Blackmagic Camera App Basic Settings Walkthrough for Beginners
I just made a video the other day about using the Blackmagic camera app as a way to make really incredible sort of content. You know how this channel works. If you guys leave me questions in the comments, I'm going to answer those questions. So my homegirl Brooklyn came through and she says she ran into a little bit of a kerfuffle and we're going to see if we can't help her out. So basically, sis was trying to cook and somebody came in and stole her bacon grease.
So look, Brooklyn basically said she shot all this content, all the angles, the whole nine yards. she went to go drop him in the Final Cut and said Final Cut wouldn't recognize the files. She tried to self-diagnose, which I absolutely appreciate. I love it when you try to go for self. But ChatGBT sent her down a rabbit hole of downloading the Blackmagic Roleplayer app in DaVinci Resolve and didn't solve her problem.
Basically, long story short, she said, could I make a video going through the settings of the Blackmagic camera app as a way that maybe she can avoid this and we'll see if we can solve her problem. The first thing I want to help you with, Brooklyn. Thank you for leaving your comment. Absolutely appreciate it. This channel lives on answering your guys's question or responding to your comments. So the more you guys engage, we're a community, we're family. We are family.
The more y'all respond, the more I can come out here and try to do what I can to help you. All right, so let's dive in. First thing I want to say is that you mentioned that you recorded in the MOV format. And you know, as you search the internet, you could have all kinds of craziness about MOV versus MP4.
I'm an ex-Apple employee. Let me break this down to you. Those are container files. This is an MOV file. This is an MP4 file. They're just containers. Both of these got water in it. That container file can have one of, I believe like 130 different formats that fits inside that container. It really doesn't matter. You can actually take an MOV and rename it .MP4.
Same thing. It won't break the file. It still absolutely work so don't get twisted about that but anyway let's see if we can dive in i am going to pop over here pop the molly i'm sweat all right so this is the black magic camera app first thing we're going to do is run you through the interface real quick and then we'll go through some of the settings you'll see right up here in the upper corner there is the 24 this allows me to select which lens i have all right so we're going to leave it on that for right now. I can click on my frames per second and I can go from any one of these. I tend to use 24, but most of you guys are going to probably use 30.
So for today's example, we're going to leave it at 30. OK, now on the shutter speed, I currently have mine set at angle. Wait, let's do it. Let's do let's do us a favor real quick. Before we get busy trying to be cute, let's go in here and reset all the camera settings.
So that way we're starting clean slate like you just opened this here app okay now we're gonna go back to camera all right cool you see it went back to 24 and 24 frames a second and my little critters over here is out of focus we're gonna ignore that for right now so to make it easier for you to see this uh see where it says the shutter is 1 over 46 that's not too far off of the one over 48 that you want, you technically want it to be 180 degrees shutter. It's a, it's a semi complicated explanation, but if the shutter speed, I'm sorry, if the frames per second is 24, you want the shutter speed to be one over 48 or one over 50. Some cameras will round it to 50 if, or it could be 96 or a hundred.
It basically has to be some division of that, that breaks out perfectly. If it's 30 frames per second, you want one over 60, one over 120. One over 240, such and such. Okay. So let's, let's, let's, let's go back. Let Tim cook.
All right. So this is why I changed that one to angle. We'll deal with that in a second. You'll notice that the iris is locked. Now this is an iPhone 15 pro max. I believe if I kick over to my other camera in a bit it might be one over two because it's a 16 pro max it's slightly different that doesn't change we can't really mess with that and then you see your iso is at 55 currently my white balance is at 1590 i know for a fact we come back here girl. I know for a fact that my room is actually closer to 52.
So I'll just go ahead and set that and I can lock it because I know what it is. Because I set up my own lights in here, so I know what they do. You know what I'm saying? So we'll come back over here. And then you see there's a tent. It's kind of auto adjusting that right now. You'll see that it's shooting in 4K. That's what we want. If we were using another format, that would change there.
Here in the bottom is known as a histogram. That's going to show me what my exposure rate is in the middle. This is my storage. And it's telling me that I have 56 gigs left. Wow. This is a one terabyte phone. So I kind of filled it up. Maybe I ought to go in here and clean some of this sucker out. It's getting a little psycho.
And you can see that my meters are going crazy right now. That's because it's currently using the iPhone mic. Although I'm in my studio talking on my SM7B. normally that's going to show my DJI or my Rode Wireless Go or my Shure, whatever microphone I'm using. So that's a basic look at the interface. Now down here on the side, this first button here is going to basically control things that I see on my monitor.
And then the second button here is going to control my focus, sort of focus control. So if I slide this up and down, it kind of changes focus and things of that nature, right? This one here, they call it exposure control. It's not really exposure control. It's more or less, yeah, it's hard to describe. Let's leave it at exposure control for now. It's similar to how exposure works in the standard camera. But as you can see, it's not just exposure. It's doing a couple of different
things. And that's because we're working with a phone. So it's making some creative liberties. Let's call it that. As we skip the record button, we come down here. This one is stabilization.
So right now I'm on a tripod so I can leave it off. You can go to standard, cinematic, or extreme. Right now we're on a tripod. I can leave that off. Normally I'm on standard. Hardly ever muck with it. We call that a day. And then next under that, you have a magnifying for zoom controls so that we can sort of zoom in things of that nature. Again, I don't mess with this too often, but it is available. And then finally, there's a recording slate so you can record your cuts and your takes.
And that's really helpful if you use Dissolve or DaVinci Cloud, but may not do that there. So we skip we're going to skip them there. All right. On the side, you see your camera button. There's a media button that takes you in and show you your files.
When I'm ready to share files, and that was a question I had for you, how did you send the file to your computer? I normally airdrop it because I'm on iPhone. If you're shooting on Android, that's a little different. You got to go through the whole iTunes process. But for us, we just use airdrop. There's also something else that you can do, copying it to your files app on your computer. I'm sorry, your files app on your phone, which means you can just copy it to an SSD or SD card or something and move it over that way. So there's a couple of different ways there.
My guess is when you copied it over, it got corrupted. So you just got to copy it again. That's my guess. Anyway, so like, say I wanted to hit the select button here. I'll select that one.
I hit your air drip, hit air drip button, and it sends it to my computer like the I thought that don't think you just heard and it's done. So it's pretty quick on a, on a wifi network. So we'll leave it at that. We'll click back over here to chat. If you're working in a collaborative format with some folks, you log in, I don't use black magic cloud, but it would allow us to collaborate and send messages back and forth.
I can see these clips. I can be like, Brooke, check these out. And you'd be like, dude, they're out of focus. Try again. Are you smoking that Hawaiian stuff again? I'll be like, I don't know what you're talking about, Brooklyn. Keep it, keep it quiet. All right. So we're going to come back over here. And I'm going to press on
the settings button. We're going to start at the top at the record settings. The first option here is going to be Kodak and under the Kodak, I choose H.265. Most cases, H.264 is available, but most of us are shooting on a brand new Apple Silicon Max M1234. So H.265, actually there is a section of the chip on the M chip known as the media engine. It allows you to render files really quickly. Any calculations, color changes, things like that happen really quickly built in on that processor.
When it's in the HL265 format, file sizes are smaller. Take up less space in your hard drive. Leave it there. The Pixel Peeper kids that have come over and argue with us about these things, we don't care about them. They ain't none of our business. We're going to ignore them kids. Okay. Your resolution, of course, you can select whatever you want.
I tend to rock 4K. HD is 1080. My color space, I almost always am shooting in Rec. 709. But if you wanted to do something that required a high dynamic, high dynamic range or HDR, that's because it's really, really sunny in some spots and really, really shady in the others. And you want to make sure that you don't get anything missing. That's when you would use Rec 2020 HDR, Apple Log HDR for your timecode display.
You can use record runner time of day. Most of us aren't going to play with that. We're content creating out here in these here streets. We're going to ignore that.
We're going to go over to the camera settings. And if you do any vertical content, of course, you would enable vertical video. I'm going to leave it checked off for a second. The other things I like to have on are already on the ability to fire the recording with the volume button. So for certain, et cetera, I love that.
And then we don't really need to mess with any of these. We're going to go to the audio settings and up here at the top. Currently, it's using a microphone on my iPhone. Normally, I said I have one of my externals cranking. I leave all of this basically the same.
I don't mess with anything in here. I do turn on audio monitor, though. I think that is important. And then on the monitor side, you got your focus assist. I changed this to peaking. That's just how I like it. And I use red as my choice of lines. What that basically does, and in a second, I'll connect to my other phone and you'll see what I I mean, whenever something is in focus, it has little red edge around it, like an old Mac headroom video.
Let's get back. Why is he tripping? Why is he tripping? All right. HDMI out. I'm going to normally want to show the video speed. And I choose clean feed because like I'm doing right now in an Ecamm. When I come out here, you basically see all it is display. But if I had instead of this cable plugged in directly, if I plugged in an HDMI adapter and unplug the cable in, all you would see is camera.
So it would be beautiful. It won't have nothing on it. One thing that's cool about this app, if I tap the old interface here, I can make the majority of it go away. And then I just have to zoom in an e-cam a little bit.
But normally I'm just going to use the clean feed and that sort of solves that problemo. OK, so I mean, come over here. I don't really worry about this. I would use focus assist in that particular case and I would have my grids on. And that's about all I'm going to mess with on that. Okay. In the media file. Now, here's what I mean. Right now is recording proxies.
My computer is fast enough. I don't really need those proxies. So I'm going to off that. If you had a slower computer and you want to edit quickly, if you record in proxies, you edit in proxies, you're cutting a smaller resolution, not as pretty file. Normally dope enough for like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts and whatnot. But if you're doing something for YouTube proper or commercial or something of that nature, then you're going to definitely use the real files.
So proxy is helpful to move really quickly. Proxy is helpful for like chopping it up and cap cut or something of that nature. I normally just leave it off because I got a lot of space on my phone. I just work with the big files. Fast phone, fast computer, fast Internet. I don't have any reason to shoot procs.
All right. So then everything else is gravy over here, except for save clips to the app only to the app or the photo library or to the files app. Under normal circumstances, I leave it on app only. When I plug an external SSD or drive in, I hit the files app and then I can save it somewhere on my phone. And then that's going to, you know, just basically record it all in there like such. So that's where that comes into play.
LUTs is if you want to have any custom LUTs, you want that cool look, you want to make it look like a Western or like a 1980s Max Headroom video. That's two times I referenced that cloud. So forth, so forth, et cetera, that you would put them in here. And of course, those LUTs would get loaded exactly from where you just saw in the files app.
There was a space for it under the LUTs. OK, so there's that. And then once you get all your settings, how you like it, you can save them as a preset. You can import from some another, some another from another camera. If you already had that locked in, that's how you would do that. We don't really care about accessories because none of you guys are going to be that cute or fancy about this.
If we want to go to remote control. Yes, I want that. And I want to use this phone as a controller. And we're going to sync that across all the cameras if I have multis. Right. So we lock that black magic cloud. Again, I don't use it, but that is so that you could collaborate with other people or things that you shoot here automatically get sent to the cloud and they can just pull it on your computer.
That's the paid part of this app. And that's the reason why this app is free, because they're hoping people use Blackmagic Cloud. A lot of people on the pro side absolutely do. It ain't none of my business.
OK, we're going to come back over here. Of course, you know what the reset button is. Just make sure you're on the latest version. and then we can just go back to the old camera settings if you needed to change anything here for your phone so that you can make that work.
Okay, so let's get back over here to the camera real quick. You now see there's a little icon that looks like a remote controlly. So if I press that, okay, we're gonna ignore that for now. Normally what happens is what I showed you in a video the other day, it would allow me to trigger my other phone. So basically what we're gonna do now is I do want to go in and change that shutter angle on the camera.
I want shutter measurement set to angle instead of speed, go back to camera. And then now it's all kind of weird, right? So if I select on this second guy here and mess with it, no, I want to select on shutter itself. And then I'm going to move this guy to 180. And once we get it on 180,
get back up there. Stay there. There we go. We're going to hit the lock button. We're going to call that a day. That's what we want to leave that locked on 180. Popping down the highway, doing over 80. All right. So now we're all set up. And if I come in here and hit my focus, I have a good picture. Everything is good. This indicator down here at the bottom tells me that I can
basically shoot for three hours and 26 minutes based off of what I'm shooting at. If I were to change this to say, uh, 60 frames per second, that number is going to change down to two hours, right? If I change this to 30 frames per second, then that's going to be three hours and 26 minutes. I just tend to do everything at 24. It's really a matter of preference of choice. It's not a right or wrong,
but those are the basic settings. Now, what you're going to do over here on the side is let's say you press on this first guy, you have zebras in here, which will show you when something is blown out. I don't really use this this often, but normally if I do use it, I have it set at like 80 or 85 because that's, you know, just old school way of doing it. And then over here you have your, um, it's kind of just letting you know if something is going to be in range or not in range. So there's that. I tend to leave that off, turn that off. Your grid lines are here. I put in your master grid lines.
I like to use the center marker and the balance markers. It's hard to tell on the interface right here, but you notice that line is blue. That is because we are perfectly vertical.
If I put this up and get a blue this way, then we have a level shot all around. So that's what that indicator is for. I love to use that one. That one is extremely helpful.
And then you have a little center target right there. So you know that you're in the center. Over here, we have the ability to do our aspect ratio frames so you can make sure that you have things exactly where they go i don't really use that one why did i stick it on four by three go back to 16 oh look vertical if you wanted to do nine by 16 but you wanted to shoot it horizontal you have that capability as well um go back to 16 by nine i think you just turn it off in that case then you have your uh sort of safe zone so if you need room for titles or whatever you can kind of move that in so you know what's going on there i don't really use that one and then over here this one i believe is for your false color settings we're not going to use that and the bottom is if we had any luts loaded it would let me see what it looks like with the lut on and what the lut with the lut off so that's basically your overlays again this is the really weird exposure control situation Right now, sorry, this is the focus. So in focus, we have a set for autofocus. So anywhere we tap, we basically got autofocus happening. You can do focus pulls. So let's say I wanted this to be step one. Right. I think this is good. We're going to call that step one and then we're
going to go back here. And we're going to call that step two. So now if I press play. It's going to switch from one to two. Super cool. I love it. I love it. You just reset those. Normally, I just leave that mess off and just leave it set for autofocus.
Let's put that back on. And then, of course, we're talking about that exposure control here. This is where you can come in and mess with that and you could also play with the iso so right now i have the iso set at 55 but if you wanted to like actually move it in the position you would control this and it's automatically going to move the iso so if i was trying to shoot at iso 100 i would kind of leave it there and once you know you have it where you want you can kind of hook it up that way i did lock my white balance because i know that my lights are 5200 but you can leave that on auto there as well. And then, yeah, that's the basics of the app.
That's the basics of the settings. With this amount of information, you can be dangerous. Is there a lot more to know? Absolutely. Do most of us need that as content creators? Probably not. Probably not. One thing I forgot to show you, which I think is really cool. If I click here, I can totally see what I'm doing. And again, this particular situation, the microphone is just crazy loud, but Normally, I would use an external mic for that. So I just really love how this guy works.
It just does make everything, it makes everything so much easier. One thing that might work for you, Brooklyn, specifically, there's a couple apps you can try to fix the files that you've already shot. There is an app called Shutter Encoder. And if you go to my channel and do a search on it, I will put the link in the description. I do have a video about using Shutter Encoder to encode something for WebM. But in theory, you should be able to drag those files into Shutter Encoder and just have it save it as another MP4.
So you're going to move it from MOV to MP4, which we all know does nothing, but it will at least try to recalculate and re-render those files. And maybe it can repair it that way. But specifically, yeah, send me a comment and let me know what, how you copied it. and maybe we can figure it out. Or if this all drives your head crazy, throw them suckers in Google Drive, send me a link and I'll see if I can fix them. How about that? There you go. There you go. Friends, that is the Blackmagic camera app.
And I think it's good. I hope I was able to help you. There are some really, really deep tutorials on it. But of course, if you have some specific questions, throw them at me. I'll see what I can do to help you. I just wanted to see if we can find a way to fix Brooklyn's files. Because man, we all been there. We have all shot footage and got them cards
loaded. And them joints ain't want to load. That is one of the most pressing feelings on your chest, if ever there was. So I hope this was able to help you in some way, Brooklyn.
Please holler at your boy. Let's see if somewhere in our community, we can't get you straightened out. Because we can't have you out here in these streets looking like that. We don't let family do these type of things. You know what I'm saying?
All right, right about now, the outgo is going to show you another video you should watch. So go ahead and click that. Oh, he forgot the other cool part. I'm trying to get to 20,000 by the end of the year so if you ain't subscribed yet go ahead and click that button subscribe up we talk about tech we talk about getting your head straight so you can make this content and I'm here to support all of us creators especially those of us of a certain vintage to make our YouTube process smooth we all get better when we all get better you know what it is now that video is going to pop up go ahead and press it peace out eight times stop, one take no edits let's let this be I need to know everything, who and what and where I need everything. Music.
2024-12-26 09:18
