Depth of Field

As part of the learning process of how to use the camera and ultimately film the music video. I have undertaken several tasks in learning different aspects of the camera.

Firstly Depth of field, this is an important aspect of the camera to learn about as it can have a huge impact to the professionalism and overall look of the footage and music video.

Depth of field is all about the focal range. There are three main parts of this; Foreground, mid and back ground. The Narrow depth of field is linked to the shutter speed.

In order to get wide depth of field it is important to get the following camera settings correct. 1/50 narrow depth of field, Iris aperture, neutral density filter, video gain.

Manual Settings - Programmable, situated on the bottom left hand side of XM2 ( model of camera)
Manual Focus - Button found on the front left of the camera - when on Manual focus will appear in the viewfinder.

White Balance displays three settings: Outside light, artificial light and manual.
Exposure - In order to gain exposure the shutter speed needs to be slowed down to 1/50. Equally the aperture needs to be opened up as far as possible in order to gain or detain focus.

The Standby setting to film, and turn the lock to get the camera to sleep when not filming, this will also ensure all settings are kept.

After having learnt this theory, in groups we went out to film and put our learning into practise. We experimented with the settings on the camera and concentrated on filming an over the shoulder shot, trying to get each of the characters to be in and out of focus.

We filmed the practise shots and uploaded them onto final cut pro to edit them into a sequence. This practise we have had using the camera to film depth of field will be helpful when we come to film our music video.

The final thing I learnt was the importance of using a Clapperboard when filming. There are two reasons why this is so important. Firstly is adds definition to the transition from shot to shot, and finally it makes the editing stage much easier ans each shot and scene are clearly marked out. When working to a story board, like i will be, this is again very helpful to compare the length and structure of the shots.





This is perfect example of the use of depth of field. Using two people I was able to experiment with the focus. I first of all made sure all the correct settings were in place on the camera. As detailed above. I then adjusted the white balance, and pull focus to ensure that the person at the back was sufficiently out of focus, and the person at the front was in focus. I put the camera on lock when we weren't filming to save the settings.


These two images are examples of mistakes I made when capturing depth of field on the XM2. The first image shows the two people in focus. The reason for this is that they were not distanced sufficiently away from, the camera. This meant that the camera could not focus on either of them in order to put the other out of focus. I overcame this problem by bringing the person at the front closer to the camera.



The opposite happened with this image as both people are out of focus. This was due to the settings on the camera. I accidentally turned the camera off between shots, this put all the settings back to manual. So when I tried the depth of field shot the next time, the pull focus put both people out of focus.
I was able to capture back the footage from the depth of field shoot onto final cut pro. I then took screen shots of each scene. The clapper board helped with this as each shot and scene was segregated. I then saved them onto a disc and uploaded them onto this blog.