When I get a camera, the first thing I do is change some of the default settings. I want to get the best the camera has to offer when I capture photos and video. Here are my top 7 settings I changed first on the Sony RX100 MK V.
Check out the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 V: http://amzn.to/2i6BTRF
Video Transcription:
Hey, what’s up? It’s Jerad with Ditch Auto, and today, we’re going to talk about the top seven settings that you should change on your Sony RX100 Mark V. Now, I had the previous version, the Mark IV, and to be honest, all of these settings are what I changed on my Mark IV and also on a lot of my other Sony cameras. The reason that I make these changes is because I want to get the most out of my camera. I want to make sure that the camera is also easier to use, the way that I’m used to using it. Are these settings going to be perfect for you? Who knows? It’s really trying them out and seeing if it improves your experience with the camera.
Now, before you get started, if it is a brand new camera, the first thing that I just want to make sure that you do is set your time and date on the camera. This is before I even get into these top seven tips. I want you to set the time and date on your camera because when you go and sync these photos over to your computer, so that you can edit them when you upload them to social media, when you upload them to some photo back-up service, it categorizes and organizes everything by date. If you have the date set incorrectly on your camera, it’s going to write that data to the photo. When you upload the photo, your photo’s going to be … You’re not going to be able to find it because it’s going to be whatever date the camera came stock set to, which is going to be whatever, a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, whatever it is. You want to make sure to set the time and date on your camera.
Let’s jump in and get started on the top seven settings that you must change on your Sony RX100 Mark IV.
All right, so we’re going to go ahead and set our bag aside here and take our camera and power it on. Now, you can power the entire camera on with this switch, or you can also power it on with the preview button here. Then, of course, you can go into menu. What you’re going to see as I toggle through the menu is all of these settings being available to look at. Now, if you are shooting on auto mode, which means your camera here is set to the auto, the little green auto icon, that means that your camera is in fully auto mode. Then, a lot of settings aren’t going to be accessible to you because what you’re telling your camera is that, “I want you to do it for me,” which is fine. I mean automatic mode is getting really good, but if you truly want to unlock the potential of your camera, and that means a camera such as a small point-and-shoot like this, all the way up to your nice big DSLR cameras. You’re going to want to shoot in manual mode.
Now, I have always been shooting in manual mode with my Sony RX100 Mark IV and now with a Mark V, and I feel that you just get better photos out of manual mode than you get out of automatic mode in almost all situations. It’s better to have it in manual mode. The first thing that I’m going to do is actually enable raw shooting.
Now, raw shooting means that you are … The type of file that’s being created is a raw file as opposed to a JPEG. By default, the camera is going to want to shoot JPEG photos. JPEG photos are compressed file images, and I’m sure most of you have heard JPEG and raw. The reason that you’d want to shoot raw is because the raw image is a much better image for post-production. It means that if you’re going to go edit your photo, you have a lot more data to work with when you’re shooting with a raw, when you’re editing with a raw file than if you are playing around with JPEGs. Now, I tend to go and shoot raw plus JPEG because it’s very common that I wirelessly connect my camera to my phone and share photos over social media. Now, I try to get my settings right in the camera and make the photo look as best as possible in the camera. If you’re able to do that, then saving out a JPEG and posting that is fine.
Now, these phones and the apps for these phones are starting to allow raw editing, but it’s still not a simple transfer process. If you want to be able to share your images from your camera to your phone, you’re going to need to shoot JPEG images as well. Then, if you choose JPEG plus raw like I do, then you still have that raw image that you can edit as well. We definitely want that raw image available to us, so I choose JPEG plus raw. In the future, when the phones can handle raw, and we’ve got bigger capacity phones and all that good stuff, we could definitely go with raw only. For now, JPEG plus raw for me so that I get that nice raw image, and then I get the JPEG image for quick sharing and sending over social media if that’s what I want to do.
The second thing I do is set my Auto Focus settings. Now, by default, your camera is going to be set to a wide focus point. It’s going to evaluate what’s all over the screen, and it’s going to try and determine what to put in focus when you press down that shutter button a little bit. Now, that’s fine. There are different ways of determining what is to be in focus but there’s also different ways that the camera decides how to focus. If you tap on the function button, the little FN button and then toggle over to your focus mode here, which your focus mode by default should be set to AFA. I wanted to just briefly talk about the difference between these methods. Now, AFS is great if you’re taking a portrait of somebody, and that’s it. One shot, portrait. What single shot means is that when you press down the shutter partway to focus, it’s going to lock focus on that. Then, you press down the shutter button again and focus stays locked until you completely let off and then press down the shutter partway again.
That’s going to be fine for taking one photo, hence the name, single shot AF. You’re taking one photo. You don’t need the camera to do any thinking or any focusing or refocusing. You just need it to focus that one time. Now, if you need something that’s a little bit more flexible, maybe you’re shooting somebody that’s moving or you’re moving, you’re locked down on a tripod, there’s a person or an object or something that can move, you definitely need AFA.
Now, automatic AF basically means that the camera is going to decide whether to lock onto a subject and hold that or to continue as focus. It’s a halfway medium point between single shot AF and continuous auto focus. The problem with going into continuous auto focus on these cameras is that if it’s in continuous auto focus all the time, even when the camera doesn’t need to be continually auto focusing, it does this searching through the focal range, and it becomes quite obnoxious. Then, while you’re trying to frame up your shot and make sure that your subject or whatever it is, is in focus, the focus range is going back and forth, just looking because it’s thinking, “Man, this guy or this gal put it in continuous focus. It must mean that there’s something to pay attention to,” whereas if you put it in automatic AF, the camera does the thinking.
I know I talk a lot about being in manual mode and being all manual, but when it comes to auto focus, these cameras are getting really good at auto focus, and I like to give the camera a little bit of the ability to auto focus for me. Automatic AF is a good option, and then just as another little bit of focus information for you, by default, it’s set to focus area wide. I briefly talked about that. That means that it’s using as much of the sensor as it cane for auto focus. I tend to choose flexible spot, and the flexible spot, as you can see on the screen here, allows me to move my focal point around, so if I tap on the center button and move my focal point around, I could tell the camera exactly where I want that focal point to be. That doesn’t allow the camera to make any mistakes.
If I’m taking a picture of a person, I would set that little box right on their eye, on the eye that’s closest to me. Then, I would press down the shutter button. It would focus on that spot. It wouldn’t accidentally get their ear. It wouldn’t accidentally get their shirt. It would get their eye because I told it to focus there. That is something that I found even with the good auto focus technology that’s out there, the camera still just doesn’t do a perfect job every time. I don’t want to miss the shot because most of the time, whether I’m taking pictures of my kids or I’m shooting a wedding or some corporate event or a keynote session, I don’t have time to reframe the shot. I might miss an opportunity, and that opportunity is gone forever. I have to make sure I take as much control of the camera as I can. I can still use auto focus, but I tell the camera exactly where I want that auto focus point to be.
The second thing I do is set my shooting style to neutral. Let’s go into our settings here, and we’re going to toggle across from the first pane, the camera pane here, and we’re going to toggle to creative style. Now, the camera has different creative styles that allows processing to be done to the image. One of the reasons that these cameras, the photos straight out of these cameras look so good is because standard creative style is applied to the photo. It adds a little contrast to it and just makes the photo look really good. In my opinion, I like that, but I like to be able to control that myself, and so what I do is I go and set my creative style to neutral, which is a flatter profile.
It means that it’s not applying anything in addition to the photo other than what it sees and what the sensor is capturing because I want to be able to take that image and put it in Lightroom, or if I’m taking it straight over to my phone, I might put it in Lightroom mobile or Snapseed or some other camera app, and I want to add that contrast in myself. I don’t want to be locked in to exactly what the camera thought was right at the time. I want to make sure that I get what I want out of the photo. If I already have contrast added to the photo, then I have less to work with and less room to pull in either direction when adjusting the contrast myself. I put creative style in neutral.
Now, what I’m going to do is remap this button over on the right hand side that is currently set to your flash. Now, shooting in manual mode, the camera isn’t going to fire flash automatically unless I pop it up like this. Popping it up like that, I think, is a good enough thing to tell the camera, “Look, I want flash.” I don’t need this button to be mapped to flash over here on the right hand side. What I do want it to be mapped to is ISO. A lot of the other cameras, the bigger mirrorless cameras from Sony, ISO is the button over here, and so I want to be able to adjust my ISO because I’m shooting in manual. I need to easily be able to adjust my shutter speed, my aperture and my ISO. By default, the ISO is changed by going into function here, and then toggling over to ISO, and then making changes to your ISO.
To me, that’s a pain. I don’t have the time to deal with all of that. I want ISO to happen really quick, and so by changing that to this button, I’m able to make those changes much faster.
Let’s go to our menu, and you’re going to go over to the gear icon. Go to the fifth panel. Go down to custom key shoot. Then, toggle down to the bottom where it says right button flash mode. Now, we’re going to scroll to ISO and choose ISO. Now, if I press on the right side of this here, what it’s going to do is allow me to choose my ISO. That is exactly what I want to have happen because that way, I can make changes easily to everything. I don’t have to tap a bunch of buttons to get to my ISO. The ISO I’m always changing, and that is definitely a very important one and something worth remapping and changing because like I said, if I wanted to shoot in manual mode with the flash, if I needed flash in here, I could pop the flash up myself and then shoot with flash. I don’t need this button over here because I’m not in automatic mode. I don’t need to tell the camera when and when not to use the flash.
Okay, so the fifth setting that I like to change is the sound that is made in the camera. Now, I’ve already disabled it. I don’t like the beep to take place. On the last pane, the little briefcase and the first of that, the first … You toggle down to the bottom, audio signals, and you can set audio signals by default. It comes set to on. I probably need to turn the volume up on that too. There we go. Okay, so here’s what it sounds like typically. It makes that beep sound. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the beep sound. It’s just obnoxious to me. Sometimes, I’m trying to set focus multiple times. I’m trying not to be noticed. With a small camera like this, I’m either taking pictures of my kids who, if they even see me taking pictures, they’re going to strike a pose or do something that ruins the candid natural moment that I’m trying to capture. I want to make sure that audio signals is off.
Now, you can also choose just to have the signal, the audio signal make noise when you press down the shutter because with this camera, if you are in a single shot mode, it does make a little bit of shutter noise, but if you go in a continuous auto focus mode or a continual shot mode, it rapid fires off shots, and it actually does that without opening and closing the shutter. It does it electronically, and because of that, there is absolutely no tone at all. You have no idea. You could be holding down the button on accident, taking hundreds of photos and not even knowing it because without the audio signal, you have no idea. If you leave the audio signal on shutter, you can at least get that shutter noise. Here’s what that’s going to sound like. There’s just that little audio sound. I know it’s very faint, but if we were to, and let’s just, for the heck of it, go and put our drive mode on continuous shooting high. Here’s what that sounds like.
It’s a really annoying audio signal, but here’s what happens if we turn that off. Now, I have to wait for it to write to the card. All right, so if we turn audio signals off altogether, here’s what we get. Nothing. Hardly anything on the screen even shows us that we’re taking photos except for the fact that our photo count is decreasing rapidly. Having that audio signal on is nice because it lets you know that you’re taking a picture. To me, I don’t mind some shutter noise. It is very quiet. It’s not supper loud, so having that little bit of shutter noise really isn’t a problem for me, but the beep to confirm that I have auto focused, that is a pain. When you obtain auto focus, you get the green square, the green whatever focal point that the camera has decided to focus on, lights up in green so you know that you have achieved focus. You don’t have to worry about having that audio signal. For some of you that do want that audio signal, feel free to leave it on. It’s just my opinion.
This little tiny camera does an amazing job at shooting video, and I find it very important to make sure that your camera is set up for video because even when you’re in photo mode, all you have to do is hit the movie button, and you can start filming. Of course, if you go into movie mode on the camera by rotating the dial to movie mode, you do get more features, but it is very good to have these features set, these settings set in the camera for video so that you’re as close to ready-to-go as possible.
We’re going to rotate to our movie mode here in the camera, and then we’re going to go into our main menu and toggle back to the beginning so that I can show you where to go. From the beginning, if you go down to the second pane here of the first option, we have our file format, which I currently have set to XAVC S HD. That is also the default that the camera will come set to. You can go up to 4K if you’re wanting to film 4K video, and then you can also choose AVCHD and MP4, which are more compressed, slightly lower quality formats. The MP4 would be perfect for sharing video straight to the web, so if you’re trying to transfer a video straight off of your camera and upload it to the web through your phone or something like that, you would definitely need the MP4 format.
The XAVC S format though is much better for editing, for taking that video into a video editor. You’re going to have a lot more information, a lot more depth to your image there, and you’re going to get a lot more options for frame rate and bit depth, which I’m about to talk about next. Let’s choose the XAVC S HD, and we’re going to go down to record setting. Now, in the record setting, you have your frame rates, and you have your bit rate on the right hand side. The frame rate is basically how many frames are being captured per second of footage. By default, your camera’s probably going to come set to either 30p or 24p. 30p or 24p are great for just regular shooting. If you’re not planning on doing anything with slow motion or you’re not shooting anything very high action, your 30p or your 24p is going to be fine.
Now, for the longest time, 24p has been the standard of the film industry, so that more smooth, because if you think about it, there’s how ever many seconds in a minute, milliseconds and all of these stuff, so you’ve got your frames. The more frames you stack into a second, the sharper that image potentially can be. Now, there is such a thing as having it be too sharp, and the problem with that is that it becomes weird to watch. Everything is so sharp. There’s no natural blur. Our eyes typically see a little bit of blur when we move around, things blend together and blur really well into each other. Things aren’t extremely sharp. If you’ve ever seen … There’s been a few movies that have came out in the recent years that have chosen a higher frame rate, and they’ve been just weird. It’s something different. We’re not quite used to it, so the reason that you would want to choose something like a 60p or a 120p is for that higher frame rate, so that you can use slow motion methods in post-production.
For example, if you want to take something and make it slow motion, you’re technically stretching those frames. If you don’t have enough frames to stretch together to make that longer period of time because, keep in mind, you’re taking maybe say a 24p-second, and you’re trying to stretch it into two or three seconds, you don’t have as much to work with. It’s stretching and blending, and you don’t want it to have to do that when you’re editing. You want to have more details to start with from the beginning. If you have 60 or 120, you definitely have a lot more to work with. Depending on what you’re wanting to shoot, you would choose those options. In my opinion, 50 megabits per second, 160, it’s all plenty for shooting video projects these days, especially if it’s going onto the web. 50 megabits per second is quite a bit. Of course, you can go up to 100 here if you’re going to do slow motion, obviously. The more data you have when you’re converting to slow motion, when you’re stretching that frame out, the better quality it’s going to appear.
I typically choose 60p because I’m filming my kids a lot. They’re moving around. Who knows if I want to make something slow motion? I can always drop 60p into a 24p project, and the video editor itself is going to blend that together, and it tends to look really nice. 60p is definitely where I leave it.
As we progress through the menu here for changing our video settings, you’re going to want to go over to the eight pane, and from movie mode, change program audio down to manual exposure. Just like we shoot manual exposure in photos, we want to shoot manual when we’re shooting video. The reason for that is because with video, if you are shooting video in an automatic mode, and you’re in lower light situations, the camera, will bump your ISO up quite a bit, and you will get really noisy video. Now, it may be better than getting video at all because if the lighting situation is that dim, then you’re going to have other problems, but I would definitely recommend going into manual mode because you’re going to unlock more settings, and you’re going to have more control. It’s going to take some practice because shooting video in manual mode is definitely a whole new monster compared to just shooting manual mode for photos, but the ground rules for shooting photos, for shooting video is close to the same.
Then, of course, with video, you’re going to need to change your settings. Right now, we have our shutter speed at 1/250, our f-stop 5.6 and our ISO at 1600. You’re definitely going to want to take that shutter speed down a bit lower. Now, if you’re shooting at 60p, you need to keep your shutter speed at, at least 1/60th. If you go below 1/60th, you’re not going to be getting true 60p, and your camera may even warn you. It doesn’t look like it’s warning me, but you’re going to want to keep that shutter speed up to around 1/60th. If you’re going to shoot up at 120 frames per second, you’re going to need to be up at 1/120th. You can then use your aperture and your ISO to adjust your exposure. As you can see, my camera’s pointing at the table. This is way too bright of an exposure, so I would probably bring my ISO down a bit here and try and get my exposure meter to read +.3, +.7 or +0 across the board. Now, my exposure pointing at the table is closer to where I would want it to be for shooting video.
There’s also one setting for audio. One of the things that’s a bummer about this camera is it does not have any manual settings for audio recording. Your audio recording is either on or off, but it does have a wind noise reduction, so if you’re outside on a windy day, you can choose wind noise reduction and turn that on, and you’re going to get a little better quality of audio recording out of it. What I’ve seen some other people do, you have your two mics right here. I’ve seen some people put some fluff, a cotton ball or something like that on top of it, but you need to make sure that you don’t tape over or somehow cover up the microphones. You just have to figure out some way to get something over the microphones that will cut down on that wind noise.
That’s about all. I mean video is a whole different monster, but I feel like at least having your settings right for video definitely gets you a step closer.
The seventh and last thing that I’m going to change is, I’m going to remap the C button. Now, the C button is also the trash button, and when you are in image playback, it is the button that helps you put images in the trash, your bad images. When you are in the rest of the camera, it basically is set to in-camera guide. In my opinion, unless you’re in auto mode, which if I go into auto mode and I’m in full auto mode and I press the button, it still doesn’t even really do anything for me. It’s set to in-camera guide, but I haven’t been able to get it to do anything, regardless of what mode that I’m in.
Anyways, we’re going to go ahead and remap that button because that’s an unused button, in my opinion. Let’s go to menu. Let’s go back to the gear pane and down to the fifth and custom key shoot. You have the C button. The C button is set to in-camera guide. Now, basically, you can set this to whatever you want. If there’s a feature or a setting or something like that, that you would rather have more readily available to you, so let’s just go back up to the top of this list. You can see, there’s a ton of in-camera features that we can set to this.
For example, maybe you are always wanting to change the drive mode. In changing the drive mode, you’re always having to go to the function button, and then go over to the drive mode. We can set this to drive mode. Now, when we’re in our regular shooting menu, when we press this button, now we can change our drive mode from single shooting to continuous, to self-timer or whatever we want. That’s actually a time-saver, in my opinion, instead of going to function and then drive mode. You can set that to anything. I could have set that to ISO and left flash to be flash. I could have changed that to whatever I wanted. However, the way that I set up my other Sony cameras is that this is actually a custom button on my other Sony cameras, and I like where it is by default, so I don’t want to create confusion.
In my opinion, you can set this to whatever you want. If you want to be able to take it straight in to white balance so that you could change your white balance more easily, whatever you think, but what I would recommend is setting something for this other than in-camera guide because none of us are using the in-camera guide at this point. We want to customize our camera and make it work as best as we can. By pressing this button, I can now change my drive mode or whatever it is that you want to map that to. Pretty cool. I think that this is definitely a great camera. Like I said, I had the Mark IV. It was fantastic. This camera doesn’t have, really, any external changes to it.
There are some changes under the hood, and I have a full review of this camera coming soon, as well as some other tutorial videos on how to use it. Make sure that you subscribe to our channel here on Ditch Auto, and give this video a thumbs up if you liked it, and share it with somebody else. If somebody else has this camera, or they’re thinking about buying this camera, definitely send this video to them. I think it will help them get a better understanding of the way to use their camera and how to get the most out of your camera.
Again, thanks so much. If you haven’t yet purchased this camera or you want more information on this camera, there is a link on the description below to Amazon where they have all the specs listed out, all of the pricing and stuff like that, so make sure to check out that link also. Thanks again for checking out our Ditch Auto video here. We hope that you subscribe so that we can notify you when new videos come out soon. Thanks again, and we hope to see you here soon on Ditch Auto.
