The Nikon D7200 shoots HD video and does it well. There are a lot of settings specific to video, so lets look at shooting video using a Nikon D7200.
Get the Nikon D7200 Body Only on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2iQSFUP
Get the Nikon D7200 Kit on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2iMFqSN
Video Transcription:
Welcome to Ditch Auto. My name’s Jerad and today I’m going to show you how to shoot video with the Nikon D7200.
Now the Nikon D7200 is a great camera. I was really surprised at the price and the quality of this camera. It is fantastic. If you have this camera for any length of time, you probably know how good of a camera it is and value for the dollar.
So, shooting video is not really new, but it is to a lot of people who are now have been shooting with DSLR’s for a while and want to move into that video field or start shooting video clips, because these cameras shoot fantastic video, full HD and have a lot of options.
Now your Nikon D7200 makes it very easy for you to shoot video. So let’s go ahead and take a look at some of those options. I’m going to power up the camera, and when you go into the menu, we’re going to toggle over to the movie shooting menu, which I really like. I love the fact that Nikon has its own movie shooting menu instead of intertwining settings in with other menus.
So here we have some different options. We can change the file name. We can change, which of the two cards that you’re using, for example, the D7200 accepts two SD cards in the side. You can have photos go to one SD card and video go to another SD card. That is genius. So let’s just leave it as default.
We have our frame size and frame rate here. Based on the card that we have in this camera, it states that it is fast enough for us to shoot up to 1920 by 1080 at 30p. These other frame rates are probably going to require either the setting to be changed in the camera, or the SD card, and I believe it to be the SD card because the SD card I have in here is not the most fantastic of SD cards.
We can also choose movie quality from normal to high. We can set our microphone sensitivity, so as you can see here we’re getting a live view of what the microphone is pulling in of my voice. So I may want to go and actually increase the level of the microphone here, and then of course we can go in, and we could even leave it on auto sensitivity, which would make it easy for the camera to just automatically adjust on the fly.
We have frequency response and wind noise reduction, which we’re not really going to get into. We have image area, DX or 1.3. Basically what that means is how is the sensor being utilized for video capture. If we leave it at DX, I believe it’s using the full sensor and if we go down to 1.3 it’s actually using a smaller portion of the sensor to create video from.
So for example, if we go ahead and do that we now actually now see all of the frame rates available. So perhaps my card was just fine in the first place, but now with that crop using that crop portion of the sensor, we’re able to go all the way up to 1920 by 1080 at 60 frames per second.
So let’s really briefly talk about frame size. If you’re wanting to shoot and use your footage to make slow motion or to slow speed your footage, then I would recommend shooting at the 60p. If you’re not going to be doing anything slow motion, or you don’t have any fast moving objects in your footage, you could definitely go down to something like 30 frames or even 24 frames a second.
The kind of industry standard for film or cinema, is 24 frames per second. So you’re going to get that more fluidly feel from 24 frames per second than if you’re shooting up at 60 frames per second. It just really depends. Alternatively, you can always use your video editor to down sample your footage from 60 frames to 24. Some people will say it’s better to just let the camera do that though.
You can also go down to smaller frame sizes such as these two options that are 1280 by 720. That’s the lower standard of HD. I recommend staying up in the 1920 by 1080 for sure. So I’m just going to go ahead and choose the highest setting here.
Let’s continue to go down further on our settings. We have white balance, and you can actually set your white balance for video, so that way you’re not effecting the white balance that you may have had set up for photos. So we can either leave it at auto or we can go and choose from one of the white balancing option that are available to us.
Your picture control allows you to choose whether that picture is being modified from what the camera does by standard. Right now it is set at SD, which is standard, but we can go with neutral, vivid, monochrome, which is black and white, portrait, landscape, or flat. And a lot of times people will want to shoot flat because flat will give you more room to adjust your video in post production. This is more of an advanced feature. It’s probably not something that you’ll need to mess around with at first, but later on when you want to color correct, and you want to change the feel of your footage to give it a certain look in a video editor, like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premier, you will definitely want to probably look at shooting flat footage as opposed to standard.
High ISO noise reduction, now in low light situations where you have to increase your ISO, and that may happen if you’re shooting in automatic mode, it may happen if you’re shooting in manual mode and you increase your ISO, the camera can do a little bit of built in noise reduction. So depending on how that works for you and your current situation, you can turn that off, low, medium or high or normal and high, depending on how you want that to work.
Movie ISO sensitivity settings, it also allows you to set a maximum ISO so that if you have your ISO set to auto on you camera, that it doesn’t go too high thus giving you a really grainy footage, which that will happen if you let the ISO go extremely high. It’s nice that it has this movie specific feature here to keep that from getting kind of out of control.
You also have the ability to do time-lapse photography right here from within the camera, and you can set that up. That’s something for another video, but it’s definitely a cool feature.
So now that we’ve looked at the menu options here, now all there is left to do is actually shoot video. Keep in mind that you have a microphone jack here for an external microphone, instead of using the built in stereo mic. If you wanted better audio you could go with a, something like a road mic. I’ll put a link in the description, so you can check that out. And then you also have a headphone jack here as well, so that you can monitor your audio levels using headphones, which is going to be better than looking at that meter that we were looking at a minute ago.
So with your camera powered on, what you need to do now is toggle your switch to video mode. From there, you will need to tap the live view button to turn on the screen on the back of the camera. Now, DSLR cameras like this, you have to use the screen on the back because you heard that click just a second ago when I hit live view, basically what that’s doing is it’s flipping the mirror inside the camera and now we can’t use the viewfinder at all. We are locked to using just the screen on the back, and that is a DSLR wide thing. It’s not just Nikon here.
So now we would want to adjust our video settings if you’re in manual mode, if you’re not in manual mode you can switch your camera over to auto mode and your camera would come up with settings on its own. So now you can see just in here I’ve got my shutter speed is actually pretty high, my F stop and my ISO settings, because I’m in auto my camera is adjusting settings on the fly. If we go into manual mode, for example, I have full control over my settings and I can make my settings go where I want them to go, which I believe to be the best option, however it does take a bit of practice.
So if you’re interested in learning more about shooting in manual, I would start by learning to shoot photos in manual and you can do that with our free Ditch Auto course where we teach you how to ditch using auto and unlock the true potential of your camera. Make sure to check out that course, it’s free.
So you’re obviously going to get a lot more options shooting video here in manual mode, but as you learn feel free to use auto mode because auto mode is going to work really good. It’s just going to, it’s going to be a lot of setting changes and it’s going to be a little bit more challenging to control the consistency of your image over time.
Now that you understand how to get your camera ready to go, the only thing left is to hit the record button, which is right here conveniently placed right behind your shutter. Hit the record button, and it’s going to start recording a video. You don’t even have to do anything else, and then when you’re done you simply hit the button again and it’s going to save a file to your SD card.
Now, that MP4 file that we chose the quality and everything from, is going to be available on your card and you can take that file and upload it directly to YouTube or Facebook or something like that, or you can drag it into a video editor like Final Cut ProX or Adobe Premier Pro, iMovie, any of those video editors is going to be able to edit the video directly off of your Nikon D7200.
So that’s going to do it for looking at all of the video features and how to shoot video with a Nikon, obviously there’s a lot more to it than that than just getting the camera ready to hit record, getting good quality video, there’s a lot more to that. So make sure to subscribe to our channel here on Ditch Auto, where we talk about getting the best photos and the best video you can out of your cameras.
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Thanks again and we’ll see you next time on Ditch Auto.
