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The Nikon D7100 is useless for video

Posted 2014-03-19

Earlier, I posted a video filmed with my Nikon D7100 DSLR.

The video came out pretty good, although it's rather boring and I really should be even more careful making sure my tripod is level. However, the D7100 is pretty useless for video. First of all, the autofocus is unusable. All my lenses are pretty noisy when autofocussing. I guess that can be solved with an external microphone, though. However, the autofocus is also slow and hunts a lot to find the right focus distance. So I just used an f/11 aperture and set the focus to 5 meters or so, which seemed to have worked fairly well.

I guess the focus issues are unavoidable considering hardware limitations, but that's not true for another big problem: although you can use any shutter speed above the video framerate, you either have to set both the video shutter speed as well as the ISO manually, or leave both on auto. What I want is manually setting the shutter speed to the equivalent of 180 degrees (= 1/50 at 25 frames per second) so movement looks the way it should, and then let auto ISO take care of proper exposure. But no dice, this can't be done.

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