An article written for Zerb magazine on the general philosophy of Sony camera system menus

(an excellent magazine published by the Guild of Television Cameramen)

http://www.gtc.org.uk/about/zerb/zerb.htm

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I know many of you would rather file your own nose off than get dragged into menus and files, but they’re all around us…there’s no escape…even your lens is likely to have a menu and a selection of files.  

It may not seem like it but the original design intention was to make operation of the camera simple…the equivalent of having a big green ‘standard’ button on the side of the camera. That intention may have become lost in a maze of menus, but you can still find traces of it…in fact that big green button is a feature of the remote control panels used with studio and OB cameras, and also exists in a way within the menus of camcorders.

Why are they so complicated?

Because the camcorders are complicated…and there will always be people who want to access the more complex features. It is possible to make things simple…but simplifying things is quite compl

Why are they all different?

There are differences…and they are annoying, as I know very well when I try to access the extended menu on a Digi beta, after only seeing  HD camcorders for several weeks. But things are starting to standardise. It used to be the case that ‘pro’ and ‘broadcast’ kit would have a completely different menu structure, but if you look at the DSR-450, you’ll find it very similar to an HDW camcorder. In fact since the DVW-790, the principles of menus and files have been fairly consistent, and now spread across the DSR, DXC, BVP, DVW, DNW, PDW, HDW and HDC product ranges.

It is worth getting familiar with the general principles of one camera, as those principles will cover many other cameras, including the new HDW-F900R.

There’s usually a toggle switch on the side of the camera, near or below the gain switch, that turns the menu on. When you do so, you’ll typically see a page like this:

This is the user menu. It contains a number of pages that the chaps in the factory thought might be useful….but probably aren’t. The idea of this menu is that you should customize it to suit your requirements. All the items you normally need to access should be here, and none of the clutter that can be found in the other menus.  It’s the menu that comes up with no magic double button pushes, and once you’ve set it up, should be the only one you’ll need. This is the theory, but I’ve very seldom seen a user menu that anyone has taken the time to customize, which is a bit of a shame.

It’s not possible to say what is in the user menu of course, because it’s customisable. You could for instance, just make it consist of pages that refer to operational stuff…zebras, viewfinder displays, assignable buttons etc. This would mean you could load it into a camera without fear of upsetting vision engineers, or whoever had set up the camera for a particular ‘look’.

Talking of magic button pushes:

There’s always an extended / engineering / top menu somewhere beneath the surface that allows access to many more controls. It used to be accessed by holding one button in during the power up process, as with the trusty DVW-790, but nowadays it tends to be holding one button while you switch the menu toggle switch on.

Once you’ve perfected the magic button push (don’t forget to stand on one leg and mumble the special incantation while you do it) you’ll find yourself in an extended a-la-carte menu that will look something like this:

 ·       User Menu

Normally accessible whenever the camera is switched on. Stuff from any of the menus below can be added to this menu, so that it could become the only menu you need. You can’t really say what the user menu does, as it depends how many items and pages from the rest of the menu are allocated to it.

·       User Customize

This is where you go to customize the user menu described above. Here you can add and delete items to the user menu. You can create 5 pages of 10 items chosen from the menus below, plus any whole pages you like, to create your user menu.

·       All menu

As the name suggests it contains all the available pages. These  pages are then split into more manageable chapters, comprising the operation, paint, maintenance, file and diagnostic menus described below.

·       Operation Menu

Things that affect the way switches, outputs and displays are configured. Not items that directly affect pictures, but affect the way the controls work.

·       Paint Menu

Picture control. ‘The look’. Detail, Gamma, Knee etc.            are all adjusted in this menu. Also has access to scene files to store and recall different ‘looks’.

·       Maintenance Menu

Format switching (25P/50i ) is here, plus more obscure technical stuff. Includes the things that used to be in the menu accessed via the button on the time-code panel on digital betacam camcorders.

·       File Menu

Save, load, store and recall all the different file types. (You can also access some files from within each individual menu. For instance you can load a lens file from within the operation menu, or from within the file menu…it’s the same result.)

·       Diagnostics

In the unlikely event of a problem! This menu can help isolate a fault to a particular board. Also tells you software versions of the various boards in the camera, and drum running and operation hours.

·       (Service Menu)

Not normally accessible. You need to set internal switches to gain access to this menu.

This is all very well I hear you say, but I just want to reset the camera to something sensible and start shooting

 If you’re asked to use the ‘750 or ‘730S at short notice, and don’t have the luxury of preparation time, here’s a very short list of things to check to get you in the right ball park for getting sensible pictures:

 In the ideal world where I live, you’ll all have memory sticks with your preferred settings saved and ready to go. Insert your memory stick, go to the file menu and find the ‘ALL FILE’ page.

Start by loading an ‘ALL FILE’

The all file overwrites all previous settings in the camera with your preferred settings.

 You can think of this as a kind of base level to start from. All previous users settings have been cleared. This should be a simple procedure, but the most likely fly in the ointment is a message saying something about ‘OTHER FORMAT’.  What the camera is trying to tell you is that the file you’ve chosen to load was created for one frame rate (e.g. 25P) and the camera is currently set to another (e.g. 50i). The frame rate is one of the few items that can’t be loaded from a file. The reason for this is that you have to actually power off and on to reboot the camera as part of the process of changing frame rates. The message is just prompting you to check that you’re set to the correct frame rate. If  you need to change frame rate, go to the maintenance menu, format page.

If you don’t have a memory stick, go to the file menus and re-set user file, reference file and all file.

This is effectively a factory reset.

If you’re putting everything to all preset, after doing so, you may wish to make a couple of adjustments. The default setting for colour matrix is ‘OFF’ and as it comes out of the box, the detail on most cameras is a bit fierce. Turn on the preset matrix and set it to matrix 2 (ITU-709).  You should turn the detail level down to about –30.

These two adjustments will get you from the factory preset condition which is a little desaturated and over detail corrected, to a useful general purpose shooting condition.

Choose a frame rate, and set the shutter to 50Hz if shooting at 25P, and you’re ready to go.

Kind of begs the question ‘why don’t they set the camera up correctly in the factory?’

The detail setting is subjective. Some people, including some UK customers like their pictures sharp, and that’s certainly what you usually get straight out of the box. ( An exception to this is the HDW-F900: very gentle detail correction, even if wound up to the end stop.) Most Sony cameras, though, you’d probably want to back the detail correction off a bit..

There are many other detail correction tweaks, though they all have a fairly small effect compared to the overall ‘volume’ adjustment recommended above.

  There is no easy answer to the matrix selection either. ITU-709 is most widely accepted for HD, but all the other matrices have their advocates, so it’s left switched off from the factory.

You can actually change the preset / default / factory setting, or whatever you want to call it. If you set the camera up to what you’d consider to be a more sensible factory setting, and then store this as a reference file, you’ve effectively changed the factory reset.

This of course means that resetting the reference file needs to be part of the routine when doing a true factory reset as described above. I’ve never actually known anyone use their own reference file, so it’s perhaps not essential, but for the sake of completeness it’s important.

Just going back to that ‘turn the shutter on’ thing for a moment. The shutter speed is remembered in scene files or all files, but the actual ON/ OFF control is via the old fashioned toggle switch somewhere on the front of the camera body, same as it always was. This is the easiest bit to forget and is quite important.

Important if you’re working in progressive scan that is. If  you’re in interlace you’d use the shutter just as you would with Digi Beta…i.e. not very often.

If shooting at a similar frame rate to a film camera, it’s best to emulate the 180 degree shutter (typically) of a film camera, and use a 50Hz shutter at 25P. If you don’t, you’ll see quite a lot of blur on your pictures. If you do, you’ll see a bit of blur, and a bit of shutter judder, which seems to be the best compromise.

Don’t get too hung up on having a shutter speed exactly twice the frame rate, and equivalent to 180 degrees. For instance if you’re in the US and working with 60Hz lighting, then set the shutter to 60Hz, or use the clear-scan to remove flicker from a CRT computer monitor, in the same way as you’d perhaps tweak the shutter angle of a film camera in similar circumstances.

Now, having got your camera where you want it, you might want to start getting a bit ‘creative’. I’ d suggest having a nice sit down and a cup of tea instead, but it’s up to you.

The first thing most people want to do is to give their camera a ‘filmic’ look. I won’t get too bogged down in that other than to say 25P gives you the motion artefacts of film; from then on, what you point it at and how you light it are the most important things.

If you have made your pictures look really nice, with a tickle of your knee and a tweak of your detail etc. then you’ll want to save those settings. You can do this as another ‘ALL’ file, which will save a complete snapshot of the cameras menus, or more conveniently as a scene file.

A Scene file will save the contents of the paint menu, i.e. all the settings related to the way your pictures look. You can name and save five scene-files in the camera’s own memory at any time. Think of them as five cans of film stock attached to the camera, that can be clicked into place whenever required. They change the look of the pictures, but don’t affect the way the rest of the camera is set up.

These groups of five scene-files can be saved to the memory stick, or replaced with a group of five different files from the memory stick. The memory stick holds 20 pages, each with 5 files.

You’ll see ‘5 file load’ and ‘5 file save’ options in the menus. This is the best way to deal with these groups of scene-files. Keep them in their family groups, that fill all the slots in the camera, or a page on your memory stick. Load the family you need for a shoot, and you can put your memory stick back in your pocket. Just click to check the box for whichever of the five scene-files you wish to load at any time.

(In scene files, page P00 refers to the five memory slots held in the camera head, P01 through to P20 are the pages of files on the memory stick…this can be confusing as it doesn’t seem to mention this in the manual.)

Remember, if you hit the STANDARD button, you’ll reset the paint menu to default, so you’ll clear all picture related settings such as knee detail, flare, turn the matrix off and set detail level to ‘0’ etc. but you won’t reset the operator or engineering menus.

I know it seems complicated, but I hope you can see there’s a kind of logic behind all these menus. Once you get your head round the general philosophy, it’s actually quite easy to get these cameras reliably set up the way you want them, and as I said earlier, it may help that all new models are converging on this type of menu and file structure.

I hope that gets you started, but please also download the HDW-750 user guide and use in conjunction with this article.

I know reading the instructions is an act of heresy for most of us, but if you did want an ops manual, try www.sonybiz.net/uk and click on support, enter your model number in the search box, and then click the link for operation manuals.

Good luck out there.

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