Nikon D750 Run & Gun Video Kit Test

It’s kind of a badge of honour for me to be able to eek every last bit of quality out of every gear purchase we make. Our main camera’s are no exception. Going on 3 years old, I’m amazed at the quality of imagery, and now video, our beloved Nikon D750’s can produce.

It ain’t art, and I didn’t process the video files in any way, but here’s some non-scientific test footage I took around the house to test my hand-holding abilities with the Nikon D750 in low-light.

Gear used:

I love this Nikon D750 so much … We own four of them.

I love this tiny 24mm lens. I find the maximum aperture of f2.8 to be sufficient on wide-angle lenses like this, and shot the video in DX mode (1.5 crop) effectively shooting with a 36mm f2.8 lens. I shot entirely in manual focus and LOVE the short throw of this lens for manual, un-geared focusing. I can quickly switch to shooting full-frame if I need the entire 24mm width, and love having the option to switch to ~35mm, which is my favourite walk-about “street shooting” focal length.

Thoughts on the Nikon D750 for handheld video

Though I have a great gimbal for my DSLR that creates buttery smooth video shots, I want to learn to shoot hand-held to become more unobtrusive and create better compositions. I find my gimbal shots to be really nice to look at, but sometimes a bit boring since I’m often more worried about the movement of the camera versus the composition. I also find people really notice when I take my gimbal out for paid or non-paid work, which can be both good or bad. Good, when you want to look like a “pro, and bad, when the people you are to be recording get too self-conscious. My hope is that by shooting video handheld, I can be more thoughtful of my compositions, manually adjust focus on-the-fly (which is impossible on my gimbal setup), and become a stealthier video shooter.

Sadly I don’t have exact EXIF info to give you as it seems the video files don’t retain this info (please correct me if I’m wrong). But I shot entirely in Manual mode with White Balance set to Cloudy (to retain the warmth of the incandescent lights), ISO about 1600, Aperture fixed at f2.8 and changing my shutter to adjust for exposure on the fly – which was a mistake as I note below.

Note to self: the strobe-light show at the end of the video are sooo distracting. These were my outdoor LED Christmas lights … Must be more careful with my chosen shutter speeds to prevent this in the future. Which brings me to my big ask of Nikon:

In general, I’m very impressed with the video quality of the Nikon D750 and LOVE the fact I have full-frame 1920×1080 35mm video of this quality literally at my fingertips. My wish for the D750 would be to add the ability to customize a single dial or buttons to control the ISO while recording video. Whether taking video or stills, I often want to carefully choose my Aperture for depth of field and effect. This leaves me with shutter and ISO to maintain proper exposure. As noted in the video above, changing the shutter can cause odd strobe-like effects with certain lighting. So being able to quickly change ISO is a necessity for on-the-fly video shooting.

Sadly, on the Nikon D750 changing ISO while recording video is a 2-handed operation: left-hand finger on the ISO button while the right-hand thumb rolls the back dial. if I could assign the back or front dial to ISO, or have the Fn and Pv buttons control ISO down/up, it would be a much better solution than having to rely on a 2-handed button + dial mechanism.


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Lastly, I'd love to hear from YOU. Please don't be shy and hit me in the comments!

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