Best Video Settings for Sony ZVE-10 For Shooting Overhead Videos

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So you are looking for the best video settings for Sony ZVE-10 for shooting overhead videos? I’m going to show you how to dial the settings on your Sony camera to get the best video quality for your Youtube channel.

These settings are the best settings for an overhead camera setup. So if you’re recording yourself drawing, unboxing or cooking, these settings are just perfect for you!

My Sony ZVE-10 camera is equipped with a Sigma 16 mm f1.4 lens. If you have a kit lens or any other type of lens, you can use these settings too, but you might need to tweak a thing or two.

Step 1: Shooting mode

Sony ZVE-10 has 3 shooting modes: picture mode,video mode and S&Q mode. You want to press the button until your camera is in video mode. You’ll know that your camera is in video mode if it shows that video camera icon on the most upperleft corner of your LCD screen.

Step 2: Exposure setting

You’ll want to turn off the intelligent mode and switch it to manual exposure. The way you can do this is to press the menu button, move over to the Movie1 setting (second tab) and choose Manual Exposure.

In this mode, we have that flexibility to manually set our aperture and shutter speed settings. We don’t want the camera to make the decisions for us. If you spent a lot of money on a great lens, you want to explore and utilize its potential so you can get the most out of it.

Step 3: Video format standards

Sony ZVE-10 can shoot either in NTSC or PAL format. NTSC is a format that’s used in North American region, while PAL is used everywhere else. For this tutorial, i’m going to set my camera to NTSC.

You can do this by pressing the menu button, move over to the Setup2 setting (5th tab) and scroll to the second page. If your camera isn’t in NTSC mode already, change it to NTSC.

The reason why i chose NTSC is due to the frame rate settings. If you choose NTSC, you’ll have the option to shoot in 24fps and 30fps. These are the frame rates that i use for editing my videos.

Of course, if you would like to record your videos in 25fps, 50fps and 100fps, you can set your camera to shoot in PAL mode.

Now that our camera is set, let’s go on to the first menu and change the settings from there.

For unboxing videos, i could imagine that Continuous Autofocus would be a better option.

You could also change focus mode even during shooting! Just add a shortcut icon to your function button and you can toggle between Autofocus and Manual Focus easily. More about it in the later section of this post.

This setting basically shows you how focused your object is. The more grains it shows on the screen, the more focused your object is.

If you’re using your phone or a second camera to shoot videos from other angles and you want combine those videos into one single video, make sure they’re all set to the same fps.

For the best quality, you can choose 24fps 100M or 30fps 100M. I chose 30p (30fps) because my phone shoots in 30fps. I also didnt go for 100M (100Mbps) here because i usually speed up my videos so 60Mbps is more than enough for me.

This is a helpful feature to have to gauge if your recoding is too overexposed or not.

This is the best setting to have if you’re shooting your videos for a long period of time.

If you’re using similar setup like mine, set the aperture to 3.5. If not, adjust it so you’re footage won’t be too overexposed or when the zebra lines stop showing up.

You can create shortcuts and save them in the function menu button. It’s super helpful to have these shortcuts saved and have quick access to them.

To do this, go over to the Function Menu Set. in Camera Settings 2 menu (second tab) on 8th page.

If you click on it, you can see 12 shortcuts set by your camera by default. Let’s change Profile Picture shortcut to Grid Line shortcut.

Just click on the Profile Picture shortcut icon and scroll to the 11th page to find the Grid Line shortcut. Choosing it will replace the Profile Picture shortcut with a Grid line shortcut.

To use the shortcut, just press the Fn button before shotting and choose the Grid Line icon. You can then easily pick one of the options in the Grid Line setting.

Some shortcuts even let you change the settings during recording, how insane is that! You have the option to save 45 different kinds of shortcuts. These include:

1. Shoot Mode
2. Focus Mode
3. Focus Area
4. Face/Eye Priority in AF
5. Subject Detection
6. Right/Left eye Select
7. Face/Eye Frame Display
8. Exposure Comp.
9. ISO
10. Metering Mode
11. Face Priority in Multi Metering
12. White Balance
13. Priority Set in AWB
14. DRO/Auto HDR
15. Creative Style
16. Picture Effect
17. Picture Profile
18. Soft Skin Effect
19. Peaking Display
20. Peaking Level
21. Peaking Color
22. Product Showcase Set
23. Frame Rate
24. AF Transition Speed
25. AF Subj. Shift Sens.
26. Audio Rec Level
27. Audio Level Display
28. SteadyShot
29. SteadyShot Adjust.
30. Focal Length
31. Marker Display
32. Zoom Speed STBY
33. Zoom Speed REC
34. Fixed Speed STBY
35. Fixed Speed REC
36. Fixed Speed STBY
37. Fixed Speed REC
38. Zebra Display
39. Zebra Level
40. Grid Line
41. Audio Signals
42. Gamma Disp. Assist
43. Touch Operation
44. Not Set
45. Follow Function Menu

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