New Hobby - DSLR Video

So for the past couple months I've been learning about shooting video with a Canon 7D DSLR camera. I've never done any serious video shooting before, but I've always enjoyed documenting events with camcorders, so it wasn't a big leap. The web is replete with sites and videos that show you how to get artistic shots and how to use the gear, so I won't repeat all that information here. Instead, I'll show what I've done, and what techniques I've used so far.

I had front row seats to this concert, so it provided a prime opportunity to get good footage with minimal interference from audience members. The concert was well lit so I started out with 800 ISO. I was shooting at 30 fps so I used a 1/60th shutter speed. I was using an EFS 18-135mm IS 3.5-5.6 lens so I made use of the zoom quite a bit and rarely got to use the 3.5 f-stop. Ergo, not much of the cool shallow depth of field, but there's a lot of movement, so this probably allowed me to stay in focus better. (the 7D can't really autofocus well in video mode so I have to manually re-focus every time I move the lens.)

The audio input was set to Auto at first so it was very hot and distorted. So, I overlayed the album audio with the live audio. Thankfully they must play to a click track so it all lined up.

This was shot with pretty much the same settings, except I remembered the audio, and manually set it down to 1 click above "off". I think it came out pretty good considering it's just the on-camera mono mic.

Some of the highlights were getting washed out, so I moved the ISO down to 400 for this segment.

Once the headline act came on, the lighting was even brighter so I moved the ISO all the way down to 100.

Finally, for the last segment, I remembered that video looks cooler at 24 fps so I changed it, as well as changing the shutter speed to 1/50th.