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Hey guys, Rob Ruef here with a tutorial on how to set up your camera for shooting a cinematic
short film. There's a few things you need to remember when you are setting up to shoot
your film, and these are: frame rate, flat picture style, depth of field and most importantly
the exposure. First is frame rate, your going to want to
shoot with 24p or 25p for a cinematic look. 60p if necessary for slow motion but I wouldn't
use it too much. Make sure not to go below 23.976 frames per second or your video will
look choppy and ugly. Two, flat picture style, shoot in a flat picture
style like cinestyle or flat or create your own in picture style editor. A flat picture
style can pick up more information because shadows are raised and highlights are decreased.
Desaturation is also common. Flat picture styles are great because you can add whatever
look you want to your clips. You can make them dark and depressing or you can saturate
it and make it look epic. And when you use a flat picture style it's more like shooting
in a raw codec, an uncompressed raw like red raw because you gain more detail, more dynamic
range which is really key for post. It looks way better your images will look great afterwards
you can add a nice amount of contrast and you won't lose a lot of detail.
Third thing. Is Depth of Field. This is one of my favorite parts of filming. The ability
gained from depth of field is great. You can focus on a single object or have everything
be in focus. It's really your choice. Good lenses for a short DOF are between f1.4 and
f5.6 and your going to want to make sure that you have the right lens before you start shooting.
If your shooting a wide-angle shot you should probably not have a telephoto lens or something
like that. You should think about what kind of lens you want, how you want your shot to
look before hand and it should come out great. The right lenses for a portrait are 50mm and
85mm. Telephoto is 135mm +. Wide-angle is 35mm and less.
One other thing I wanted to point out. I actually shoot in vintage prime lenses and the reason
for that is, vintage prime lenses are great, i love vintage lenses. They look great, they
have a nice apeture ring on it so you can just change it automatically, you don't have
to go in through the camera and set it up that way, I find that really annoying. Old
vintage lenses are really high quality, there all metal and the glass is really nice. Some
can be a little soft and have a little purple fringing but those are really cheap and you
can find a Mamiya 50mm f/2 for about $20 on Ebay. It's a great lens, I use that all the
time. I'm just getting the Helios 58mm 44m-2 i think it is and that should be coming from
Russia pretty soon, and i'm pretty excited about that. If you check out some of my videos
I always shoot with vintage prime lenses. Fourth thing I have. Exposure. This is the
most important part of shooting, and as I said earlier a flat picture style can recover
some details that are lost in shadows and highlights. The histogram is really important,
you want to set up your histogram so that it's almost blown out but the part is not
actually touching the highlights, and you don't want it touching blacks either. First
thing you want to do when you are setting up your exposure is think if you want DOF
choose your apeture wisely. If you do want DOF choose below f5.6 if not do above f5.6.
Then you choose your iso, like iso 100, 200, 400, etc., unless you have magic lantern you
can use the native iso's like 160, 80, 320, 640 which are really nice because they have
less noise because they are negative digital iso's. Third thing for exposure is your going
to want to leave your shutter speed at 2x whatever your frame rate is. So if you have
24fps then you would set it to 50, if your at 60fps your going to want to shoot at 125.
Another thing is white-balance, white balance is really important. It's probably best just
to set your white balance to white. Your going to want your in-camera to be as white as possible,
you can change the white balance in post if you want. It's a lot easier that way, then
you can have whatever look you want. Another thing, I use Highlight Tone Priority when
I'm shooting video. It recovers a lot more detail in highlights because it brings them
down and I feel like this is really helpful if you tend to overexpose, I use to overexpose
a lot now I pay a lot more attention to the histograms.
One more thing, have fun with what you are doing, your making videos, its what you love,
and it's fun for you, just keep with it, don't get discouraged, don't let anyone tell you
your bad at it. Keep at it and you'll do great. Thanks for watching guys, be sure to like,
comment, subscribe and have a great day!