(P6) Manipulate the camera settings to record cinematic quality footage

When recording our footage, we manipulated and changed camera settings to create suitable footage to be used in our edit for the music video. 

ISO and Aperture - 

When we were on shoot days, we used the Canon R5 with a 55mm-105mm lens in manual mode to capture our footage. We adjusted aperture, ISO, focal length, zoom and shutter speed throughout the production to ensure that our footage reflected the ideal that we wanted to videos to look like. In some of our shots, we had to change the aperture or the ISO to level our brightness and make sure that any shots were not too bright or too dark. 

Adjusting aperture was also important to establish a depth of field as many of our shots relied on having a portion, or full, character in frame with a blurred background in order to frame and isolate them in shot. This meant adjusting the aperture to a lower f. stop whilst decreasing ISO to limit how bright the frame gets.

This is an example of how we used aperture to our advantage. The blur in the background is cased by having a low f. stop value. This allows more light into the lens, and therefore blurs the background and frames the protagonist.

Shutter Speed - 

When recording, we kept our shutter speed at 30 frames per second. This is because conventionally, video media is kept to from 24 fps to 30 fps to avoid looking too slow and seeing frames, but also not being too smooth to cause headaches and nausea. This was particularly important as our video had a lot of movement shots, which are hugely impacted by the frame rate of the image. This is why we kept the frames to a standard amount to avoid creating any issues for anybody watching the video. If we were too film slow motion, we would increase the frame rate to 60 for a 0.5x video speed as when we halved the speed, it would be at 30 frames per second.

DSLR - 

When recording our footage, we used a DSLR camera. This is because of the versatility, size and quality of a camera which can be held easily and is completely wireless. We also used a DSLR camera as we knew we would have full control of the settings on the camera, for example, aperture, exposure, ISO, shutter speed and zoom. This means that we could make the shots our own, and make sure that all of the shots had the cinematic feel and quality that we needed for the footage.

Another reason that we used a DSLR is because of my previous experience with DSLR cameras. Having worked with these cameras before, I knew which settings needed adjusting to change certain visuals. This means that I had the confidence to use the camera and make the footage look good whilst ensuring that the camera was being used correctly and safely.

We also had the option of shooting in 8K as well as RAW video with this camera. This was useful as it means that the pixel quality of our video is extremely professional and looks amazing on a screen. WE used around 4-6k video for our music video, which turned out looking very professional and it is obvious that the footage and camera is extremely high quality when watching the video. We did not end up using RAW video as the file sizes were too big for us to make any use with, however we had the option to shoot in RAW if we wanted to which was very useful in terms of quality.