Recording Video

Recording a video with the Sony Alpha SLT-A77 is extraordinarily easy to accomplish—just press the prominent red Movie button to the right of the viewfinder to start, and press it again to stop. Before you press that button, though, there are some settings you should make to prepare the camera to record the scene the way you want it to. Setting up the camera for recording video can be a bit tricky, because it’s not immediately obvious, either from the camera’s menus or from Sony’s user’s guide, which settings apply to video recording and which do not. I will unravel that mystery for you, and throw in a few other tips to help improve your movies. First, here’s what I recommend you do to prepare for your recording session:

Set the camera’s aspect ratio. The aspect ratio setting (3:2 or 16:9, accessed through the Image Size menu) won’t affect your video recording, but it will affect how you frame your images using the live view on the LCD screen prior to pressing the movie button. So, if you want to know approximately how your video will be framed on the screen, set the aspect ratio to 3:2 if you’re going to be recording in VGA; set it to 16:9 if you’ll be using any of the other formats. (For another way to get a visual preview of how a video will be framed with the current settings, turn on the Grid Line options in the Custom 2 menu, which will place a set of four small movie frame brackets on the screen; those brackets will show you the size of the movie frame before you press the red b....