The Socialize Strategy - Camera Settings + More
Welcome to the Socialize Strategy. Happy Friday. It has been one heck of a week over here, having returned from Vegas and gotten back into the thick of things. Wow. What can I say?
Helen:I gashed my lip open and have fifteen stitches in my bottom lip, if you're watching. My bottom my lower left lip area. And what happened is I got up in the middle of the night, felt some severe back pain as I went got up to turn on the air conditioner because it was hot in the room. And as I was going back into bed and I felt this back pain, I got lightheaded thinking about, what am I gonna have to have back surgery or something? And just getting inside my head, even since childhood has always been a thing where I got like a little lightheaded and didn't get to the bed quick enough, and next thing I know I was on the floor, but I had gashed my lip open on the edge of the bed.
Helen:So that's the story, and it has been an adventure. So I have stitches, so I'm gonna be taking getting them taken out on Saturday. All is well. I'm fine. Nothing's wrong with my head.
Helen:People were very concerned about that when I posted on my Instagram story, but it's really just something that has always been with me since childhood. When I used to get blood taken, would get lightheaded. Sometimes if I would get hurt on the playground, I remember getting lightheaded. So those things, that's always been a part of me. So this was the same kind of thing.
Helen:I just started thinking back surgery, and I just got lightheaded and, boom, down I went. I've really gotten better about getting blood taken though since chemo. That fixed me. But, that's what happened, and I am doing fine and recovering. But before we get into the topic for today, I did wanna do two unsponsored by topics because one of them I'm wearing and one of them I'm sharing.
Helen:And I this the one I'm wearing is definitely a topic on TikTok. So if you know cakes, the brand cake spotty, it is basically these, like, rubber nipple cover things that you put on your boobs if you don't wanna wear a bra. Okay? But the way they marketed this to me on TikTok, I'm telling you, I it was like, lift your boobs. They you don't need a bra like, hello.
Helen:I'm here to tell you, they do not lift your boobs. Okay? They do not lift your boobs. I'm gonna tell it to you a bunch more times. They just don't.
Helen:They do what they claim to do, which is nipple coverage. But I'm telling you, the the ads and the people promoting this on TikTok would put them on and lift the boob up under a shirt and be like, look at the difference in one boob's down here and one boob's up here. Like, no. Okay? I'm here to tell you no.
Helen:It doesn't work like that. Do not get yourself sucked into those ads thinking that these are gonna be the answer to lifting because even with not even big boobs like mine are not that big. It's not gonna work like that. Alright? So that's the honest review.
Helen:I'm gonna show you one right now. Take one off so you could see. It just in case you don't know about it. It just sticks. It's it's very comfortable actually on.
Helen:It just kind of adheres to your skin without it being sticky. There's nothing sticky here at all. It just the way the heat, I guess, goes on your skin. And then this side, they say, oh, it attaches to the fabric. And then when the fabric the fabric will lift your boob.
Helen:Yeah. No. You put that in there, and you're gonna do that. It's not staying there. It's not lifting.
Helen:Trust me. It is not. The end. So that's my honest review of of cakes, and they're good for what they're what they meant for, but not for what a lot of people are talking about on ads. Next.
Helen:My next thing. I'm not even going to call it. It's unsponsored by I don't know how I haven't even talked about this brand before because look what happens when I show you what's on my desk. I'm raising up my desk right now. It's a standing desk.
Helen:Lifting it up, and I'm going to show you how many oh, hold on. Let me fix that. I wanna show you how many of these things I have. This is the Aloha brand. Okay?
Helen:Look at one, two, three, four, five, six. I have seven different sizes. I also have one really big one that's at the beach. I am obsessed with this brand. I love that I love that they are these are just like pouches in all different sizes, so you can use them for anything.
Helen:You can use them for wires and cords and, here, nail polishes. Okay? Medicines, toiletries for when I travel and I just want a lightweight, if I want just an overnight bag, lightweight toiletries for my short trips. Hold on. Jewelry, okay?
Helen:This one has, I think, just like lip lip stuff, lip organizing stuff. This is like travel nail files and stuff, like literally have, I think I probably have more of them. I just pulled out as many as I could to share with you. I'm obsessed with this brand. The name is Aloha, and I have I have nothing bad to say about it.
Helen:They they make purses and all sorts of things, but when it comes to a pouch a pouch system, they have my soul because I love that they don't add any extra weight, and I like that they're all differentiated. Like, I know immediately that this one is my nail polishes because I have it in my head. I this one is my medicines. So color coded, whatever. This is a nice brand.
Helen:I like it. Go investigate, and they have all different sizes. Okay. That's my one of my faves. Let's get into it for today, tips for creating high quality videos.
Helen:And the reason I wanna talk about it is because in my studio, a lot of people have asked me what are my camera settings. And because I shoot for brands, I'm going to be shooting for Secret, Deodorant next week. Because I shoot for brands, they often ask me, oh, what are your camera settings? And I always shoot with the same camera settings even for when I even when I work on projects where I'm hired to do it. So I'm gonna tell you why I choose my camera settings, and of course, are there better quality camera settings than the ones that I use?
Helen:Yes. But they take up so much data on your phone that if you shoot consistently like that, you're gonna run out of storage on your phone, and you're also gonna have trouble transferring those shots to another device. Like, the airdrop thing is gonna take forever get them off, and you're gonna have to be doing it manually plugging in into a hard drive. It becomes debilitating. So there's I always like to find a balance between good quality and manageable data, and that that's where I find my sweet spot.
Helen:So we're gonna talk about it. Yay. Okay. Now I don't even know if a lot of people know they can adjust their camera settings, but if you go into and I'll walk you through the steps because I do think it's always important, so I'm gonna do it as I talk it. So if you go into settings and just scroll down the main page, right to below general, you're gonna see camera.
Helen:You tap it. I'll hold it up for the people that are here. So you can see there's lots of options if you're watching. You can do recording at ten eighty p at 30 frames per second. You can do seven twenty p at 30 frames per second.
Helen:You can do high HD at 60 frames per second. I'll tell you what the difference is with that, and then it goes up to four k. So I'm gonna start with telling you that four k is incredible. The fact that our phones can shoot at this quality, if you're gonna make a feature film and you wanna use your phone, you're gonna use four k because it's gonna go on a gigantic screen in a movie theater, and you need the highest definition that you can get. So if you are producing a feature film with your phone, you're gonna wanna go with four k.
Helen:Now considering most of us are not producing or directing or filming feature films on our phone, they are films, they may be features, but they may be just viewable on a computer or on a or on another phone device, you don't really need that high quality because what it's gonna do is make every file so big. And I recently I was asked to do it for a couple of shots at a shoot recently, and it took forever for that. I think the company was also shooting four k with their phone, and they couldn't even get the data, the videos out of their phone quick enough to get it to a hard drive. Just really slowed the process down. So if you're planning to do something like that, you wanna be mindful of your time to transfer these files to get them out.
Helen:It's also going to eat the storage on your phone very quickly, so you have to make sure your phone storage is optimized so not so that everything isn't saving locally and completely eating your data. Okey doke. So that's the thing about four k. Now the difference between ten eighty p at 30 frames per second and ten eighty p at 60 is that 60 frames per second, if you were to put it into an edit app and tell it to play it back in a project that is running 30 frames per second, it is going to give you a slow motion effect, and it will be much cleaner video in slow motion versus filming at 30 frames and then slowing it down to half speed because then you're going to take those 30 frames and be spreading it across the double length of time instead of having double the amount of frames to work with. So it's just a matter of quality if you so okay.
Helen:That said, I do not have my camera set to record at 60 frames per second. I have it set to record at 30 frames per second because in in the end, that's gonna be better for my 95% of my videos. Very rarely am I gonna take a video and do it and slow it down. But for the times that I do, I know that my quality is gonna be a little less than it could be if I was filming at 60. If I knew ahead of time, I'm gonna I wanna use this shot and I wanna do it and have use it in slow motion, instead of filming in slow motion, what I do is I will then change it to 60 frames per second because it'll be better quality when I slow it down.
Helen:Okay. I'm I'm going slow because I don't want people to get lost with a lot of technical jargon. But I'm gonna now talk about seven twenty p, and that is definitely lesser quality. So if you have less storage on your phone, less space, and you're desperate to shoot more video, then going to seven twenty is fine. It's going to be great for just online video content.
Helen:But for my druthers, ten eighty p is solid, and you can always go export and go down in quality. You can never go up in quality. When once you export, once you film, you can't increase the quality. So you're better off shooting at nice full ten eighty p high def. That way you have everything that you need.
Helen:You're never gonna be able to get it to go up to four k. It's never gonna look as good as four k, but it's gonna be so much cleaner than doing it at seven twenty. Okay? So what are your settings? What should they be in the at the end of the day?
Helen:Ten eighty p HD at 30 frames per second. That is my recommendation. And then if you want to be covered for slow motion, you can do it at 60 FPS. 60 f so ten eighty p HD at 60 FPS, and that would get you better quality if you were to slow those videos down after the fact. Now let's just speak quickly about slow motion.
Helen:There are two options in your slow motion settings. One is one twenty FPS, and one is two forty FPS. Two forty, higher the number, slower the video. Higher the number of frames per second, slower the video when you play it back. I have mine set to one twenty.
Helen:I don't think I ever really need, like, a teardrop slow motion like quality, which would be two forty FPS. Actually, a teardrop dropping is usually a thousand FPS on a fancy high end camera, but I just go with one twenty. And I will say, the higher your number of frames per second, the more light you need to have good quality video. So I did a video at one point, I said, oh, I'm gonna shoot it in slow motion because I was gonna do a bunch of jumping things and then add them together, and I wanted to not have to slow it down after the fact. That video bugs me to this day because the quality is grainier.
Helen:I didn't have enough light coming in the window to really offset the fact that it needs so much more light in the in the lens to get that to be good quality. So I don't I don't really recommend shooting in slow motion. However, if you like doing that, you're certainly welcome to do it when you when you want to. And then when you and then when you export it or when you're playing with it, can always change where the slow motion starts and stops. But if you shoot it in your regular camera, you can always change where you want it to go slower and faster in CapCut.
Helen:CapCut has so much so much advanced, like, settings of time and, speed where you can tap it, and then you can have it make a curve where it goes fast, slow, fast, slow. Like, it has all these curve options. You can double, triple, quadruple the speed, or you can slow it down so tremendously. So you have a lot of leeway in the CapCut app. Instead of trying to shoot it in slow motion in your phone, I highly recommend just shooting it at regular speed and then putting it into the app where you wanna slow it down.
Helen:That's just my personal recommendation. Alright. Then we have this cinematic setting. Do we care about this cinematic setting? If you're a filmmaker and you wanna make a even if you're not a filmmaker, let's say you wanna make a spoof film.
Helen:You're a content creator and you wanna make a spoof film. This this camera is for you potentially because you can do dramatic, like it it throws the background out of focus a little bit, and it keeps only the foreground in focus, so it looks very filmic. And it also gives you the option to do 24 FPS at four k. So you're again, we're talking about higher data, higher frames per more more, taken up on your phone, more data. So therefore the files are gonna be bigger because they're much better quality.
Helen:And then when you that whole problem of sending it and getting it transferred to another device, it's gonna take longer. But when you shoot at 24 frames per second, you're getting more of a film vibe, and that's what that lens is designed for. So when you record in cinematic and you go to that four k and you suck it up and say I'm gonna kill my data and shoot at 20 frames frame 24 frames per second, you're gonna get more of a feature film type of vibe. Alright. That's what the cinematic is for.
Helen:I rarely use it because you can't zoom. So the minute I know that I'm accidentally in a cinematic is when I'm trying to zoom in and I can't zoom. I'm like, I'm in the wrong thing, so I gotta switch back to regular video. So on your camera, in case you're not aware, the bottom settings, oh, it's hard to see it so far away, but you have videos, photo, and then you have cinematic. So if you accidentally choose cinematic, you won't be able to zoom in.
Helen:So that just be aware that in order to zoom, you have to be not in cinematic because that lens will not let you zoom. I do say I like I like that there's all these options with the settings because it gives us so much power in the palm of our hand to be creative and make more more, I don't know, higher end videos. Like, you have the option here. Even though I'm not gonna use this option to make a feature film, I like that the option is here, and I like that I would occasionally, if I wanted to record something and make it feel like cinematic, like some kind of, you know, I could do a trend where it's like Taylor Swift running the the running on the beach trend. Shooting that at cinematic would be gorgeous, and it would feel like a music video.
Helen:So that those are the types of times that you might want to consider using the different lenses. Alright. So that hopefully explains a little bit about the settings. I went in deep, way deeper than I did in the newsletter, so that's why you're here, hope. Okay.
Helen:Now if you don't use some of those camera settings, don't be distressed. Like, there's also time lapse, but you don't have to shoot time lapse. You can, you know, shoot something and then speed it up and or you can edit it to chop out parts to make it feel faster. So you don't have to use all the settings on your phone. It's just it's nice to know that occasionally, you know, it's it's an option for you.
Helen:Like, you you have them. I I do think being aware of what is needed to make certain camera settings be more effective, like to have to to know the simple fact that you need more light to shoot better slow motion. Bingo. That's a hot tip. Here's another hot tip.
Helen:Don't shoot slow motion in flicker in lights, like store lights, because it'll flicker. Everything will flicker. So lit places that have lighting inside, stores, hospitals, restaurants, like that. A lot of times when you shoot in slow motion, you'll notice a flickering, and that's what is what is causing it is the speed of your lens versus the speed of the lights. I noticed this heavily when I was in Croatia because my camera settings were not in sync with the Croatian light system.
Helen:So all of my lights were flickering in my videos, which was crazy because I'm shooting at 30 frames per second, and the lights in Croatia would be at 25 frames per second, the frequency. Listen, I don't know that much about the lighting frequencies, but I just know that PAL versus NTSC is a difference, 25 frames per second versus 30 frames per second, and that makes a difference in a lot of times you'll see glitching in certain videos when they're not running at the the right speed. That is more high end filmmaking. Sorry to get into that, but onward we go. Alright.
Helen:Said it before, good lighting, very important. So I'm gonna skip over that section because I really got into lighting well into lighting already. This is a big one now that Julie constantly gets on me about, and I figured out why, so I'm gonna tell you what the issue is, and I'm gonna tell you what she thought she was seeing, and then the reality. Okay? Clean your camera lens because a lot of times you don't realize that your phone's in your pocket, your phone's in your purse, your phone's wherever it is, and that you might have a phone protector on, but the lens is usually cover isn't always covered on a lot of those phone protectors.
Helen:So your lens could be smudgy, and you could be filming, and all of a sudden, oh my gosh, I have, like, marks on my lens. Now I'm gonna tell you what happened to me. When I zoom out to point five, something happens in my iPhone where the lens gets blurrier. It happens I can see it. My shot's clear.
Helen:I go point five, and all of a sudden, it gets like a haze over it. So what she thought was my not clean camera lens is actually some kind of a weird glitch in both of my phones. And I thought I don't know if it's an iPhone 14 problem in general or just a problem with the phone or a problem with, the operating system or the camera itself. But when I'm filming along the way here, shooting, shooting, shooting, I'm at one. I'm at one.
Helen:The minute I tap point five, everything gets a haze over it, and it looks like a filter, like a hazy filter. And the minute I go back to one, it's clear again. So there's a glitch, and I don't know if it's in all of the phones. I'd love to know if you have this happen to you. Open up your camera, and then make sure you're on, like, regular, pointing not on your selfie camera, the one you know, you're filming something else.
Helen:And then tap point five and see if something comes like hazy on your phone. So frustrating because my next tip is to use the back camera and use the point five, yet I'm having this severe problem every time I go to the point five lens where I'm getting a haze over it. And a lot of times I'll notice it's only indoors from outside, and maybe it's just because it's better lit outside. I don't notice it as much. But when you it's a good idea to take your phone, point it at something, you're on point one, then tap that little on the on the settings right underneath, right above the record button.
Helen:You'll see point five one. What are the options? Let me see. Point five it says point five one x and then two and three. So go to one, hold up your camera to point it at something, and let it focus on something.
Helen:God forbid it could focus on something right now. Now everything looks hazy. What's going on with my phone? Hold on. Let me film you.
Helen:Okay. This is looking good. I'm filming you right now. So I've got this one x. Everything is clear, crystal clear.
Helen:I could see myself, my phone here. I go point five. Immediately, haze goes over the screen. Weird. And then as soon as I zoom in slowly, slowly, slowly, I hit a point where it gets clear again.
Helen:I don't know what's going on with it. But take a look at your phone and see if you're getting that haze and just be careful because I do think the point five lens is so cool. I use it a lot for taking pictures. I tap that point five, I turn it around, and I snap a selfie, and then I'm not getting just my face in the selfie. I'm getting the whole scene behind me.
Helen:So I highly recommend using that point five lens. Just be aware of this weird glitch that some people are having where when they go back to point five, it gets a little fuzzy and weird. Don't know what to say about that. But I I was thinking about upgrading to an iPhone 16, so maybe the time is now. We'll see.
Helen:Soon enough, I have to do it. I'm gonna have to bite the bullet at some point. But I do like using the back camera. I also think it takes practice to know where to look in the back camera because when you're facing it, you think you're pointing it right at you, but you're more pointing it at the person next to you potentially. So just do some practicing, take a few shots, and find out the angle, and and you'll remember it.
Helen:Like, just take a look and go, okay. Over here, it was I was too far to the right, so I'm gonna tilt it a little bit this way. And just play around with it until you get that knack. They also make little mirrors for the backs of the phone. So you can put a little mirror back here, and then it'll show you what the lens is seeing.
Helen:I don't know how accurate that's gonna be because if the mirror is not actually on the lens, but Julie uses it, and she thinks those work well. So it gives her a sense of where she is in the frame. Okay. That is it for today. I am talking way too long.
Helen:I think I kicked off with the cakes. I got into it and the bags. This was a long one. I also shouldn't be talking so long with my lip in the current state that it's in. So I'm going to sign off.
Helen:I'm going to leave you two having a wonderful weekend. I am going to be traveling next week, you can follow along with my adventures always on my Instagram story, which is where I usually share more of my day to day updates. If you have any questions, anything you'd like to talk about in a podcast, I would love to hear from you, honestly. And I read all the comments. If you leave it on the YouTube channel, if you, you know, wanna respond to the newsletter, however you wanna get the comment to me, the feedback to me, I'm always open to it because I I love to know what topics you might wanna hear about in these strategy sessions so that we can tackle it all together.
Helen:Lastly, I'll just leave you with, if you're not in the studio, I hope to see you there soon. Bye.
