Camera Settings You NEED to Know

Hey everybody! My name is Adrienne. I’m so glad you’re here. Today we’re talking about aperture, ISO, frame rate, and shutter speed and how all 4 of those things interact and impact each other. These are things that are really important for you to get a good grasp on for recording video content. I just did 4 short videos on each of these topics. If you didn’t see them or you want a quick refresher, you can click over to shorts here on YouTube, or I’ll link the reels in the description box below.

Let’s compare all of these things to this little wooden Jeep. Whenever my husband, Nick, goes to Lowe’s, they give him one of these little free kits that you can take home and build with your kid. My older son loves them. He is very proud. They built this one together recently and I thought I’d showcase it here. 

Sorry for the tangent. Alright. Camera, aperture, ISO, frame rate, and shutter speed. Let’s call the steering wheel the aperture. It controls where you go and you can’t do anything else with just this piece of the Jeep. Now you’ve got the brakes - let’s pretend we can see the little brake pedal there on the driver’s side floor and call them the ISO brakes. We’re getting better - we can steer and we can stop but we can’t go, so we have frame rate wheels - that is hard for me to say. And finally, the engine can be the shutter speed. All 4 pieces of the car, working together, is going to give me a great experience. A great road trip. They have all been designed to work together. 

Now admittedly I have a tenuous grasp on how cars actually work, like in detail, but that Jeep analogy is supposed to help those of you who may not understand that aperture, ISO, frame rate, and shutter speed are all interconnected. It’s important to use all of them properly so they all can work together in harmony. To make great looking videos and be fully proficient in using your camera, these 4 things are really critical.

I want to start with frame rate. Frame rate refers to how quickly you are either capturing or playing back a sequence of still images. The standard frame rate for movies is 24 fps - that means that in those movies there are 24 frames in 1 second. This frame rate allows for a little bit of something called motion blur. If you are watching a movie about a basketball game, 24fps gives the ball some motion blur. Your eye doesn’t see it perfectly, but most things in the shot are clear enough that your brain can make sense of what is going on.

Now maybe you are thinking - when can I not use 24 fps? That depends on what you are recording and the effects you want to create. A faster frame rate shows movement more clearly, so if you want to make a movie about that basketball game but have the motion be more crisp and clear, use a faster frame rate. But you aren’t going to go higher than 120fps because it’s going to require a different camera in order to make your footage look natural. 

I have heard people use frame rate and shutter speed interchangeably when talking about video, but it’s important to know that they are not the same thing. The shutter speed measures how long the shutter is open in the camera. This is one of the things that controls how much light enters the camera and hits the sensor and it’s usually for fractions of a second. The faster the shutter speed, the less light is allowed in, and the slower the shutter speed, the longer that is open and more light is allowed in. The rule to follow is that in order to get realistic motion that our human eye is used to seeing, the shutter speed needs to be set to twice the frame rate. 

Alright. Aperture. It’s the hole in the diaphragm in your camera and it also controls how much light hits the sensor. The size of the aperture is measured in f stops. My camera is set to a low f stop - I think it’s at an f/4, and it’s letting a lot of light hit the sensor and that is giving me this nice, bright image. But that low f stop is also impacting what is going on in the background. Do I look a little bit blurry? That’s called depth of field. This shot has a relatively shallow depth of field. That means I’m in focus, but my background is a bit out of focus. Making your background blurry is getting your viewers to focus on you. The background is there, it looks nice, but it’s not pulling attention. (broll of a landscape photo) Now you can see in this photo that I took in Alaska, everything is in focus. The entire landscape is crisp, clear, and sharp. If you want your viewers to see everything then you need to use a higher f stop like f/11 or f/22. That will make sure that you are really capturing all the details.

And finally, ISO. If anybody out there is interested in film, ISO is the digital way of talking about ASA. ASA describes how sensitive a particular roll of film is to light, and ISO describes how sensitive the camera sensor will be to light. A high ISO is more sensitive to light so you’d use that setting in a low light situation, like indoors or at night. Then a low ISO is the opposite and you’ll have a lower setting if you are shooting outside, middle of the day, with full, bright sunlight.

Ok, let’s set the scene. You are filming inside. Your frame rate is 24fps which means your shutter speed is set to 50. You’ve decided you’d like to have a lower aperture so maybe your lap could look a bit blurry. And your ISO is set to 500 - it’s a pretty bright room, lots of white, but you are still inside. But things are just a little too dark. So you decide to crank up your ISO. Wa-la. It brightens up the shot. But with each ISO setting, the image gets a little bit worse. It gets more grainy or noisy. There’s less contrast and less dynamic range. 

Personally, I try to keep my ISO settings in between 400 and 800. That way I know I’m getting the highest quality image for the environment I’m shooting in.

The big thing I want you to take away from this is how interconnected these 4 concepts are. They all control light and they all control the quality of the image, among many other things. The more you use these settings, the more you practice with them, the more confidence you have in your own production. Eventually you’ll look at your footage and think - oh I should have closed my aperture a bit, or oh I could bump the ISO next time. 

So that’s it from me. Leave a comment below if you’d like me to dive into more camera basics. And if you’d like to see more, I hope you’ll subscribe. Thanks for watching!