual control first stay tuned for that later though in this video you've done really well to get this far but now let's talk about a specific setting and this is a really important element and it's called frame rate put simply a video's frame rate tells you how many frames there are in one second of video so if you set your camera to 30 frames per second that means each second of video contains 30 still frames which are basically photos playing one after the next and these photos are flashed before our eyes one after the other to create the illusion of movement at 24 frames per second or higher this is fast enough that your brain stops seeing still photos and sees smooth realistic looking movement now frame rate is important for two main reasons one different frame rates change the look of your video and two there's actually two frame rates to consider the first is the frame rate you record the video at and the second is the frame rate you play the video back at the simplest way to get video that has a similar look to movies is to shoot and play back at 24 frames per second that's what we're all used to because we're used to seeing movies that way lower frame rates below 24 frames a second start to look choppy while faster frame rates tend to look a bit more like a video game it's actually impossible for me to show you in this video what different playback frame rates look like that's because while we can shoot at different frame rates and we can edit those different frame rates together when we master a video it can only be at one unified frame rate so every video or movie you watch will be playing to you at a set frame rate throughout the movie and as a filmmaker this is so important you should really know what frame rate you intend to master your video before you start filming what you want to avoid is to shoot some video at 25 frames per second and some at 24 frames per second and then try to edit them together because if you take a 25 frames per second clip and play it back at 24 frames per second it will probably look jerky but if you play it back at 25 frames per second it should look very smooth okay so what if we want slow motion well put simply most slow motion is achieved by recording at a fast frame rate and then playing back that video at a slower frame rate if you take a 24 frames per second video and slow it to 50 speed it will now be playing back at 12 frames per second and at this speed our brain stops seeing it as smooth motion we start to see the individual still images as still photos and it doesn't look nearly as smooth some smartphones can record at eye-wateringly fast frame rates the huawei p40 pro for example can shoot at a ridiculous bullet stopping 7680 frames per second and that said 60 or 220 frames per second is usually good for cinematic b-roll slow motion so to get slow motion from a video which you've recorded at 60 frames per second place it on a 24 frames per second timeline and then slow it to 40 percent if it's 120 frames per second then slow it to 20 okay so that's the basics of how frame rates work but in smartphones they do actually work a little bit differently something to bear in mind regarding frame rates when it comes to shooting video using a smartphone most smartphones shoot in a codec which uses what's known as variable frame rate this is done to save file space and make it easier to stream video online this used to be a problem when it came to editing as variable frame rate would use much more processing power and some editing platforms struggled to play it these days things have improved however there can be issues when you push your smartphone's processor to its limit there are things that demand lots of processing power like high resolutions high frame rates high bitrates and shooting in log and so on if you start loading all these things onto your phone's processor at the same time you might find video starts to come out at weird frame rates so you might think you're shooting at 60 frames per second but when you bring it into an editing program it says 48 frames per second or some weird number like 44.657 or something like that now when you try to play it back at 60 frames per second it looks really jerky because the frames are not even so to sum up frame rates 24 frames a second for the film look then 60 frames per second or 120 frames per second slowed to 24 frames per second for nice smooth slow motion you've already learned a lot about your smartphone camera but you need to understand how frame rates work with shutter speeds if you really want to master this that's coming up right now as we move on to exposure in a normal digital camera exposure is a combination of three core settings iso shutter speed and aperture these three settings operate together to correctly expose each frame of your video but and here's the catch like frame rate they also change the look of the video in other ways now first understand that there's no right or wrong shutter setting or iso setting or aperture setting it's more about which combination works best and gives you the look you want because you might want your subject to be in silhouette or you might want them well lit that's down to your creative vision and by learning how to use these exposure controls it enables you to get the results that you want exposure is a bit like a kind of magic potion made of three ingredients and the first ingredient in the pot is iso iso is a measure of your camera's sensitivity to light the higher it is the brighter your image so you can think of the iso control a bit like the volume control on a music player so increasing iso amplifies the light signal from our camera sensor making the image brighter with a smartphone you'll need to go into that third-party app or pro mode if you have it but i'm going to use filmic pro because it's a good app for both iphone and android on my iphone 12 pro max the iso goes from 34 all the way up to 3264 and using an iso you can get perfect disposal in just about any situation even if there's very little light but there is a downside and that downside comes in the form of digital noise the higher the iso the more digital noise you will see in the image and digital noise looks like kind of messy pixels moving around randomly kind of like a bunch of drunk ants having a night party on the beach while the frame might look nice and bright these drunken ants are distracting and pretty ugly most of the time and this is where smartphones are at a disadvantage to regular cameras with their bigger sensors the small sensors in our smartphones are not quite as good at collecting light this means that digital noise especially in video is a bit more of a challenge and the general rule with iso is to try to keep it as low as possible if you can have it set to the bottom value you will also find that different smartphones produce different amounts of noise and usually a smartphone with a bigger sensor will produce less noise wow we've already covered frame rates and iso remember i said frame rates and shutter speed work closely together so it's really important to understand how and it's coming up right now if you have any experience using a camera you will probably know what shutter speed is a shutter in a normal camera is basically a door behind the lens tokens and closes to let in light so you might have heard about photographers sort of around the 19th century actually physically removing the lens cap from the camera and then replacing it so that was like the first ever camera shutter and this basic process is still relevant to what's going on in our smartphone cameras today so later they developed mechanical shutters that opened and closed when you press the shutter button but in movie cameras the shutter is actually a rotating disc and that's where this shutter speed to frame rate guideline comes from you may have heard people talk about the 180 degree rule named that way because the rotating shutter in movie cameras ones that shoot film is set to 180 degrees thing is smartphones don't have a physical shutter opening and closing instead like most other digital cameras the sensor simply switches on and off just like switching a light on and off and the length of time the sensor is switched on is equal to the shutter speed now you will usually see shutter speed measured in fractions of a second you will usually see a fraction like 1 48th or 1 60th and if you set it to 1 48th this means the shutter is open or 1 48 of a second for each frame of the video and if you're shooting at 24 frames per second a 1 over 48 shutter speed means it will be open for half the time and closed for half the time so closed for 1 48 of a second and open for 148 per second then closed and open and so on you get the idea and this is the thing 180 degrees is half of a full 360 degree circle so see how the math is all adding up are you connecting the dots here think about how these camera settings are combining already we're talking about shutter speed in relation to frame rates and when we set shutter speed we usually derive the setting from the frame rate remember video is made up of photos shooting at 24 frames per second means we're taking 24 photos per second when cameras were first invented the photographic plates used were very slow to react to light to get a correct exposure the photographer would have to remove the lens cap for several seconds for each photo and everyone in the photo had to sit very still because any movement would end up as blur in the photo but in video it's a different story in most cases we actually want some blur remember that video is 24 or 30 photos per second flashing at our eyes creating an illusion of movement and if we have blur in those 24 photos that illusion of movement is even smoother put simply more blur equals more smoothness so the speed of the shutter changes the look of your video in two ways one brightness and two motion blur when they were working out how to design a film camera about 100 years ago they came to the compromise of 24 frames per second combined with a 180 degree shutter at 24 frames a second a 180 degree shutter gives you a shutter speed of 1 48 of a second so for that reason the 24 frames per second frame rate and the 1 48th of a second shutter speed is considered the perfect combination now having tried various shutter speeds and frame rates they found that 24 frames per second with a 1 over 48 shutter speed was the smoothest the most natural looking they could achieve and we pretty much stuck with that ever since putting it simply a 1 48 shutter speed with a 24 frames per second frame rate will give you a nice motion blur however it's not a case of anything but 1 48 shutter speed is wrong if you increase your shutter speed to 1 60th of a second for example you will still get a good amount of motion blur so i'll show you two videos and one is one over 48th shutter and the other is one over 72 shutter so see if you can tell which is which if you keep pushing the shutter speed higher eventually there will be pretty much no visible motion blur and when you play those 24 photos one after the other you get a much harsher looking video anything moving just looks very crisp most of the time this is undesirable but there are times when we might want a fast shutter speed look so for example in the movie saving private ryan they use the fast shutter speed deliberately to create more dramatic battle scenes so you might use it in a fight scene or maybe if you're filming action sports alternatively you can use slow frame rates and very slow shutter speeds as an effect whereas fast shutter speeds make your video very crisp and present slow shutter speeds make your video more dreamy and surreal so good for a dream sequence maybe or for depicting someone who has just been drunk perps and that's why i really want to stress this aspect of cinematography how you set up your camera is a creative choice informed by your knowledge of camera settings and how your camera works so i don't want you holding your camera worrying if i don't get this right my videos will suck i want you to be thinking about the creative choices on what's right for your artistic vision okay so this is where we are so far iso controls brightness but it adds digital noise shutter speed controls brightness but it adds or removes motion blur and now to complete your understanding of the three core exposure elements we need to learn about aperture many years ago i was holding my fingers over my eyes like this and a work colleague came up to me and said what in heck are you doing that's how i told him i'd forgotten my glasses and doing this helped focus my eyes so of course he walked away laughing his head off thinking i was just messing about but in fact it's true this actually works so if you're near sighted like me try it make a tiny hole between your fingers and look through it or poke a hole in some paper with a pin and look through that it should bring things more into focus but things will also look darker so that's essentially what an aperture is in a lens it's a mechanical device which changes the size of the hole behind the lens if it's smaller more stuff is in focus but darker and if it's bigger less stuff is in focus but it's brighter and this is one element that creates the shallow depth of field which we use to make the background blurred out usually in professional photography or cinematography we try to separate the subject of the frame from the background this way again just like other settings there's no right or wrong amount of blurry background this is a creative decision more specifically it's about telling the audience what to look at so if you have a wide angle with everything in focus you're saying look at the view and if it's a close-up with the background blurred you're saying look at the subject so how do we adjust aperture on our smartphone cameras i'm sure some of you are already wondering this because the answer is we can't pretty much all smartphones have fixed aperture cameras samsung did briefly experiment with a dual aperture which i have on this s9 but they eventually decided to stop that experiment however not all smartphone cameras have the same aperture while each camera on this iphone 12 pro max has a fixed aperture they are also different sizes the ultra wide camera has an f 2.4 aperture while the main camera has a f 1.6 aperture and the telephoto has a f 2.2 aperture so what do these sizes mean again just to confuse us the higher the f number the smaller the aperture remember that for blurry backgrounds we want a bigger aperture taking my iphone 12 pro max as an example the main camera has a bigger aperture than the telephoto but here's the thing most professionals use a telephoto to get a shallow depth of field and that's why telephoto lenses on our smartphones are more useful for zooming in than getting a shallow depth of field but they do have a use in my last tutorial about shooting a product video i used the telephoto lens for one shot because i could get closer to the product than if i used the main camera so while we can't adjust aperture on our smartphones is certainly something we should bear in mind when choosing lenses for example we should also be aware this is a difference between smartphones and regular cameras which do have an adjustable aperture having a variable aperture means having three elements which can be adjusted to set exposure but in smartphones we only have two settings iso and shutter speed so if you've watched this bar you've already got a great grounding in setting exposure and now you understand how these settings work together to control the look of your image and now when you have a vision in your mind of what you want to achieve you'll be better equipped to get the look you want but you're not finished because you can't master your smartphone camera until you understand this essential part of what a digital camera does and that is controlling white balance what is white balance if the colors look off in your photo or video there's a very good chance the white balance is uh well unbalanced if white balance is correct then anything that is white in the frame should actually look white you can tell if white balance is off because white things have some kind of tint to them they might look slightly yellow or slightly blue for example if we go into the white balance controls in filmic pro we can see it is controlled by two parameters the first one is temperature which is measured in kelvins and that's why you see this k symbol here the second one is tint which is like a specific color overlay that adds a specific color to the entire frame while color temperature moves on a spectrum between orange and blue tint moves on a spectrum between green and magenta so if you leave your white balance on auto your camera will set white balance live adjusting frame by frame and like with auto exposure this can look messy distracting and basically unprofessional we can correct white balance and color grading software but this is almost impossible if the white balance changes during the shot even if it doesn't change the process of fixing white balance can make color grading our video more problematic so what should we do to make sure our white balance is correct there's actually a variety of options depending on how much effort and time you want to put into each shot to get the most accurate white balance we can use a grey card they're pretty cheap and easy to use once we have our gray card go to white balance controls fill the screen with the card and then lock white balance so in filmic pro white balance is locked by tapping this button until it goes red and now when you go back and get your shot white balance will be fixed in place and white should come out looking white another option is to use a piece of kitchen towel instead of the grey card which is almost as effective so how often do we need to set white balance basically every time the color of the lighting in the frame changes but practically speaking having a consistent correct white balance is important when you're editing shots together and you don't want the color to keep changing between shots for example if you're filming a dialogue scene in a movie or maybe a wedding video consistent color temperature between the shots will make your final video look much more professional now if you don't have the time to keep setting white balance the next best option is to make sure white balance doesn't change during the shot filmic pro has an option to lock on record white balance but when you set it to lock on record white balance will still adjust between the shots but once you hit record the white balance now locks so it will be consistent throughout the shot and having a consistent white balance in a shot means it looks more polished more professional and is much easier to fix with color grading software this can be done in various editing programs but i'm going to show you how to do it in adobe premiere pro in premiere pro there's an eyedropper tool which allows you to click on an area of the image you know should be white the part you clicked should now go white and the color balance is adjusted across the whole frame for the entire clip below this tool in adobe premiere we again have these two parameters temperature and tint just like we saw in filmic pro you've covered so much and you're well on your way to mastering your smartphone camera but you won't have mastered it completely until you understand focus i don't think i really need to explain what focus is but if you want your videos to look more professional then you need to use focus correctly so once again if we don't lock focus movement within the frame will cause the focus to keep adjusting and this can be really obvious and distracting also autofocus will quite often focus on the wrong thing have you ever filmed a subject and you think everything looks fine but when you came to edit you found the background is in focus and the subject is out of focus so these days smartphones are getting better at face detection and if face detection is on autofocus will look for human faces and prioritize them when it comes to focusing actually some samsung devices also have a focus tracking feature that locks focus on a certain object even if it moves out of frame and back again so you might find that useful if you have a samsung so in filmic pro we have a focus wheel which we can use to set unlock focus and actually this also allows you to create an automated focus pool there's also focus peaking which is an analytics tool to help us when setting focus so the first thing is to make sure the subject is in focus and the focus is locked if the subject doesn't move too much all good but if the distance between the camera and the subject changes during the shot they're probably going to go out of focus so in a professional movie setup there will actually be someone called a focus puller and that person's job is to maintain correct focus during the shot well as most of us don't have the luxury of a focus puller we're going to need other strategies for example we could leave focus on auto and hope that it adjusts correctly we can use features like focus object tracking or we can try to pull focus ourselves during the shot using software like filmic pro or samsung pro video and another thing is that we can also use a focus pool to tell the audience what to look at this is used in movies all the time going from one important object to another in one shot what you've learned so far is a huge step towards professional videography but no pro is going to shoot outside in daylight without one of these an nd filter so let me explain why they're so important if you don't have one already i really recommend that you get some kind of nd filter system for your smartphone nd filters are like sunglasses for your camera they reduce the light hitting the sensor so as we just learned when it comes to setting exposure smartphones have one element less than regular cameras that's because they have fixed aperture lenses but with an nd filter you get another option for controlling exposure and the main reason for using an nd filter is to reduce your shutter speed in bright conditions for that smooth cinematic motion blur thing is that buying nd filters can be a bit confusing i've wasted money buying the wrong ones until i understood that nd filters come in different strengths measured in stops again this word stop comes from traditional photography cameras but it is useful to know what a stop is because it actually relates to other settings as well one stop of exposure doubles or halves the amount of light hitting the sensor for example changing shutter speed from 1 60th of a second to 1 30th of a second is one stop because it doubles the light hitting the sensor going from 100 iso to 200 iso is also the equivalent to one stock or 200 iso to 400 iso so let's say you had your iso at 200 and you put a one stop nd filter over the lens the exposure would be stopped down as if you had adjusted iso to 100. so therefore a one-stop nd filter will allow you to reduce shutter speed by one stop for example from 196 to 148. so you can see that exposure is a kind of mathematical puzzle add one stop here take one stop there common strengths of nd filters are three stop six stop and ten stop and just to confuse us nd filters have an extra number to measure their strength so this is a set of three variable nd filters sent to me by sandmark and they simply clip over your smartphone lens now see here it says nd16pl now nd 16 equals four stops of light reduction the pl stands for polarizing which is another type of filter and it's one which reduces glare and this nd filter is an nd 32 which equals five stops of light reduction and the third one is nd 64 which equals six stops of light reduction now many videos will tell you that you absolutely must use manual control but shooting with a smartphone i do sometimes use auto mode so let's talk about when you might want to keep your camera in auto when you're shooting with smartphones using manual controls isn't always the best option that's because smartphone cameras have developed differently to normal cameras one of the biggest differences is a thing called dynamic tone mapping and this is particularly important to you if you're using an iphone however even samsung and other phone makers are now using dynamic tone mapping and their cameras as well and also many modern tv sets use dynamic tone mapping so if you're serious about shooting high quality video with your smartphone you need to understand what's going on with this dynamic tone mapping so dynamic tone mapping adjust the exposure differently for different areas of the image if there is a wide contrast in brightness levels so for example when you're filming a landscape in daylight the tone mapping function works to reduce the brightness of the sky meanwhile the area beneath the sky is at a different exposure setting so it kind of draws a line around all the dark areas and pulls down the iso for the brighter areas so what does dynamic tone mapping have to do with manual exposure well with iphones especially dynamic tone mapping overrides your manual control settings in certain situations like moving from light to dark areas even if you have exposure locked you will see darker areas getting lighter or light areas getting darker this is because dynamic tone mapping is working to even out the exposure across the image thing is mobile cameras with their small sensors have pretty low dynamic range compared to regular cameras this low dynamic range means that when you set exposure you will often have to choose between exposing the bright areas or the dark areas correctly the contrast between sky and land for example is too much for the sensor to cope with so you'll either have a blown out white sky or you will have a correctly exposed sky but the land below will be very dark or even black but by using dynamic tone mapping the sky and land will be exposed with different settings when you see people going wow the new iphone has incredible dynamic range better than my black magic it's because of this dynamic tone mapping so we can see the advantage of dynamic tone mapping but we can also see it comes with a downside so check out my other videos on this channel because they're all to do with smartphone filmmaking and thanks to all my patreons we've got another 10 this month so that's really fantastic we've got extra things there for you downloads uh behind the scenes material for the silent eye series so i'd love to see you on patreon and see you in the next video

Channel: Simon Horrocks

Views: 66,705

Keywords: smartphone videography, cinematic video, smartphone cinematic video, camera tutorial

Id: egW9kO9ZfyI

Length: 33min 6sec (1986 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021