About is file size and frame rate. These things are quite important because they will decide the quality of the videos that you shoot. This camera is pretty good – it’ll shoot 1080p which is full HD and it will also shoot 720p which is standard HD – both of which are perfectly acceptable for social media platforms. In order to make those changes we go again into Video Tab 2 and find Movie Recording Size. If we press on that option then we get four choices. Depending on whether you’ve chosen NTSC or PAL, you maximum rates will be either 60fps or 50fps.

When you’re shooting stills with the Canon 1300D you have lots of choices. They’re all on the Mode Dial and they go from entirely manual to semi-automatic and then to entirely automatic options In most of these Modes the camera is trying to get the best exposure for the stills that you’re shooting within the given parameters that you have presented to it. With movies it’s different. You have two options – you can either shoot Automatic or you can shoot Manual. With Automatic in the movie setting the camera will try to get the best possible exposure for you and in many cases it works very well, so I would suggest that initially at least you shoot in Automatic just to get a feel for how the camera works and you don’t have to worry then about the exposure because the camera will do the best it can for you. However, if you want to go into Manual there are different ways of changing the various parameters for Manual that are different to the way that you would do that for stills. In the Menu, Movie Exposure is in Video Tab 1 and you get the two options, Auto or Manual. If you choose to go into Manual then you have much more control over the settings that you can have. You will see that you have options for setting the Shutter Speed for setting the Aperture and for setting the ISO. For the Shutter Speed, rotate Main Dial. By depressing the AV button here and rotating that Main Dial you can change the Aperture. The ISO is changed by pressing the flash button and rotating the Main Dial.

The Canon 1300D does not have an external microphone socket. It just has an internal microphone, so sound can be a bit limited with this camera. But if you go into Menus and on Shooting Tab 2, the second one down is Sound Recording and you can set that to one of three options. You can have either Auto, Manual or Disabled. I would argue against disabling it entirely because sometimes it’s useful to have sound, even if you don’t intend to use it in the final cut. Auto is not bad but it will try to pick up as much sound as possible and you may not want that – you may not want the ambient sound. Manual is not too bad provided you’re reasonably close to the source of sound. There is a decibel bar going across the bottom and, as with most cameras, the objective is to try to peak on about 12. In terms of its recording in itself it’s actually pretty good, so I wouldn’t be adverse to using the internal microphone, you just have to be a little bit careful.

The next couple of options that we are going to look at are in Video Tab 3 and it may seem that they’re less important than other options, but they do affect the way that your video looks and so they are worth checking out. If we go to Video Tab 3 then at the bottom is the Picture Style option. These are the same options that you get with stills and you can choose to have Vivid or Sepia or many other options and some of them are set so that they bring out the best qualities for portrait and landscape. With video it tends to be better to try and shoot video as flat as possible and so the best option to start with is neutral and so you should always set that to neutral for video until you make the decision that you want to change the Picture Style and shoot something differently. The one just above that in Video Tab 3 is Custom White Balance. It’s very important for shooting videos because if you start moving around and shooting things in different light then the one stable element – the one constant – will be the white balance.