Nikon® D5000 Digital Field Guide

Chapter 7. Working with D-Movie

In This Chapter

• About video

• Tricks, tips, and workarounds

• Video-editing software

The D5000 has inherited a pretty special feature from the D90: the ability to use the Live View feature to record HD video. The D90 was a groundbreaking camera in this respect, and the D5000 follows right along in its footsteps.

First and foremost, this statement must be made: The D5000 is not a video camera. It's a still camera that just happens to record video by using the Live View feature. The D5000 is one of Nikon's dSLR cameras, and it's an excellent example of that. It has a 12-megapixel sensor, low noise at high ISO settings, and a fast continuous shutter speed — everything you could want from a dSLR. Why am I bringing this up? Because there are some people who aren't happy with the current video performance in dSLR cameras. These evaluations are being based on comparisons to dedicated video cameras. This is an unfair comparison, as the D5000 was designed primarily to shoot still photographs, and it does an excellent job accomplishing that. You wouldn't compare a still grab from a video camera to a high-res still image from the D5000, would you? Of course not. It's like comparing apples to oranges.

The D5000's Video mode is, for all practical purposes, fully automatic. Once you switch to Video mode, the camera controls all the settings. Shutter speed and ISO can't be adjusted at all, and the aperture setting is locked in once Live View is activated. The only way to ...