You Can't Focus Breath if You're Out of Focus!

Everybody makes YouTube videos, right? Actually, I think far fewer people make them than would like to because, they require video production to look any good. I can see how using a phone to create short TikTok videos is pretty straightforward and simple, but once you get into that 10 minute range, little things seem to make a big difference.

For a photographer with a more than passing interest in starting videography, I'm a true novice, but her are some things I have picked up along the way. There is a learning curve.

• How well did I prepare myself? Dry skin, hair out of whack, a little dandruff - ya, staring at someone for 10 minutes will make this stuff stand out. Is my camera looking up my nose?

• My office is now a set, is it presentable? Thank goodness for fast prime lenses and bokeh.

• OMG - whenever I move, my whole video zooms in and out because of focus breathing! OK, stop down a little bit, switch to manual focus, problem solved. Or, switch to your other camera with a Sigma 16mm F1.4 or some other lens that doesn't seem to breath much at the same distance, and just be happy with it.

• I switched cameras - now my audio is all over the place because I have clips from one, then the other - Calm down, Davinci Resolve Studio has audio normalization - you can fix this with a few button clicks. Go to the Edit workspace, from the menu it's Workspace->Switch to Page->Edit. Then select your audio clips (be sure to unlock the audio before trying this, there's a lock icon available on the audio tracks). Select them all and choose to "Normalize Audio Levels..."; I do not know how to apply all the options yet, but chose "True Peak" with it's default -2.0 dBTB setting. It seemed to work well enough for me.

• I have an amazing camera with 10-bit color, log profiles for applying LUTs, and I have no idea what to do with the video clips.

  • If it's a Canon R5/R6, and your PC doesn't happen to have the codecs in hardware, which is pretty common - simply choose all your clips in Davinci Resolve Studio, right click on them and choose "generate optimized media". That problem is solved.

  • Again, if you are shooting on a Canon R6 like I am, go to Canon's support site, and find the "Canon Lookup Table" download for your camera. It will contain all the LUTs you need to properly grade your 10-bit Clog3 files. In the Color view in Davinci Resolve Studio, go to the LUTs section (should say LUTs at the top left). You can get to the Color workspace by using the menu Workspace->Switch to Page->Color, or using the icon for the Color workspace at the bottom of the interface. You can right click on "Open File Location" from the folder in the LUTs browser, and then make a Canon folder in there and extract the contents from Canon's LUT archive that you downloaded, then you can just choose the one that matches the log setting and the color space you used with the output type you desire, an right click to apply to the clip you have selected. (don't ask me about the grid sizes - I've not looked into it yet - I know nothing so I chose the highest number because bigger is better, right?)

The equipment and software involved is as follows: Canon R6 (1.60 Firmware) with a Canon 35mm f/1.8 IS STM lens (2.0.2 Firmware), Canon M6 Mark II with a Sigma 16mm f/1.4 DC DN lens (both fully updated), Davinci Resolve Studio 18 (full version), Alienware Aroura R10 PC Windows 11 PC with some customizations for video editing, Sirui 3T-35R tripod