Question about quality of videos

[Grandpaw]

I have a Nikon D7000 and want to find some how to videos on using the HD video feature. I don't seem to be able to find any but the videos that I do find on YouTube that were taken with the D7000 have in the lower right hand corner of the video while it is playing 360P or 480P and none say 1080P when it says it was taken in FULL HD. Why is that? I would like to get an example to look at to see what this camera can do. I am also looking for some instruction videos so I can learn the best settings before we go to Disney World in December, Jeff

[Skyman]

Interesting questions.

I am assuming that you are asking what settings give the best video, as opposed to exposure. As with still photography there really isn't a definitive answer. Like the different jpeg modes in still photography, 360p, 480p, 1080p correspond to the number of horizontal pixels in an image. Full HD is just a marketing term for saying 1080p. To give this a little perspective, NTSC vhs is roughly 360, PAL VHS is roughly 480, DVD is roughly 640 and blue ray typically 1080.

Frame rate is an interesting one if you can set it, and it is related to shutter speed but shouldn't be confused with it. The frame rate is the number of pictures a second that are taken. Anything up over 10 frames per second starts to look like video but jerky like the flick books we made as kids. 24 is the rate that most cinema uses and 25 used to be the norm for video cameras, but frame rates up to 50 are common. A higher frame rate will display fast action more smoothly, but purists say that the 24-25 zone feels nicer. It should be noted that the frame rate with effect the lowest shutterspeed you can choose but not the highest. Shutterspeed works exaclt as it does on a still camera, low shutterspeeds blur the image and show motion, high shutterspeeds freeze it. Filming a running tap or shower head will give you the general idea of how this effects the end result.

Aperture does exactly what it does for stills, but a lot of video people call it the iris and I have noticed a lot of camera operators will use the iris to control exposure before the shutterspeed.... this is probably more a reflection of the exposure limitations of early video cameras and trained habits being hard to break rather than anything else.

The P stands for progressive and means that every vertical line of the image is scanned in sequence, as opposed to interlaced where the lines are split into odd and even and half are scanned at a time. interlaced video is a tie over from crt televisions where the pixels would start to fade before the full image was created so to cover this they illuminated half the image at a time. It is a good way to save processing power though as the computer need only generate half as many pixels. I would say that unless you plan to burn blue rays of your home movies or half a very large TV that 480 or 720 is fine and you will find that you fit a lot more video per card this way. Also some cameras only have enough buffer memory to record short clips in full hd but can record much longer at lower resolutions. Having said that if space isn't a problem and you want to do a bit of editing then full hd is the way to go, as lots of shorter more creative clips edited together will make your movies that much more interesting and watchable than a one hour long sequence of everything. You can chop up that hour clip into snippets in editing but it is easier to be selective in camera.

If you have time I suggest you make a couple of short videos to get a feel for piecing together a story without showing everything. It might be usefully to think of things in terms of establishing shots(usually very wide), mid shots and close ups etc. This helps you cut out the un needed parts. A short grab of the overall scene, a very quick mid shot to focus attention whilst not disorienting the viewer followed by a couple of close ups of the detail you want to show from different angles if possible. Yes you could zoom and pan around to get all this in one shot, but the audience ends up being bored and dizzy. This will also help you get familiar with your editing software and hopefully let you come up with a workflow that suits you and your hardware / software. You might find that 1080p files are too large for your computer to edit them well or that you really don't need that resolution if the end result is destined for you tube.

There are a bunch of rules that help to keep the viewer oriented in the scene, similar to concepts like the rule of thirds but extending that in 3 dimensions to include the audience as a compositional element. The most famous of these is the 180 degree rule (breaking it can disorient the audience and something make the viewer dizzy) it might be worth while learning about those.


ok enough video 101, best way to learn is to start playing!

[Skyman]

oh and if you want to get an idea of how bad home movies can be, watch some of the intrepid berkely explorers videos, they are old and he has made hundreds of them but he still manages to break just about every rule in the book!

[Grandpaw]

I figured out that if I click on the 360P or whatever it says in the lower right corner that it will give me more choices all the way up to the setting it was recorded on, Jeff

[Grandpaw]

Thanks Skyman, for taking the time to reply with such a detailed answer. I am trying to learn as much about this before my trip to help eliminate as many mistakes as possible. I do plan on going out at night several times and practicing to work out as many bugs as I can. I am a firm believer that actually going out and trying different things to see what happens is more productive than just reading about it. I ask questions first to try and get some clue as to what is going on then it is time for some trial and error shooting. Thanks again for your reply! :thumbsup::thumbsup: it is great to have a place where you can have knowledgeable friends to be able to ask for advice and get some help. Thanks again, Jeff

[Jennifer2010]

I was looking to get a D7000 for video so thanks for the tips as well!