Tips for Shooting Video With Your New DSLR

Here is a great beginners list taken from the Gadgets Blog over at the NYTimes. The author got to spend a day working with Canon expert Bruce Dorn on a commercial for the Canon T2i and came up with some very helpful observations:

• It will take some practice, but you must learn to focus manually. For Mr. Dorn, autofocus is just not acceptable.

• If your camera allows, use manual exposure settings when shooting video because exposures will change as you pan the camera.

• A good shutter speed for video is 1/50^th second. That’s the “classic sweet spot,” Mr. Dorn said.

• Set the ISO to 200.

• He recommends an aperture setting of F/5.6, which he says is used by many cinematographers.

• If your camera accommodates 24 fps video capture, use it.

• Avoid auto white balance at all costs. Instead, pick one white balance mode and stick with it throughout the video.

• Use the camera’s neutral image setting; it will give you the most latitude for postproduction work.

• Focus where your subject will be, not where it is.

• Always shoot a minimum of 15 seconds per take.

• Never shoot vertical, unless you want to mount your HDTV sideways.

• Invest in a good high-performance memory card. Slower cards will conk out when their buffer becomes overloaded.

• If you’re serious about video, invest in an add-on microphone, like the $200 Sennheiser MKE 400 shotgun microphone.

• Use a neutral density filter, like an N.3 or N.9; stick with one brand if you buy several filters.