Set it once. Then you only ever touch the record button.

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Everything is shot at 25fps, or 100fps when you want slow motion. 25 is what we work in here in New Zealand. That is the only setting you ever change.

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Action 5 Pro

D-Log M and the ISO range only appear once you switch out of normal mode into Pro mode. Tap the scenes icon to get there.

Osmo 360

Why those last few

5600K is what daylight looks like. Locking it means every clip starts from the same place, which makes the grade faster and keeps the month looking like one piece of work. Indoors it will look strange, because house lights are nowhere near 5600K, so switch to auto when you go inside.

Auto exposure, because there are no ND filters on these cameras. The camera holds the exposure by moving the ISO, and the 100 to 12800 range lets it sit as low as it can get away with. Low ISO is the clean image. High ISO is the grainy one.

Noise reduction off, at -2. Left on, it cleans up grain but wrecks other things in the process.

Three things that will look wrong, but aren't

Your footage will look flat, grey and washed out. That is D-Log M doing its job. It keeps detail in the bright sky and the dark shadows so it can be graded properly afterwards. The camera screen may even show you a nicer version than what is being written to the card. Do not judge a shot by the screen, and do not try to fix it.

4:3 looks too tall. Deliberate. It means one clip can be cropped to vertical for Instagram and to horizontal for YouTube without losing quality, so you never film the same thing twice.

8K on the 360 feels like overkill. It is the room to crop. The angle gets chosen after the fact, so the more pixels the sphere has, the better the finished shot looks.

When to use 100fps

Anything with real speed or impact. A jump, a sprint, a descent, going through the mud or the puddle. It plays back at quarter speed and looks great.

Switch back to 25fps afterwards. 100fps has no usable audio, so never use it for talking.

Which camera when