Transcription
If you are a photographer and you own a Canon R6 and you're interested in dabbling in video but you don't really know where to start, then you are in the right place. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to set up your R6, all the settings you need to change to shoot really high-quality video, and give you some pointers, some tips, and tricks along the way.
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Hey there, my name is Tyler Harrington. Welcome back to the Caitlyn James YouTube channel. This is a place we love to empower photographers to build profitable and professional businesses while also giving you a little sneak peek into Caitlyn's everyday life. If you don't know who I am, my name is Tyler Harrington. I am the editor, filmmaker, whatever you want to call it, behind this YouTube channel. And every once in a while, I'll jump on in here and make a couple episodes about things that are more in my wheelhouse. And today, we're talking about video, which is definitely in my wheelhouse.
If you've been following this channel for any length of time, you know that we have made a lot of videos about the R6 and our lenses and things like that. And one question we have gotten a handful of times over the past however many months has been people requesting, um, for me to make a video about how to set up the camera for shooting video. So that's what we're gonna do today. So basically, what we're gonna do is I'm gonna just, we're gonna jump into the camera. We're going to dive into the menus. I'm going to show you exactly what you need to change if you wanted to be shooting video, whether that be for your own YouTube content, maybe some courses you want to film, maybe you just want to film a little welcome video for your website, or you just want to film your family. Whatever it may be, I'm just going to show you the settings you need to adjust in your R6 to get it primed for shooting video and explain a couple little nuancing things that you may not be as familiar with as a photographer jumping into the video world. So we're just gonna jump right into it. I'm just gonna start going through the menus of the camera and it's gonna be fun.
Okay, so now the first thing we need to do, might seem obvious, but it's not, is we need to change our mode dial on the top to the video setting. Now, you need to, you need to do this first because if you don't change it to video mode, you won't get the video options in your menus and it's going to look totally different. So, um, we don't want that. All right, so first things first, we're going to go right into the menu and we're going to start from the very beginning.
Okay, so for shooting mode, you want to choose manual. So we have complete control over our, you know, things like shutter speed and aperture and ISO and all those stuff. We want control over that. So we're going to set it to manual. Then we are going to go into movie record size. Now, this, um, when you go in here, it kind of looks kind of confusing, but I'm going to break it down for you really easily. Basically, you have two things you need to decide. You need to choose your frame size, which is either going to be 4K or FHD. Basically, the difference between these is that FHD, the size of the actual file is 1920 by 1080 pixels for Full HD versus 4K, which is 3840 pixels by 2160 pixels. Um, you probably don't need to shoot 4K and if you do, you probably already know about it. So I would always suggest just shooting in 1080p. It's gonna look really good. It's literally a fourth the size of 4K and unless you know you need 4K, I wouldn't shoot in 4K, especially if you're first getting started. So, um, then the next thing you need to choose is going to be your frame rate. So basically, you have either 24 frames per second, 60 frames per second, or 30 frames per second. So with 24 and 30 frames per second, those are going to be for anything you're going to keep in, you know, standard speed, you're not planning on slowing it down at all. Um, 24 is a little more cinematic. I tend to shoot in 24. It's personal preference, but those two, you can kind of choose either one. If you do want to do some cool slow motion where you're slowing things down and doing things like that, that's when you're going to choose 60 frames per second. So basically, you've got to choose 4K or 1080p, slow motion or no slow motion, and then go from there. So I'm going to set it to 24 frames per second in 1080p. Okay, and then we can leave high frame rate disabled.
Okay, from here, we're going to go down to sound recording. Now, if you plan on using the sound coming out of the camera, so if you have a microphone plugged in or anything like that, you're going to want to set it to manual. Basically, what happens is if you don't set it to manual and you leave it on auto, anytime there's any sort of a gap in speaking or silence or something like that, the camera says, "Oh no, it's too quiet. We need to boost the levels up." And then it gets, it starts to turn, it's basically turning your ISO up and you start getting tons of noise and hiss and all sorts of stuff in your microphone, even if you have a really nice microphone. So if you plan on using the audio for anything at all, I would do manual. And we can, I'll show you how you can monitor this from your quick select menu. But basically, you want to switch it to manual. You have to do that here. And then we can adjust the levels later, but you want to come in here, change sound recording to manual.
Okay, then we're going to come over to the third menu here. We're going to be shooting in Kelvin white balance, but again, we'll adjust that in our quick settings later. And what you do want to adjust is your picture style. So unlike in photography, when you're shooting in video, you're essentially shooting as a medium-sized JPEG. You don't have the ability of RAW to change things after the fact. And you, the image coming out of the camera is somewhat baked in. You have a little bit of flexibility, but not a ton. So basically, what we want to do is we want to give ourselves a little bit more of a flat look with less baked in in-camera, so we can add those things back in in post, because you can't really take them out, but you can always add them back in. So what I suggest you do is come down here to neutral, and then you click info right here to set your details. And then what I would suggest doing is taking your contrast down to negative two and your saturation down to negative one. Again, this will give you just a little bit flatter of an image with less contrast and less saturation baked in, so you can add those back in later, um, if you know you so choose. Okay, so then from then on, you can see that it's now, it's saved our settings. We're going to use neutral going forward.
Canon Log is another way of shooting flat. That's shooting very, very flat. Again, it takes a lot of color grading knowledge and programs, things like that, to do that. So I wouldn't mess with that unless you know, um, that is something that you want to do.
From here, we are going to come over to image stabilizer under the seventh menu here. And we want to make sure that our movie, like the one right here with the video icon, is set to on. Okay, so basically, what's going to do is it is using the sensor, it's going to be moving around, it's going to stabilize any handheld footage and help remove any shake from our footage.
Okay, this is kind of a pro tip. I'm gonna talk about it anyway. So under zebra settings right here, essentially what zebras are is their little lines that show up on your screen while you're filming that indicate to you the brightness level of that specific area. So what you can do here is you can see I have mine set to zero two and under zero two, I have it set to a hundred. So that's what this does is anytime that any area of the, of what you're filming hits a hundred, which basically means that you're blowing out your highlights, there will be little zebra stripes on the screen. And that can is a really good indicator to show you like, "Hey, you're losing detail here." And again, because you're not shooting in RAW, you have no way of recovering that in post. So when you shoot video, it's really important that you protect your highlights. So I would, I think it's personally a good idea to shoot with the zebras on and the zebras set to a hundred, so that way at least you know if you're peaking. And if you see that peaking on something important like a shirt or a face or anything like that, that your exposure is too bright and you need to bring it down. Okay, so that's kind of a pro tip, but again, I would suggest doing that.
Okay, um, overheat control. I would turn it off. Um, Canon had a lot of problems with the R6 when it first came out with overheating. They fixed that with some firmware updates. So make sure you're updating your firmware on your camera if you do have an R6 and you plan to shoot video, but you can turn it off so it's a little bit less aggressive.
Okay, so for the autofocus stuff, again, we can change a lot of these that we need in the quick settings menu, but the one thing you do need to make sure this is set to, oops, is, um, sorry, here we go. Subject to detect. You want it to be set to either no priority or people. Probably you don't want it set to animals unless you're shooting a lot of animals. You want to make sure that movie servo AF is on. That basically means you have continuous autofocus. It won't be locked off. It will move as you move. Um, and then we'll change our AF method. We're going to change that in the quick select.
Okay, so from there, we, some of this stuff you can play around with in terms of how fast your autofocus moves and stuff like that. I've found that the out-of-the-box settings are usually pretty good for what most people are going to do with it, but again, that is kind of up to you, personal preference. It's going to be all the way over here under the screen viewfinder display. You want to make sure this is either set to screen only or for this one, you can do auto one. The reason you don't want it to be switching is because if you're pressing buttons or you're holding the camera close to your body or anything like that, and you're looking at the screen while you're recording video, and you get too close to this proximity sensor here, you see this? It'll turn off your screen. And obviously, if you're filming and you're using the screen to film and this gets turned off, it's not, not good. So I would set it to auto one, and then that way, um, or I would just actually set it to screen, and then that way this won't, that won't happen to you anymore because that's annoying.
Um, for screen brightness, I would make sure you have this set to manual. And if you're filming outside, especially, you're going to need to see the screen more than you would for photos. So I would either set it to six or seven, depending on how bright the situation is. Six is kind of a safe place, a safe bet. Um, and what's most important is you wanna just make sure that it's kind of consistent. It's not changing all the time because you are using the screen to judge exposure for video. You wanna make sure that it's consistent, it's not changing in different scenarios. And then for a screen and viewfinder color tone, I would make sure you have just that to standard number two here. Again, you're gonna be, you're gonna be judging your white balance and lots of things with the screen with no real ability to change it after the fact. So you want to make sure that it's as accurate as possible.
Okay, so those are the main things we need to change in the actual menus themselves. So what we're going to do now is we're going to back out of the menu. We're going to come to our home. And what's really nice about the Canon cameras are set up is if you hit the little Q up here, you pull up your quick select menu. And the nice thing here is that you can actually change a lot of the most important settings that you're going to need on, like, really quickly while you're shooting, right here from this quick select menu. So as you can see, as we kind of scroll around here, you have, um, a lot of the same things we just talked about. You have the ability to adjust them right here without having to dive into the menus.
So the one thing we do need to talk about here is our autofocus method. So you can see here that we have a bunch of different autofocus zones. The two that I suggest you're using are gonna be the face tracking. If you know there's gonna be faces, this is really good for anything where you're filming yourself talking for maybe a course or a YouTube video, or you're gonna have mostly just people in the, in the shot. Um, then you can use the face tracking. Um, if not, then I suggest using this large zone AF. And then the nice thing is you can kind of just put it anywhere you want in the frame and it'll focus wherever this is. So there's lots of different kind of techniques and how you can do this, but this is kind of the easiest way if you're not used to manually focusing. This big, this is big enough that, um, it's, you have to be super precise with it, but it's not so big that it's difficult to control what you're actually trying to get in focus. So these are, this is one that I suggest using if, uh, if you're not using face track.
Okay, here again, you can switch movie recording size if you need to. Here's where you can adjust your audio levels on the fly. Again, you want to make sure when you're, if you're recording some audio, that when you're, um, when you're speaking, that it is peaking around negative 12. You don't want it to be too hot because again, it starts clipping. You have no way of recovering that. So in this situation, I would probably bring it up to about here. Again, this is with no mic or anything on it, so this would be a pretty good level right here. You can see it's just barely peaking above negative 12, if and when I get really loud, but that's a pretty good audio level right there. Okay, so you can adjust those there. If you're listening with headphones, you can adjust the headphone volume here. Here, you actually can adjust your movie IS, if you want to turn it off or make it even more stronger. White balance. Again, I would always suggest using Kelvin white balance because as you're filming, if you have it set to auto, if you're, you know, what you're filming changes in the frame, the auto, the white balance is also going to be changing. And it's really tricky to color correct in post a clip where the white balance is changing from the beginning of clip to the end of clip. It's just really difficult. So always use custom Kelvin. Um, on this camera, they have the back dial here set to Kelvin. So it's a good idea to have this, or maybe even the ring on your lens set to Kelvin, because you really need to have that dialed in. That's one of the most important things, um, that you can have dialed in. And then of course, down here, you have your standard things where you have your ISO, which again, I would set manually. Um, you also can control your aperture and your shutter, just like normal.
Alright, there you have it. Hopefully, now your R6 is perfectly set up for shooting video. And when you do go to create video content for the first time, you feel really confident knowing that your camera is set up in the perfect way to capture some really high-quality video. If you like this video and want to see more just like it, except for with Caitlyn and not with me, subscribe to this channel. We do lots and lots of content around the R6 and RF lenses and all those different things as that continues to kind of grow and evolve. So definitely subscribe if you're interested in that, or if you're just looking for more behind the scenes photography content. Um, if you're a wedding photographer, all this good stuff, we have lots of content coming your way. So thank you guys so much for watching. We'll be back with Caitlyn next week, like normal. And, uh, yeah, she's, uh, she's not here to prompt me to say goodbye, so I'll just hate myself.
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Bye.
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