Setup Menus in Admin Panel
Your SD card is probably the culprit here. Take a look at the monitor or viewfinder. Are both card icons RED?
Now check the SD card door at the back of the camera. It must be closed in order to work! If the card icons are still red after you close the door, use the Slot Select button to make sure the little triangle is pointing at the green icon on your monitor!
Hold on a second! You may not want to get rid of them once you know what they’re doing! By default nothing that appears on your screen is recorded- except the image, of course! There are a few different types of patterns you may see on your screen.
Diagonal black and white stripes will appear on the screen if you tap the button marked “ZEBRA” on the side of the camera. Areas of the image that have zebra stripes are overexposed and may clip: all of the detail and color will be replaced with white in the clip.
When you see yellow (or red or white) lines around the edges of an item, you know that you have pressed the button on the side of the camera marked “PEAKING”. You can turn it off if you want to by pressing the button again, but peaking can be very useful: it highlights areas of your image where there is sharp, well-defined detail in your shot. In short, the areas where you see the yellow lines are most likely in focus. While nothing is 100% accurate- objects that are showing peaking may still be a little soft if focus isn’t perfect- peaking should help you to avoid an overly soft image. It also makes focusing the lens manually much easier than “doing it by eye”.
Magnification
OK, so it’s not quite a “pattern” but it can still throw you off if you see this and you’re not expecting it. When you press the “MAGN.” button on the side of the body the camera “zooms in” to a closeup of one area of the screen. (You can change this area using the joystick on the handle or on the monitor.) You can use this closeup view to ensure that whatever you need to be in focus appear as as sharp as your lens can make it. And you can turn it off by pressing the “MAGN.” button again.
First of all, check your lens and make sure the switch is set to AF rather than MF.
Next, hit “Menu” and navigate to the camera icon and then the AF settings. There are two options: One Shot and Continuous. In Continuous AF mode, the camera will continuously attempt to adjust itself in order to keep focus on whatever it thinks is the most important thing in your frame. When it guesses right, it’s great. Sometimes it doesn’t guess right and the footage is unusable. Continuous mode is great when you’re shooting fast-moving action or flying the camera on a gimbal. Not so great when you’re conducting an interview or shooting something that isn’t moving much.
In those situations it’s usually preferable to use One Shot AF. This is like letting the camera help you to manually focus. To use it, you hit the button on the front of the camera. This will focus the lens on the selected area and then keep it focused on that point after you release the button.
Audio setup can be a little tricky. There are four ways to record audio with the C100: with the internal microphone, with the microphones built into the handle, using external microphones plugged into the XLR jacks on the handle, or using an external microphone plugged into the 3.5mm jack on the camera body. (We’re not going to talk about that last one since we don’t use any microphones that plug into a 3.5mm jack.)
Recording to the internal microphone is easy: don’t connect the handle and press record. That’s it. The sound will be terrible but it will at least give you a “scratch track” to help you sync good sound later, or even to use as a reference when you do a foley session.
Recording to the microphone in the handle is pretty easy. Remember to plug the handle cable into the camera!
Now make sure that the switches on the audio interface are set up correctly.
The audio inputs for Ch1 and Ch2 are set to INT (for internal microphone). The input is set to Mic since the microphone does not require phantom power. And here the gain control is set to A for automatic. This way the camera will set the levels automatically. Turning the wheels on top of the interface will not do anything. (You generally only want to do this if you’ve got to leave the camera unattended- while shooting a conference, for instance.)
If you’re trying to record with a shotgun microphone like the Rode NTG1 you’ve got to set up the audio interface a little differently. First make sure you know which channel you’re plugging into! In the photo below we’re plugging into Channel 1.
Let’s look at how we might choose to set this up on the audio interface.
We’ve switched the gain control from auto (A) to manual (M). Now the wheel on top of the interface will control the gain. Use it to set your voice levels to approximately -12Db! We’ve set the input switch to Mic+48v since the Rode NTG1 is a condenser microphone that requires phantom power.And since this is an external mic, we’ve naturally set the selector switch to EXT.
Notice that we haven’t changed any of the settings on the CH2 side of the interface. This way we’ll record a backup track from the microphone on the handle which could come in handy if we end up with any clipping on the shotgun mic.
As long as the interface is configured correctly you should be able to see the levels moving around on the monitor screen. You can give the shotgun a gentle tap to make sure its connected. You should hear it loud clear and you should see a spike on the CH1 meter.
If you still can’t hear it though, there might be a problem with how your audio output is configured. Hit menu and navigate to the little musical note icon, then select audio output. You should see a screen like the one below:
“Monitor Channels” determines what you’re hearing through the headphones. If you’ve got a shotgun on CH1 and the internal handle mic on CH2, then these settings will give you the shotgun mic in your left ear and the handle mic in the right. If monitor output was set to CH1/CH1, then you would ONLY hear the shotgun mic. If it was set to CH2/CH2 then you would ONLY hear the handle mic.Make sure it’s set to what you want to be listening to! And make sure that the Headphone Volume isn’t set to 0!
