Lost Marble Media

We get a lot customers shooting their own footage and hiring us to edit it and add graphics. A great example of this is SelfGrowth.com who send us weekly video of David Riklan offering ‘healthy living’ advice in front of a green screen. David and the SelfGrowth.com team have a good grasp on filming and how to use their cameras but not everyone does. Most can happily leave everything set to automatic, point the camera at the subject and push the red button but that won’t always get you the best result. Here’s a few simple tips to help you achieve a more professional result. In this blog entry, we assume you’re shooting indoors as most (actually, I think all) of our current customers do.

Tip #1
Evenly lighting your scene
This is a very simple procedure. Set up your shot first and make sure that everything is as you want it when you intend to start shooting. If possible ensure the lighting is constant. Natural lighting gets brighter and then darker during the day and more often than not will cause your camera to constantly fight to re-adjust itself accordingly to compensate. If you’re shooting indoors, it’s a good idea to close the curtains and rely on ample artificial lighting. If you find that the artificial lighting is not enough to light your scene, then mix the natural lighting with whatever artificial light you can add to try to add some stability.

Tip #2
Avoid using the auto-settings:
Setting the white balance
It can be daunting, but don’t rely on the cameras auto-exposure and auto/pre-set white balance settings. Once you have the scene how you want it, the lighting is right and any large coloured areas are already in place, go to your camera’s menu settings and find the white balance option. In most cases you will be presented with some or all of the following: ‘Indoors’, ‘Outdoors’, ‘One Touch’ (manual) and ‘Auto’. Although some of these features can be useful when shooting outdoors, we’re interested in the ‘One Touch’ option. You will need a white sheet of paper or a large plain white area to focus your camera on. With the sheet at least a few feet away from the camera, zoom in on the white area and make sure there’s nothing else in shot other than the white. Click the ‘One Touch’ or manual button and wait for the camera to adjust to the white. You should see that the shot you had was either too red or too blue but now it should appear as you see it with your eyes with the correct colour balance.

Setting the exposure
All cameras have at least two ways to control light: the shutter and aperture. The aperture is like an iris in the eye, and controls light by changing size. When a photographer takes a picture, the shutter opens briefly and the image is exposed. Leaving the exposure setting to auto is leaving the quality and detail picked up by the lens to chance. Again, auto-exposure features can be useful for the outdoors but for filming indoors, I strongly advise learning to master the camera’s manual setting. It’s extremely simple to do but is often ignored. Set your camera up and point it at a subject. Find the exposure settings in your camera’s menu and set it to manual. Now adjust the exposure negatively and you will see the light and detail drain from your shot. Now you might assume that adjusting it positively to the maximum setting would compensate and restore the detail? Try it, what you will notice on the preview screen is an almost white shot. What you’re looking for here is the perfect balance. Just like before you want the capture to look exactly, or as close as you can get to what you see with your eyes. It’s a good tip to set it to auto-exposure, then switch to manual and tweak it as you see fit for a better result. If you wish your scene to be brighter, that can be done in post production. If you brighten the scene using the exposure, you will lose detail that you can’t adjust in post.

Tip#3
Use a tripod!
Granted, this is an obvious one but it’s a very important one, especially if you’re shooting with a green/blue screen background. A moving/wobbling camera (or a fast moving subject) will cause motion blurs. This is a disaster when keying (removing) the green from the video as you now have blurs of colours mixing with the green. If you don’t have a tripod then simply set up the camera on a steady surface. If you have ever watched an MTV reality show you will have no doubt seen the hand-held style/technique of purposely moving the camera around and zooming in on the subject abruptly. If you wish to achieve this style, I would strongly recommend either filming multi-angle (with a second steady angle) or shooting a separate, steady second take.

Tip#4
Think about how you will deliver the video and where it will be seen
Where will the finished video be seen? This is where the vast majority make mistakes. If you intend your video to be seen via the internet, the chances are that it will be displayed in a small embedded video. Youtube’s default embed size is 425 x 344. If you have a shot with small content and fine detail, you have to keep in mind where it will be seen as you shoot because it might look good and appear visible on your monitor but when it’s on youtube people will struggle to see it.

Tip#5
Shooting with one camera and maintaining continuity
Not many people have access to more than one camera. If you’re not in the videoing business, why would you? However, you can always shoot the same piece twice from different angles and as long as you deliver it in the same way, you’ll be able to edit between the two shoots and the result will seem as if the two angles were shot at the same time. The big issues are obvious – don’t change clothing or move around items in the scene…but it’s the little factors that will catch you out. You may sweep your hair to one side while setting up the next angle, loosen your tie or roll up your sleeves. It may seem like nothing but when you’re trying to get across a point or sell an idea or service via your video, you don’t want the viewer distracted by the fact that one moment there’s a cat on the window ledge behind you and the next second it’s vanished.

There are many other hints we could share with you and may well do so in a follow up article, but for now these few basic tips should help you execute a successful shoot.