How to gain manual video control on Nikon D3s

The Nikon D3s is Nikon’s only DSLR capable of giving the user full manual control of video capture on the camera. This means you can control aperture, ISO sensitivity and shutter speed. In this post we’ll explain how you can easily gain manual control of video on the Nikon D3s.

By default the D3s won’t give you much control of video capture and you’ll have to unlock the manual video control by using a secret method. Don’t worry, nothing will happen to your $5,000+ camera!

All you have to do is set your Live View-setting to “Tripod Mode”, enter Live View using the Lv-button on the back of the camera and then press the OK-button on the left side of the LCD. That’s it. You’ve now gained full manual control of video on your D3s. Congratulations!

With manual control enabled, you’ll be presented with an actual preview of how your still images or video will look based on your camera settings. You can actually see the live preview getting darker when you use a faster shutter speed or a lower aperture. It’s really quite cool! You’ll even have a 3-stop exposure indicator on the right side of the display that can be used as a guideline, and it’s also possible to bring up a live histogram of the exposure. Simply press the Info-button a few times during Live View and it should be there.

For those of you with a Nikon D90, D300s or D5000, we recommend you watch the first video in our three-part series of shooting better videos with your DSLR. In this video Patrick explains how you can manually set the aperture and lock the exposure on the D300s – don’t sweat, it even works on the D90 and D5000 as well!