Help on live view and exposure

Hi everyone this is my first Nikon camera coming from a Canon background and I went out this morning and struggled with live view. Let me explain. I've heard lots of people say the live view is not the same as the live view on the canon as it always show depth of field but never really understood by what they meant by that. Well I think I found out this morning. I struggled really badly not blowing out the sky when I was getting the foreground to the correct exposure. I seemed to be having to shoot with almost 5 stops of grad and still was 2 stops underexposed according to the meter so the sky was coming out ok, if I tried setting the exposure at centre the foreground was virtually dark and the sky completely blown with the grads. is it done to which spot metering mode your in or am I missing something really simple that's different to the canon. Hope that makes sense.

Depth of field refers to the depth of focus, so to speak, and probably that discussion referred to Live View showing the stopped down scene. It does show actual exposure (vs wide open lens in the viewfinder), but Depth of Field is Not about exposure extremes.

What does 5 stops of grad mean? a ND filter?

Exposure extremes of brightest sky and darkest shadow areas are tough. It's always a good plan to choose your scene better. Or modify your angles, maybe the bright sky can be eliminated. A graduated filter could help some cases. Or sometimes maybe you can use flash or reflectors to better fill the near shaded area. But all things are not always possible, and that is just photography, and I really doubt that is a Nikon/Canon issue.

Thanks for your reply. It operates completely different on Canon Liveview.

In it's simplest terms what I tried today was to expose correctly for the foreground then add graduated filters to bring back the sky so that it did not blow the highlights. On this occasion I was using a 0.9 and a 0.6 stop hard graduated filter which should of been more than enough to control the sky but I found that I was still having to shot 2 stops under exposed to not blow out the sky which made the foreground dark. So i'm wondering if with the Nikon it matters what metering mode your in i.e. spot, partial etc. because I should be able to expose properly for the foreground then add the filters for the sky and maybe just tweak my shutter speed slightly to get the histogram in he right place. I shouldn't be having to shot so underexposed. It's like its metering the sky rather than the foreground.

I would agree if using Spot metering, it surely would depend on where your spot is in the graduated filter area, something for the photographer to be aware of.

Spot metering is not point&shoot anyway, it is only about the spot, and it ignores all other areas in the frame.
And Spot does not even make the Spot be "accurate" exposure, it only makes the spot be middle gray level, correct or not. Spot requires considerable thinking and adjustment, it is far from novice point&shoot.

I know nothing about Canons, but was thinking if you still have it, you might also try it in the same situation. It would seem to just be a difficult photographic situation.

Yes it could of just been one of those difficult compositions with the sun coming up. I've a week off next week and will get plenty of chance to play around and get it right. Absolute love the camera though!