Home Video Hints: Pushing Your Buttons

If you're like a lot of first-time camcorder owners, you purchased a camera after hearing how fun and easy-to-use they are. Then you pulled it out of the box only to find it covered with confusing buttons. While pushing some of them may be frightening or frustrating, you should understand that they are there to help you get the most from your video shooting experience. They let you tap into the true potential of your camcorder.
Some of the buttons on your camcorder are there just to get things rolling. For example, you're probably most familiar with the "record" button that hides under your thumb as you hold the camcorder. But there are more things that you can work with on your camcorder than that. In this article, we discuss the buttons that control focus, iris, exposure, shutter speed, image stabilization, digital zoom, titling and playback controls.
No, you don't have to use all of these buttons every time out. But it's important to know what they do so you can produce the best video possible with the equipment you have.
Your camcorder has a lot of fully automatic features. Sometimes, though, you want to manually control features, especially if you're striving for a particular look to your shot. That means turning off a few of those automatic features. The first one we'll discuss is …