Monday-DSLR, and camera settings

Please watch this movie and look at the camera note link below. Watch the movie, and answer the camera notes at the same time, the questions in the notes follow the movie. About half way through the camera notes, you will be asked to look at the camera you will use to identify ways to make the best possible video in terms of quality and style.

Camera notes-click here

Practice shooting:

Demonstrate a good shallow/narrow depth of field by:

1. Place the subject or actor against an interesting background, but one that you intend to defocus (or blur out- blur can go from slightly blurred or defocused to achieving a Bokeh look which produces magical looking almost soft bubbles in the background - very desirable, not always possible to achieve)
2. On your camera go into aperture priority mode (A), or Portrait mode if your camera has a portrait setting
3. Chose a large aperture for your aperture setting (remember, the small number is the larger opening, so F1.4-F3.5, these are letting lots of light into your camera, opening the lens). With so much light though, you risk over exposure-so we'll discuss that next. You also may experience more out of focus shots, so it is advisable to stablize your camera on a tripod, or something stable, rest against a tree, etc. If you shake just a little, you risk an out of focus image.
4. The exposure triad include aperture, shutter and ISO. Now we'll look at ISO. As aperture controls the amount of light the lens allows onto the sensor, the shutter controls the speed at which the shutter is released. Shutter speed also is a great way to achieve certain effects, such as motion and zoom blurs and the like. Shutter at high speed is also used to freeze things such as drops of water from a fountain, etc. So first, set your ISO to about 100. Remember, you can always increase ISO, but for now take it down.
5. Now Shutter-start with setting shutter to twice your frame rate as instructed in your video. If you are shooting at 24fps, then set shutter to 48, and so forth.
6. Now back up from your actor, further away (don't go over a cliff), and now zoom your lens into desirable compositional framing. Have your actor display some kind of emotion. 
7. NOW - without any mic attached to your dslr, have your actor say something (4 score and 20 years ago, for the lack of anything better). Now move up 1/2 distance to your actor, and again, record with audio. Finally, move up within a couple feet of your actor-record audio. This can be used to test the audio on your camera and see what issues you will run into with audio. For those of you with DSLRs, identify the sound input options. Can you use a boom mic if desired?

Deliverable:
Log and Transfer your series of tests
1. Depth of field shot trying to achieve cinematic film quality (24fps), with shallow depth of field (20-30 sec in length, 1080p) Simple shot, talking head is fine
2. Same shot, but with 3 different audio takes demonstrating audio quality at various distances from actor.
3. 1 experiment you have performed on this video to better understand the color correction filters in either FCE, FCP, Premiere. Be experimental, see what they do, what improvements would you like to make?
4. Taking the most inaudible of your files, using the editor of your choice, increase the volume while monitoring for introduction of noise. Increase gain, normalize and let's also look at hum reduction. This is a good time to play with those audio filters.

Upload for to the videostorage server by Thursday, end of class so we can share results.