Home Video Hints: Pushing the Right Buttons

No matter how casual your interest in video, there are times you'll want to assert dominance over your camcorder by overriding some automatic setting. To do that, you have to know your basic controls and how to use them. In the misty dawn of the home video era (15 years ago), almost all these controls were buttons (or switches or sliders or rocker arms), so we still speak of camcorder "buttons" for convenience, though all too many manual controls are now buried in the branches of screen menu trees. So, unless you've memorized your entire owner's manual (a little humor there), come with us now on a pulse-quickening tour of camcorder controls.

Briefly, you want to be able to control the white balance, the exposure system, the lens, the viewfinder(s) and the electronic accessories or at least know how to do so should the need ever arise.

White Balance

The white balance control matches the colors you record to the overall tint of the light in which you're shooting (outdoors: bluish; indoors: orangish; fluorescents: don't ask).

In most cases, the auto white-balance setting works well. In mixed-light settings (e.g. window daylight and ceiling fluorescents), you may want to switch between outdoor and fluorescent presets to see which looks more neutral. Today, some fluorescent tubes are even closer to the indoor white balance preset.

If you want to go pro, the manual white balance setting offers the closest match to your shooting light.

Exposure

Your camcorder defaults to auto exposure (see the Defaults of de Camera sidebar), opening and closing a hole called the iris with changing light levels to deliver the right amount of illumination to the imaging chip.

The most common reason for adjusting exposure is to compensate for excess backlight that overwhelms the auto-exposure system and turns your foreground subject into a silhouette. You can do this in three different ways: