Transcript for:
Sony a6700

Sony a6700 the complete guide this little hybrid camera is quite powerful for photos and videos but like anything you got to get your settings dialed in maybe you're here because you have a new Sony a6700 and you want to do a complete deep dive into the camera respect or maybe you're just thinking about picking one up well you've stumbled across a great video that's going to accomplish all of that in this video we're going to cover how to get the most out of your cinematic video settings we'll also talk about how to get the best results in low light situations as well as how to maximize the photo capabilities out of the a6700 might even take a look at what accessories are actually worth even picking up but first I guess it makes sense to start with whether or not this camera is even good in the first place has Sony finally made the perfect camera with the a6700 outstanding video quality extremely sharp photos and a feature set that is truly incredible all of that very well could make this the perfect camera I'm going to show you eight things about the a6700 that make it a very strong offering but we're also going to look at some potential downfalls that could hold it back from being that perfect camera and through all of that you'll get my honest review of this camera after some heavy use to help you decide if this is the right camera for you the video quality coming out of the a6700 is truly impressive you've been looking at it this whole time in this entire video we'll be using the a6700 besides maybe some b-roll actually of the camera that I'll be using like an a7c Mark II this camera gives us all of the codecs frame rates bit rates and color depths that are coming in all the recent Sony cameras we're getting 4K 24 4K 30 4K 60 and 4K 120 and the Codex we have xavcs xavcs xavcs all of those in 422 10bit color and if all of that is over your head just use xavcs it's a great codec and you're going to like your results a lot it's great that we get 4k 120 in this camera something we've asked Sony 4 for a long time with the a6000 series cameras it does have a 1.5 times crop so besides that punch in you have to deal with you're going to get a little bit of a quality loss there but I think the image is still outstanding and in 4k 60 we're using the entire sensor so no crop at all and it's a 6K sensor that's down sampling to 4K the quality is really high and that 4K 60 I think is a huge strength of this camera we get all of the classic Sony picture profiles as well as the highly desirable Sone and now that we have 422 10bit color we can actually utilize slog three to its full potential and just like 4K 120 another feature we've been asking for for a long time in these Sony cameras is the ability to preview and upload our own custom lots and look at those in camera before we even start shooting which is something that we can do in the a6700 and as far as crop sensor cameras go this camera does perform extremely well in low light situations in my experience I found that going up to 12,800 ISO is completely usable before going much higher than that the image starts to fall apart part of it but 12,800 is really impressive you can also live stream simply by connecting a USBC cable to the camera and your computer in 4k 30 which makes it a good streaming option we're about to look at how good the a6700 is at autofocus at any point during that section if you're getting something from this video let me know by giving it a tap on the thumbs up and while you're down there hit that subscribe button if you want to see future videos about the a6700 or some photo video education cuz that is what this channel is all about in regards to autofocus this camera simply doesn't miss it's likely due to the fact that it has a bunch of different subject recognitions that we can do with complete tracking across 93% of the frame which is a lot in short I have pure confidence with this camera when it comes to autofocus a lot of that autofocus strength comes back to the new AI chip that's in this camera which comes with a few additional [Music] features one of the biggest features that comes from that AI chip besides that incredible autofocus is this Auto framing which if you're a solo Creator it gives the effect and the look like somebody is filming you which can be really valuable and it's one of those things I didn't know I needed as a solo Creator until I first had access to it in the zv1 so it's nice to see that they brought this in to the a6700 compact cameras are usually a let down when it comes to their build quality the amount of customizable buttons the size of the grip and the amount of dials but the a6700 is probably the best that I've seen first off it uses the Sony npf Z battery kind of a mouthful there anyways that battery is the same one that you see in the A7 S3 the a74 it's a bigger battery but it has a very good battery life it's one of the best out there and because of that battery we get this substantial grip on the a6700 which is a huge win in my opinion the grip is fantastic especially if you look at it compared to my new Sony a7c Mark I which is a fullframe $2,200 camera and the a6700 grip is just way better we also get three dials for aperture shutter speed and ISO which is new on these a6000 series cameras where previously we were pretty limited on the amount of dials that we had we get a fully articulating touch screen that we can actually change the settings on Via touch which is particularly convenient when you're doing a vlog style shot and you want to change some settings you're getting the updated Sony menu system which they finally got right after a lot of years years of going through some pretty rough menus it has the digital hot shoe which you can use the new Sony microphones and not have to worry about connecting any cables and you get manual toggles from switching between photo video and snq which is a really important feature for a hybrid style camera meaning you're switching from photo to video often and having that manual toggle is one of those small things that goes a really long way I don't know what Sony did about 6 months ago in the zb1 is where I first noticed how much better their color science was and it seems as though at least in my experience that same color science has carried over to the a6700 that's a big win so if you're considering upgrading from an older a6000 series or like a zve E10 you're not only going to notice the 10 bit color versus you were using 8 bit in the past that being a huge upgrade in your color but you're going to notice that you're going to like the color rendition a lot better with this new color science and if this a6700 happens to be your first camera you're jumping in at a good time one of the most common questions that I get in my one-on-one coaching calls is how to make your colors look good I found that the foundation to making your colors look good comes back to having really good exposure which is why I put together a two-part comprehensive free course all about exposure everything from shutter speed aperture ISO to how to get the right exposure in camera you can check that out it's free there's a link in the description if a camera is claiming to be a hybrid camera that means that it's good in both photo and video we've already talked about how good the a6700 is in video the good news is that for photos it doesn't disappoint you can shoot in up to 11 frames per second in compressed raw and I found that I get about 60 shots before I fill up the buffer which is pretty good and whether you're in burst or you're just taking single shots the autofocus on this camera is sticky it's accurate and I have pure confidence in it and again it covers 93% of the frame which is a lot you're getting 26 megapixels for your photos which I think is a sweet spot for a camera like this reminds me a lot of the a73 which was fantastic the images are sharp the files aren't too big the color rendition is outstanding the autofocus is on point yeah it's really good for photography yeah you read that right overheating I have this as one of the points that make this camera a really strong offering to potentially being Sony's first perfect camera I can't get it overheat in 4k 24 frames a second whether I'm in the studio or outside and about 75° fah I've let it go and completely drain the battery for about 2 hours to see if I could get it to overheat and it won't and if you're in extremely hot temperatures in direct sunlight you might get it to overheat but in my experience I can't get it to I also ran up for an hour in 4k K 60 until the SD card filled up it never overheated and I just stopped the test looking at Gerald UND dun's video on this camera looks like he got about 2 hours and 4K 60 and didn't get it to overheat either I did however get it to overheat in 4k at 120 frames a second in about 20 minutes of continuous shooting but I don't really see that as a downside because 99% of us were not using the camera in 4k 120 besides a few bursts here and there of 60 seconds or 30 seconds to get a quick shot but speaking of downsides this is where we identify if this is so first perfect camera cuz we're going to talk about a few things where it might come up short first thing is rolling shutter if you're filming incredibly fast moving subjects or you're whipping the camera around and you want your lines to be straight with this camera they're going to be warped and they're just not going to be straight that said the majority of us are not going to be noticing a thing about rolling shutter with this camera cuz we're not whipping it around or taking photos of Major League Baseball the viewfinder I personally just hate the location of the viewfinder in the a6000 series cameras but it gets the job done and it's not a deal breaker there's no joystick and Sony can we please get joysticks on every single camera it is so important to be able to move your focus Point around I think it's the most natural way to do it I mean sure there's workarounds with having a touch screen or some other ways to set your focus point but there's nothing quite like that joystick it's got a micro HDMI port and micro HDMI are the worst they break just like the viewfinder they do the job but they're just not ideal but if you're not using external monitor on your camera you're not going to need to worry about this at all it's got one SD card slot and knock on desk this isn't wood knock on desk I've never had an SD card fail but if it were to fail best case scenario you have two SD cards in your camera you're recording redundantly that way if one of them fails you're still safe by having the second one in there this camera only has one so if you're capturing once in a lifetime things like a wedding for example you're probably not going to be using this camera as your main camera professional so is it so son's first perfect camera for everyone no there's no such thing but I think that what you get in the a6700 for $1,400 is unmatched and it very well could be the perfect camera for you so who's it for who is it the perfect camera for this is saying a lot I think it's the perfect camera for Content creators all the positives that we mentioned fit in perfectly for Content creators and all the downsides are really non-issues unless again you happen to be capturing once in a lifetime stuff I probably wouldn't get this camera it's absolutely not perfect but for the rest of us content creators out there it probably is perfect so what do you think is it Sony's first perfect hybrid camera I think it's pretty darn close next we're going to dive into all the Cinematic video settings and functions out of the a6700 this is a big one buckle up so for the past few months I've been shooting with the Sony a6700 right next to the a74 and the zv1 which are both cameras that should heavily outperform the a6700 but I've had a really hard time telling the footage apart all of the Cinematic functions in the a6700 that are working well for me coming at you so out of the box you want to switch the camera into manual mode as well as movie mode to be able to access all the settings that we're going to be talking about in today's video for our autofocus settings the first thing I want to talk about is how to use the screen to do touch tracking and be able to tap on any subject you want and track it to do that we're going to go into the menu I'm going to go to the bottom toolbox here the yellow tab over here number five under tou tou operation under touch pan first off make sure your touch operation is set to on and then for your touch panel settings we're going to go to shooting screen and then down here to touch function in shooting and make sure that is set to touch tracking and then let's talk about the actual autofocus speeds which is really important so down here on the AF MF purple tab we're going to go to AF MF we have these two settings here autofocus transition speed I'll typically for a shot like this an interview or like a studio shot I'm going to have this really low and if you ever have a situ situation happened where you're noticing that there's a lot of pulsing on the edges of your frame it's likely because you have a shot like this the lens does matter here but generally speaking you have your autofocus cranked up way too high I typically keep this a lot lower if not all the way down here the first setting now it's a fast moving subject I'll crank it up to something a lot faster to keep up with the action I'll do the same thing for the autofocus subject shift sensitivity same idea fast moving subject I'm way up here and then something a lot slower like this I'm usually down on two or one for locked on and trust me it's plenty fast to keep up with a really simple shot that we're looking at right now one thing you can do for this autofocus transition speed let's say you want to use the back of the camera to tap and do like a rack Focus what I'll usually do for that is I'll usually have it a lot slower like two or three to have a natural kind of transition between two subjects the a6700 has a really cool feature that allows us to really dial in our shutter speed if we want natural motion blur we want our shutter speed to be exactly twice the amount of our frame rate so for example if I'm shooting in 24 frames a second and I want good motion blur I want my shutter speed to be at exactly 1 over 48 previously with these cameras we'd be stuck at using something like 1 over 50 which is close to a 48 shutter but it's 50 so it's a little bit higher in the camera here if you go to the third tab on number five here under shutter SL silent anti flicker setting if you turn that on you'll have the ability looking at my shutter down here to get a lot more precise with your exact shutter speed and in this case for 24 frames a second we can get that dialed in in exactly 48 as we're going through this you might notice that you're coming across some menu items that you're going to want to find really quickly my menu so at the very top here this star you can customize these my menu tabs and put whatever menu item that you want in there how you do that under my menu setting go to add item and you can find Whatever item you want to add into your short cuted my menu system and build out your own custom tabs I have a few videos planned for this a6700 on the channel that I'm really excited about as well as a couple of in-depth guides on exposure as well as white balance not the most exciting topics but ones that are going to make your videos look really good if you can get it right anyways if you want to see those make sure you subscribe down below and while you're down there if you're getting something from this video let me know by giving it a tap on the thumbs up our codecs different frame rates and color options are probably one of the more important things with this camera and the a6700 gives us a ton of updated and high-end features I'm on the third tab here number one image quality and recording file format we have a few options let's talk about the 4K stuff that's probably what we're shooting if you have this camera we have xavc HS 4K xavc s4k and xavc Si 4K xavc SI is technically your highest quality they're also massive file sizes xavc s4k is one of the most common Sony codecs and the files are really nice and they're not too big and then you have xab HS which is my preferred codec the only problem with this one is that it's an h.265 file so you got to make sure that your computer can actually handle h.265 files before using it otherwise you're going to have some issues but technically it's a high quality file that's a really small file type so it's kind of the best of all worlds there I actually can't tell the difference between these three in terms of quality more on that in just a second and then in movie settings you can first have your frame rate options here now if you're using something like xavcs you're probably going to have like 30p in here and xavc HS we don't have 30 so you might see different frame rates if you're not using using xavc HS for regular motion stuff I'm shooting in 24p and then for slow motion you can use either 60 or 120 I'm typically using 60 more recently cuz I'm kind of getting tired of 120 but this camera can shoot 120 and the files are really nice coming out of it there next under record settings again these will look a little bit different depending upon which codec that you're using but here's our options in xavc HS 24p and it's the same general rule of thumb regardless of what codec you're using I'm going to be using the highest Megs possible in this case that's 100 Megs to get the best looking video and then always shooting in 422 with 10bit color nice that they includeed 10bit color in this a6700 it's one of my favorite things about this camera the truth is though between like 8bit and 10 bit we don't even have any 8bit options with xab C HS another codex you will 10 bit you just have way more flexibility over your colors if you want to be changing the colors and I just think generally speaking 10bit looks a lot better but I'm going to let you be the judge if you can tell the difference between xavcs SI xavcs and xab CS what I tell you about today's video sponsor which is audio using audio for copyright free music and sound effects has unlocked my creativity and I've used it for all of my recent YouTube videos having a vast library is really valuable and audio crushes it with that but it's not just stock music it's music made by real artists and I always feel great about putting it in my videos it's really helped me upgrade my edit with syn worthy premium sound and their sound effects live Library I think is one of the most underrated things on the entire platform so if you need copyright free music or sound effects you don't want to have any stress about any copyright claims and you want really high quality stuff you got to join me on team audio and check the special link down below using this code to save 70% off your first year it's already an incredibly valuable platform without that 70% off so make sure you take advantage of that I'm not sure how long they're going to make that thing last thank you audio for sponsoring the video I couldn't be happier to work with youall another cool feature that the a6700 has is the ability to install our own custom LS and look at that footage in camera before we even get into post here's how to do it first thing you want to do is put your SD card in your computer and then put whatever L file that you want to end up putting on the camera put that L file in this exact place on the SD card after that once you put your SD card in the camera here's how you find your L I'm on this pink tab under number five color and tone manage user Luts you can import your Luts here so once you have the lot stored on the SD card in the right spot it's going to pop up here and you can assign it to whatever container that you want after that you can select the lot right here and I'm using Sony's conversion L their official slog 3 direct 709 conversion L I think that's the best one and I'll put a link down below if you want to check that L out now if you're doing a workflow like I am where you're using your conversion LS because you want to be shooting an log 3 here's how you actually display that information back over here on the third tab we're going to go to number one and all the way down here in log shooting setting you want to turn log shooting on this is what's going to give the ability and you put s gamut 3 cine to S log 3 if that's the same workflow that you're using like I am and then when you go back over to this color and tone piece in my case this user one this is the exact conversion L you're going to see that in camera exactly what the log footage converted over to Sony's official conversion L is going to look like you also have the ability here to embed the L file I choose not to when that's on your actual L is going to be embedded into your footage when you look at it in post when it's off like I have it you're just seeing it on the back of the camera the way it's going to look once you apply that actual l in post so completely up to you I tend to keep it off and just look at it in post that way my file is always just a log file just in case something funky happens moving into our custom buttons and this is a huge efficiency hack for this camera because out a box I don't think the buttons are laid out all that well for video shooting here's how I have mine laid out down here on the toolbox we're going to go to operation customize and this is for photo this is for video and in the video setting what you can do you're just going to look different than mine right now we'll go through each of these how you map something is just go to the one you want to map let's say I want to map my afon button here for example I'm going to click that and I can go through the menu and find whatever I want to attach to that button my first first button this C1 button here on the side I have that mapped to audio record level something we use all the time in video shooting just a quick tap on that and I can change my audio levels really quickly number two this is just the afon button and I've mapped this over to white balance and yes on the camera you technically can use the touchscreen to access white balance as well as some other things maybe I'm old school but I like having the manual buttons for these it is nice though with this camera let's say you're doing like a vlog style shot camera screens flipped out being able to tap and change things as nice but generally speaking I like to have these custom map so when I tap my afon button I can quickly just access different white balance settings I'm typically using a Kelvin setting so just manually changing my white balance this is not a full tutorial on white balance that video is coming in the future like I mentioned critical to make your videos look good but I'm typically just manually selecting my white balance setting via this Kelvin meter here or I'll be in Auto WIP balance if I want to just have the camera do the work for me and on my auto wide balance you might be noticing mine says Auto white there's a difference between how the camera handles particularly like the warmer tones if you're in regular Auto white balance or Auto wipe balance white I prefer the tones and auto wipe balance white even though it's like an incredibly incredibly minuscule difference here's how to change that back in my menu system I'm going to go to this fourth Tab and I'm going to go to the white balance setting and then right here priority set in Auto wipe balance out of camera it's going to come in this Auto WIP balance standard that we just looked at or you can change to Auto wi balance white and then my trash can button down here this is going to be my auto WIP balance lock toggle when you're in Auto wi balance and you let the camera get the scene takes about 10 to 15 seconds let the camera get the tones of the scene and adjust its own Auto wipe balance and then what you can do when you tap this C3 button in this case this trash can you can lock the wipe balance so that way it won't change the tones as the scene might change a little bit you can lock that off and not have any color shifts and then it won't unlock or start getting Auto wi balance again until you toggle it off and then the camera will do its thing and calibrate the wi balance moving into tab two these two buttons here I have set to my zebra levels which is my preferred method to getting exposure that being something of the utmost importance to get good-looking videos what I have when I hit left on my dial it's going to bring up my zebra levels and I can just cycle through those and then when I tap my center button I'm going to be toggling zebras on or off to be able to see those when they're popping up on those different levels video coming in the very near future about nailing your exposure that's how I have mine set for quick access and then my right button I have that set to not set that's because I'm going to jump ahead here for a second I have my wheel set to ISO so as I spin this wheel my ISO is going to be increasing and maybe it's just me maybe I'm heavy-handed but whenever I'm twisting my ISO wheel I tend to like press down on that right button and the last thing I want is for some function that I don't want access to at that time to pop up so I just leave that one not set and then pressing down is going to bring up my focus area and I can cycle between the different type of focus areas that I want and when you do that you might find you have more options here these are the three that I use the most I'll explain how to minimize your actual options in a second wide I typically use for touch tracking Zone gives me ability to just choose a section that I want to have the focus on and then expand spot it's going to focus on whatever is in that inner box as well as anything that's just outside of it for really dialed in Focus how to change cuz I think there's like six or seven options when you cycle through your different Focus areas how to change that I'm going to go to this AF MF tab here under Focus area when you go over to focus area limit whatever you have checked are the ones that are going to show up when you try to cycle through your different Focus areas this Center one to me might as well just use zone or the expandable spot and put it in the middle and then this uh small medium and large spots kind of the same thing as expand spots Trying to minimize the noise and the options that I have for fast turnaround and the top of the camera this third tab uh this first red button here I have set to picture profile so I'm in log shooting right now so I can't actually bring up my picture profile this red record button we have up top it's really nice it's cool that they have that but if you go into your menu and you go to the bottom here under operation customize and you go to record with shutter and set that to on when you just tap your shutter button on top of the camera the same one you use to take photos it'll start and stop recording which will free up an extra button in this case the red button but to be used for a different customizable option which like I just mentioned I have that one set to picture profile 90% of the time I'm shooting in log and using my installed LS to do that but if I want to shoot in something like s cotone i turn my log shooting off tap that for picture profile pull up pp11 andom an as cotone this second one here the C2 button this is what I have set for Focus standard so let's say I want to change that Focus point right there how I would have to change where that's actually positioned I would have to go to hitting down on my my wheel pull up my focus area go to Zone set it hit down again go to this expand spot and now I can move it around right kind of annoying a lot of steps there or because I've mapped that Focus standard to C2 if I just tap C2 it lets me move that Focus Point around with just one click of a button and this fourth tab if you happen to have a lens that has a customizable button I have M set to focus mode so I can just toggle between autofocus or manual focus and then lastly for my Wheels this front dial I have that set for aperture my back when I have set to shutter speed and this back wheel here like we've already talked about that is set to ISO I found that setting my most frequently used settings and functions to my customizable buttons is absolutely the way to go but there's still ones that are really good and the ones that I still use often but not quite as often as the ones I just map to my custom buttons for those ones I put in my function menu so when I'm in this function menu up top is for photos we're talking about video today you can customize all of these as well how to change them just select the slot you want just like on our custom buttons go through the menu and you can map whatever you want to that area pulling up the actual function menu here we're going to look at what I have set first thing is focus mode this is togging between autofocus and manual focus yes that's redundant seems inefficient right because I just talked about having that set to the customizable button on the lens but I don't always have a lens that has a customizable button so I want to make sure I have quick access to toggling from autofocus to manual focus and these three are all of my codec frame rates and bit rates that we talked about so quick access to be able to change if I want to be an xavc HSS or Si what frame rate I want I can get that really quickly there and then lastly my actual record setting I can quickly access that with that one so these three used all the time and then we have these two settings which are going to look familiar this is how I can quickly access them my autofocus transition speed as well as my autofocus subject shift sensitivity this next one here is my peaking display so when I'm in manual focus I can turn my peaking set to on and then we're going to get those dancing ants around around whatever is in Focus steady shot is next this camera does have the ability to go into active stability you're going to get a 1.1 times crop on that you're going to get a lot better stability for like handheld shots or like a vlog style shot standard or off is what I'll have if I'm like locked off on a tripod and the nice thing about the a6700 is that it's a high megapixel sensor so it's downsampling a 6K image to 4K what's cool about that is when we go into even it's a 1.1 crop on active if you drop in on a true 4K sensor you might lose a little bit of quality because we're down samp thing from 6K to 4K you're not going to notice much of a quality loss here whatsoever and these last three are my autof framing this camera comes with some of the new features of that autof framing which is something that I didn't know I needed until I first had it in the zv1 especially if you're like a solo shooter having the ability to almost have a look like someone's filming you is pretty cool so I can turn my auto framing simply just on or off via this function here and then my crop level you can go something wide medium or tight all have their different uses and then lastly the framing tracking speed I found that just like autofocus just have this match whatever the action is if it's fast action make it fast if it's slow action make it slow for the most natural look memory recall so with this camera pick your most common stylish shot and then put all of your settings together right your frame rates your shutter speed your ISO your white balance put all of your settings that you want literally everything autofocus speeds everything put that in and then when you go here you're going to go to camera set memory you can assign you have three containers so do this for each of your most common style of shots and then when you tap this it's going to assign all of those settings to that container you can then repeat that process for number two and three instead of putting the camera just in manual mode you can put it in container one two or three and that's what's going to give you the ability to just quickly access those settings if you want to see how I have mine set up for number one two and three a studio shot of Vlog shot and slow motion or my most common three you want to see every single detail of how I have that set up there's a free link below I've got a video walkthr to show you exactly that there are a few like random annoying settings that we're going to want to take into consideration the first one I'm down here under this toolbox and I want to go down to finder slm monitor so under this one here is Select finder or monitor out a box it's going to come in Auto so anything that you put behind your viewfinder it's going to automatically just turn off the back of the screen or just switch it over to the viewfinder so I have this set to monitor manual which means that the monitor is what's always on the back of the screen display is always on until I come in here maybe switch it over to putting it on the viewfinder this monitor brightness sunny weather is going to drain the battery a bit faster but it's also going to make the screen really bright compared to manual where it's not quite as bright still down here on the toolbox I'm going to go to number nine and then over here auto power off temp so when you first turn on the camera it might have you change this if you happen to miss that and your camera set set to standard it might overheat a little bit more frequently than you wanted to I have this set to high and I've had no overheating issues with the camera yet and then this power save start time out a box it comes in somewhere around like one or two minutes I think and essentially what that means if you just turn the camera on let it sit in this case for 2 minutes uh it's going to just turn off and you got to go back in like rogle it on and off it's kind of annoying I have mine set to 30 just in case I want to set the camera up get the studio set up and then start shooting I don't want it just to turn off in the meantime I also don't want it set to off where if I happen to leave my camera on and put it in my bag it's going to kill the battery so 30 minutes is the medium that works well for me if you're wondering how to get the red frame around the screen when you're actually recording if you go to this third tab we're going to go to number 10 shooting display emphasize record display set that to on those cinematic video settings really unlock the full potential out of the Sony a6700 but what about when you're in those low light those tricky low light situations how do you make your images and your videos actually look good let's take a look at that you can can get excellent performance out of the Sony a6700 this shop for example is at 10,000 ISO and the closest thing I have to a key light is a street light that's about 50 ft away and look how clean this looks I'm going to show you what works well for me to get consistent results and low light situations it comes down to three simple things the first two are kind of obvious but I do have a few tricks that you might not know about they're going to make a pretty big difference and the third one was a huge aha moment for me when you get them right you'll get footage that looks like this even at those higher isos when I first started shooting videos way back with the a73 I kept seeing people getting amazing low light videos and I was rarely making mine look good I get lucky sometimes but I was rarely able to have a repeatable outcome so I got a little bit obsessed and I spent years identifying the main factors that led to finally getting repeatable and greatl looking videos out of Sony cameras in low light environments and I'm going to share those with you today so that you too can get great results with your Sony a6700 the first thing that will make or break your lowl videos or photos for that matter is exposure regardless of what picture profile I'm in I use the method I'm about to run through with you and the results have been really solid whether that's no picture profile or s cotone or S log 3 my go-to method for nailing my exposure for consistent results is using the zebra method it's really simple and through a lot of trial and error I found that it gives me far better results than the other popular method which is overexposing to or exposing to 0.0 or overexposing to plus 0.3 or plus 0.7 or plus 1.3 or whatever other overexposure values are being thrown out there right now here's how to do it this is the anel atoms exposure chart I'll include a free link down below if you want your own copy anyways it represents the values that we want to expose things to this is all going to make sense it's a bit complicated though so let's simplify it and only look at the skin tones and the brightest highlights as those things are prevalent in the majority of the shots that we're getting next identify the zebra settings on your a6700 I've custom mapped the ability to toggle zebras on or off to this button here and then I've custom mapped the level that I'm setting the zebras to to when they actually start to show up on the back of the camera to this button here the nice thing is that those zebra values match the chart perfectly let's say that I have this skin tone in the shot I'll simply set my zebra level or my zebra value in camera to that exact same number from the chart and then I'll increase exposure in this example I'm just using ISO but I'll increase exposure until the zebras just start to appear on the brightest part of that skin tone and then I'll pull back by just one ISO click and that will be my exposure and if I don't have a skin tone in the shop I'm just going to find a light like a practical light that's in the frame I know that light would represent the brightest highlight in the scene so I'll set my zebra value to match the chart which would be around 100 and then do the same method of bringing up the iso until the zebras just barely start to appear on on that highlight and then pull back by one click and boom we have exposure look the zebra method is not a perfect way to get exposure they all have their tradeoffs but this has been the most consistent for me and if you haven't used the zebra method and you're also unhappy with the exposure of your lowlight shots I'd encourage you to give it a try and I think you'll see really quickly why I use it so much the second thing that's going to upgrade your low light results is choosing the right ISO in short increasing the ISO on the camera is going to introduce noise into the image it's also going to potentially do some color shifting and overall make it a lot softer and these are the things that going to make your low life videos not look so good but there are a few things that we can do in camera using higher isos that are going to clean it up the Sony a6700 performs really well in low light situations especially for a crop sensor camera and one of the main reasons for that is it has what's called dual Baseline ISO let's break that down just for a moment let's pretend that the a6700 only had one Baseline ISO what is a baseline ISO first off every picture profile on the camera is going to have a little bit of a different Baseline ISO but generally speaking it's the lowest ISO that you can use for that picture profile and that lowest ISO is also going to give you the best performance meaning a lot less noise than the higher isos so for the a6700 and staying with this EX example of only having one Baseline ISO we'll talk about the second one in just one second when I increase the iso gain the noise would simply increase for each increased ISO value so if I wanted clean photos and videos the lower the iso the better but when we're in low life situations we typically have to shoot in higher isos and that's where the problems come into play Enter the benefits of the feature that's called second Baseline ISO a second Baseline ISO allows us to get a low noise performance reset at a higher ISO value than the original first Baseline and the second Baseline ISO happens to be exactly five clicks above the Baseline ISO easy to remember isn't it five clicks let's break that down if I'm in s citone as an example the first Baseline ISO is 125 so one 2 3 four and five clicks and we're in our second Baseline ISO which is 400 and for SL log 3 the Baseline ISO is 800 so again one 2 3 four five clicks on my ISO and the second Baseline ISO is 2500 I'll include this free chart I'll put a link down below if you want your own copy of every single picture profile Baseline and second Baseline ISO in the a6700 so I'm in SL log 3 here where we learned that 800 and 2500 ISO will be our best performers in terms of having the cleanest videos and photos this means that I'd rather shoot at 2500 even though it's technically higher than 2,000 because ISO 2500 will have better low light performance so because we get that ISO performance reset at that second Baseline ISO as we increase the ISO from there we will start to introduce some noise but can you imagine how noisy it would be with without that second Baseline ISO reset what this essentially means is that we can shoot at higher isos and still get a really clean result with that being said I typically won't shoot over 12,800 ISO in the a6700 because the image starts to fall apart a little bit and might not be quite usable the final component that's working really well for me to get ideal results in low Liv situations with the a6700 is actually in the color panel of our editing software okay I'm in Premiere Pro here but but the concepts that I'm going to review are Universal for whatever editing software that you're using and the amounts that you'll make these tweaks are going to depend on your shot but generally speaking here's what you're going to want to do to reduce the noise in your low light shots I'll bring the contrast up the Shadows are going to need to come down and the blacks are also going to need to come down a bit and yes this does mean that we might be breaking a rule here that rule being over here on the lumos Scopes we're not going to want too much of the data being pushed down to zero because we're essentially losing detail in the shadows but what that's also doing it's going to clean up the blacks and the shadows of our shot and make them a lot less noisy so in lowl situations at higher isos I almost always have to choose do I want to pull the blacks down and make it look nice and clean or do I want to keep them high and not break that rule but have a lot of noise in the shot and if that's my choice I will bring those blacks and shadows down every single time so I want you to pay extra close attention to the shadows of this shot because here is what we're left with after making those adjustments in our color panel and because y'all are probably going to ask anyways my settings when I'm in low light I shoot an xavcs 4K and I'm usually in SL log 3 with the S gamut 3 Sy color profile because I think slog 3 handles the higher isos the best and my ISO level is a range from 2500 and I won't go higher than 12,800 all of that should make your lowl light situations a lot more manageable out of the a6700 I'm going to take youall on a bit of an adventure for this next one we're going back to my home area of the Pacific Northwest to take a look at how to get the best looking and most highquality photos using all the photo settings out of this camera when you're in one of those once in a lifetime situations with your brand new Sony a6700 you want to make sure that your photos come out sharp that they're exposed well that the colors and tones look good that you're able to navigate the camera in an extremely efficient way and that's exactly what we're covering in today's video I was recently back home in the Pacific Northwest in a lot of those once in a-lifetime situations and I can't wait to share with you how well the photos turned out and what's been working really well for me to get the best looking images using this new camera before we look at some of my favorite shots from the trip let's make sure we're on the same page with some basic fundamental settings first thing we want to do with these foundational settings is make sure that the camera is in manual mode this is what's really going to unlock all the settings that we can actually adjust most commonly things like ISO or our shutter speed or our aperture additionally a lot of the things that we're going to cover in some future tips we're going to want to make sure that we're in manual to be able to access some of those settings as an example if you're in auto mode and you try and change some of the settings that we want to be using a little bit later they might be grayed out and that's because the camera is in Auto so to get full access make sure you're in manual on that note if you're just starting out and you want to be in Auto because you're not comfortable using manual settings yet that's totally cool and you're still going to get something from the points in this video but at some point I encourage you to jump off the deep end dive into manual even if it's just for practicing just for practicing jump into manual and start to get used to that because you're going to be able to get a lot better images but I recognize that it does take some practice next let's talk about about how to navigate the camera extremely efficiently and that's going to come back to our function menu and our custom buttons those once in a lifetime situations you got to hit your settings quick I mean even if you're just taking product shots or something that's not once in a lifetime being able to navigate the camera efficiently is really important okay starting with the function menu I'm down here on the briefcase I'm going to go to dial customize no I'm going to go to operation customize Under function menu settings and this top one here this is for photo down here is for video we're talking about photo today and anytime you want to change one of these yours is going to look different than mine but when you start changing it it's going to change how these look I can just click on the cell that I want to change I can tap that I can go through the menu and find the thing that I want to map there here's how I have M set the first thing I have is going to be silent mode so just being able to turn the camera from that shutter sound over to silent mode sometimes that's important if you need to be in a really quiet setting next is my autofocus tracking sensitivity so how fast my autofocus is tracking next my file format this is when I can jump between raw and jpeg interval shooting if I want to do time lapses soft skin effects not something I use super often some people like it the way they look so I will have that as an option if the person I'm shooting wants that drive mode this is changing everything I'm just going to actually go into the actual function menu here drive mode this is an important one that we will touch on in just a few tips I can change whether I'm doing continuous shooting so fast frames per second or single shooting or some kind of timed shoot next my last thing that I actually have set is this recognition Target this is how you're going to be toggling between what the AI Auto Focus system in this a6700 is picking up as the main subject of autofocus we have human animal SL bird or you can Target animal or bird for those bird photographers out there insects cars and trains as well as airplanes we also do have the ability on the touch screen on this camera to cycle those I don't love that there is nice that we have touch functions on here I do use some of them but I do like the ability just to have the manual quick switch on that as opposed to toggling through on the touchcreen and then I actually just leave these ones completely not set those ones below that I can't even highlight right now I'll show you what that looks like maybe over here makes more sense I have these ones just not set that's an option you can choose in the menu at the very bottom just to leave it completely blank uh I don't use them I don't want to just put things in there to have them in there it's confusing so I just leave those completely completely blank there okay next on the same tab here I'm going to go to custom key SL dial settings on the photo mode not video but for photo and everything that we look at here what gets highlighted is just in the same conjunction of what it is on the actual camera so the first thing I have this custom one button I actually have that not set for photos I have all these things set for video but for photography if I don't need it I don't want to access it frequently I don't want to have that custom button set to anything if I happen to tap it on accident button two afon this is the button that actually says afon and this is the one that I'm going to allow for back button focusing I don't like half pressing the shutter for Focus I like holding this to tell the camera to start focusing before I take the shot number three is auto white balance lock toggle I will save that point for a future tip coming up a really important thing about white balance this third button here which happens to be custom button three which is the trash can and I have that set for auto wi balance lock toggle more on that shortly but that's where I have that set and then my center button of the wheel I have that toggling whether I want my zebros to be on or off so just tapping that will let me know if I have zebras I use that for exposure which we will spend time on in just a moment and then tapping left on that wheel is how I choose my actual zebra levels so I can quickly just decide if what my zebra's on or off and then I can jump over and find what level I want them at with really quick navigation so going into drive mode here on the right yes I have that as a function menu button as well so a bit of redundancy there tends to be at least for me what happens if I sometimes forget that it's on the right I know it's in my function menu so kind of a fail safe and this is one that I use pretty often so I have some redundancy there and then tapping down on the wheel is my focus area so just choosing what type of area I want to use for my focus after that let's go into one of the more important ones I have this movie button up top set to not set I don't want it typically comes out a box and you can set it to anything else but again if I don't use something on there I don't want to have too many buttons that do something I have it to not set and I especially don't want it set to start movie recording cuz when I'm in photo mode and I hit that and the camera starts recording video uh not a good situation so I leave that one alone and then uh Focus standard for my C2 button and that's an important one that's what's going to allow me to tap that and move my focus Point really quickly that does come out of box that Focus standard typically out of box comes out set here as this center button which does the same thing but again I use my zebras incredibly often and having those two buttons next to each other to turn zebras on and then find the level I like having that set right there but you can do with it what is going to make the most sense for you this is what's working well for me if I have a lens that has a custom button on it I leave that set to focus hold and then lastly my dials I leave these out of box the only thing that I change these two two here for my aperture and shutter speed I leave those alone but down here I do change my wheel to ISO um that way all I have to do to change my ISO settings is spin the wheel and that's a lot more like most cameras that we're used to a quick ISO adjustment as opposed to what comes in the camera of tapping right and then cycling through your different ISO tip number two is all about nailing exposure looking at some of these photos from the trip it was really important that I got the exposure just right regardless if it was an epic landscape shot or more of a portrait I used the zebra method to make sure that I had my exposure dialed in I'm going to show you in the a6700 exactly how to do that I do have these custom mapped on my custom dials which we did talk about earlier but here's what they live in the menu if you're curious I'm on the uh purple tab here for exposure I'm down here on number seven for zebra display clicking here is how you can select if you want your zebras to be on or off and then you can click here and you can choose your different zebra levels I'll be using my custom buttons and showing you this for the remainder of this section of the video but tapping my center button is how I turn zebra displays on or off and then tapping left I can choose the different levels I usually use down here in my custom ranges I actually like using lower limit over the standard range and there's some complexity there that I will save for a future video but I like using lower limit and then just changing the zebra values here of where the zebras are going to start to appear on the image but there in BS the question of like well what do you even set your zebra levels to and this chart right here which I'll provide another link down below if you want to access that chart for free for your own copy is going to tell us exactly what to set the zebra levels to this chart represents the values to expose things too on the IR scale so on the far right we have 100 the benefit of that is when you're changing your zebra levels all of the values that you're setting whether it be 100 or you're sliding down to 90 just like on the chart or 80 just like on the chart you're essentially telling the camera I want to see zebras on the parts of the image that are at in this case at 80 or anything above again it syncs up with the chart perfectly so if you memorize this chart or download it and have access to it on a regular basis you'll start to realize that maybe you want to expose your brightest highlights to close to 100 or maybe a skin tone to 70 this is how you do that is using that chart in conjunction with zebras so when I have zebrra turned on and set the values that I want all that I have to do is adjust the exposure to the shot using either ISO aperture or shutter speed until the zebras just barely start to appear on the part of the image that I'll be focusing my exposure on let's call that area the subject of exposure the zebras might also be visible in other parts of the image if it has things that are at that same value or higher than your subject of exposure but just ignore those and make sure that your zebras are just barely starting to show up on the part of your subject of exposure as you raise your exposure and once they just barely start to show up boom that will be your exposure and since you're all going to ask in the comments anyway about what lenses I use with the a6700 to get the shots that you're seeing in today's video I'm going to show you what they are while I tell you about today's video sponsor which is audio audio is an outstanding service to get completely copyright free music and sound effects and they are my go-to resource for all of my YouTube videos one of my favorite things about audio is that it isn't stock music it's music from real artists and I always feel really good about using them in my videos and that sound effects library is so so underrated this has been such an important aspect of unleashing my creative potential and they make music licensing so easy and you don't have to worry about any copyright claims on your creative projects they are really taking care of all the viewers of this channel by hooking y'all up with 70 % off your first year making that first year ridiculously affordable and you can find all the details to how to get that hook up with the link down below thank you for sponsoring this video audio y'all keep doing what you're doing I am a huge fan and I may or may not have tried to do this sponsorship Spot while doing a cold Plunge in an Alpine Lake but it uh didn't go well legitimately frigid we also have to deal with all these flies these flies are coming in hot making it real challenging all the information again these flies join me there's too many flies anyways join me on team audio I think you're going to see what I see and how great they are for all of your creative [Music] projects tip number three white balance I found that to get consistent tones in my photos I need to get my white balance right in camera sure I'm shooting in raw and when I get these photos into post I can manipulate the white balance pretty heavily but like I said I've always found the most consistent results when you get it right in camera when I took some of these shots I was really focused on getting the white balance right the a6700 has a few really interesting tricks that you can do in the camera to do just that so when it comes to a couple of the auto white balance features that the a6700 has there's there's two things I want to talk about I'm on the uh the purple tab here the exposure tab down here on Tab five for white balance and the second tab here priority set and auto wi balance you actually have some options of how you want the camera to handle certain tones mostly the whites and ambient tones of the scene it's going to come out of box and auto white balance standard you can also use Auto wi balance ambient or what I choose which is the auto wipe balance white so when you have your camera in Auto wipe balance it's going to be essentially using whatever you have set here to manipulate the tones it's not much and it's only in certain scenes but what I've found is that I prefer what the auto white balance white does to the tones as opposed to something like the auto wipe balance standard it's a very very small thing play with that see what you like at least for me in the tones of images that I get and that I like the most this tends to be the best fit and the next one is all about locking the auto wipe balance so instead of having to try to decide like what white balance to use whether you want to go down here and adjust the actual Kelvin or try to figure out if you're in like a cloudy day or some shade or some daylight what you can do is just keep the camera in Auto again I have mine set to the white so your auto might look a little bit different but leave it set in Auto and then you can see that the camera is in Auto by that display there by saying it's in AWB and then if you want your tones to be really consistent amongst your images assuming that they're in the exact same scene this is important but give the camera a second to get the tones and the white balance of the scene and then I said earlier that I have my C3 button the trash can I'm going to tap that now and you'll see in the bottom right hand of the screen awbl comes up that essentially means that I gave the camera a second to get the tones and then I locked it so it's not going to change the tones at all so all the shots that I do while this is locked it's going to stay in what it calibrated the white balance to be where that's really important is if I again I want my tones to be consistent in the exact same scene with the exact same lighting let the camera get the scene lock it and all those shots are going to have the exact same wi balance when I go to a new scene I'm just going to tap my C3 button again I'm going to unlock it I do it all over again let the camera get the tones and calibrate the white balance and then lock it off again and repeat if you're as impressed as I am with the photos coming out of this a6700 give this video a tap on the thumbs up and while you're down there if you want to see all of the future videos and tutorials that I have planned for this camera make sure you subscribe so you don't miss [Music] those tip number four and five we're blending these two together cuz they just compliment each other so well well is autofocused and whether or not to shoot in raw or jpeg I was able to get the camera out for some Wildlife style shots on this really cool whale watching tour I was really happy with how these shots turned out but to get these shots to look good and sharp I had to make sure that the camera had the right autofocus settings I also had to have the correct raw settings to get the fastest burst or fastest frames per second to capture some of the action these autofocus and raw settings tips are really simple but they can make a huge impact let's take a look at exactly what I did to get these photos Okay autofocus settings is really simple I have that in my function menu and I can change my autofocus tracking speeds here you can either have it as locked on or really responsive I usually leave it at 4 so somewhere close to responsive this isn't going to make a huge difference when it comes to photography but almost always I want the autofocus tracking to be quick if I'm trying to actually track a subject for video it's a little bit different we'll probably come way down here but for photography somewhere around here is usually what I want because we're typically wanting to track some kind of fast moving subject and even if it's not a fast moving subject we want our autofocus tracking to be able to keep up with whatever we're doing as an example when I'm shooting wildlife and the whals are moving pretty quickly I want to keep my I'm trying to track them I want to keep make sure that the camera is autofocused and it's ridiculously good in this camera is keeping up and it actually performed extremely well next is going to be the raw over jpeg so I'm over here I'm going to go up to the camera and we're going to go to image quality file format and we can choose either jpeg or raw we can do both if you want to do that but raw is going to give us the ability to manipulate the images the absolute most that we possibly can uh jpeg is for like quick turnaround stuff I am 99.9% of the time shooting in raw and then the raw file type to get the fastest frames per second so the fastest burst rate we want to be in this compressed version I haven't seen a huge difference between these two lossless is not going to give us the ability to have a fast Burst it's still pretty quick but the file sizes are a bit bigger and it is uh it's just a bigger file so it can't feed the buffer nearly as quickly so I keep this Inc compressed 100% of the time but especially on this next point that I'm about to make here and we go to our drive mode when we want the highest frames per second in raw which is this High plus we're going to get the fastest frames per second on our shutter when we have this in compressed raw so on my Wildlife example earlier fast moving subjects I wanted to be able to capture as I filled up an SD card so fast uh but we wanted to capture as many images as possible to try to get that that perfect shot then this is how I did that by using continuous shooting High using the 11 frames per second that the a6700 does and I made sure that the camera was not in lossless that it was in compressed raw if you're in jpeg you'll still get that really fast frames per second but uh we don't want to shoot JP we want to be shooting in raw photo settings check video settings check low light situations check a review on if the camera is even good in the first place check I guess all that's left is to take a look at what accessories are actually worth picking up for your Sony a6700 so you just got your brand new Sony a6700 and you're like I need some cool for it there's one accessory that I've come across that actually makes the a6700 incredible it's not a new microphone although this new Sony ecm1 is really good it's not even a new travel tripod although this one's really good too it's something far more simple you see camera cages can be really good for a lot of reasons this is this is all going to make sense besides the cage providing all the benefits like the obvious of being able to completely rig your camera out for the record small rig makes a really really good one so besides all that they can also make the camera a little bit more robust and get rid of this little this little pinky floating pinky issue here the a6700 grip is incredible but uh but yeah and the nice thing about the a6700 is that it's really compact so putting a cage on it just to get rid of our little uh little problem here doesn't really make all that much sense and small rig also solve that that by making this half cage which is a little bit more Compact and still SES a little issue here but can still be maybe a little bit bulky for this compact camera but then we have this $29 little accessory that makes the a6700 incredible I know it's the little things that make all the difference let me put this into perspective this is my $160 grip extension thing for the Sony a7c Mark I and I think it's awful see it does the job of making the grip a bit bigger and being able to put the entire camera grip in one hand but then if you want to actually Mount your camera with this $160 grip extension you have to put your your plate on the bottom of it and then it makes the camera impossible to stand up straight and just makes it kind of weird but then with this small rig base plate we can actually fit our entire hand on the camera and it actually doubles as an ARCA Swiss style plate so you can attach it to your tripod or whatever else you want to connect it to like a gimbal but then one more little benefit here is that it lays flat everything we covered today including this fantastic little base plate that even has a little slot here to be able to take your battery out nice and Sleek everything we covered today I put all the links down below if you want to find them all right that's all I have to give you for this camera if you made it to the end you're a beast and hopefully I've made you 10 times more confident with your Sony a6700 I'll see you in the next video take care see you