10 Tips for Good Quality Home Video

8/6/2019 10 Tips for Good Quality Home Video

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Introduction

It's easy go ahead!It wasn't so long ago that video editing was a very expensive, elitist type

of activity. You had to have the best hardware and software and even then it

took years of knowledge and experience to produce a great looking video.

Nowadays that's no longer the case. Both hardware and software have

dropped considerably in price to such an extent that it is now almost

possible to make a full length feature film on video for a miniscule amount of

money (The Blair Witch Project proved that..).

What hasn't changed is the need to understand some of the basic

principles of movie making. Couple this with lightweight cameras and free

editing equipment and you're off!

This short ebook will highlight the ten most important tips for making a

good quality, but cheap video. Use these along with the tools detailed on the

free video editing website and you could be the next Spielberg, Scorsese or (if

you're really ambitious), James Cameron...

Good luck and enjoy!

Gary

Gary Comerford 2008 Page 2 of 24


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Table Of Contents

Introduction .............................................................. 2

It's easy go ahead! .............................................................. 2

Table Of Contents ................................................................. 3

Chapter 1: The Ten Tips summarised ............................... 6

Tip 1: Plan your shots in advance so they edit together .................. 6

Tip 2: Use a good, solid tripod ................................................. 6

Tip 3: Frame Your Shot well.................................................... 6

Tip 4: Light Your Shot Well...................................................... 6Tip 5: Use Shallow Depth of Field ............................................. 6

Tip 6: Minimise movement. ..................................................... 6

Tip 7: Use good sound ............................................................ 7

Tip 8: Review all your footage before editing ............................... 7

Tip 9: Shoot at 24 FPS ............................................................ 7

Tip 10: Don't compress! .......................................................... 7

Tip 1 : Plan your shots in advance so they edit together ....... 8

Why? ................................................................................. 8

Solution ............................................................................. 8

Tip 2: Use a good, solid tripod ........................................ 9

Why? ................................................................................. 9

The solution ........................................................................ 9

Cheap alternative? ................................................................ 9

Tip 3: Light your shot well........................................... 10

Three point lighting ............................................................. 10

Tip 4: Frame your shot well......................................... 12

Why? ............................................................................... 12

Solution ............................................................................ 12



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Tip 5: Use Shallow Depth of Field .................................. 13

Why? ............................................................................... 13

Quick, cheap and easy: ........................................................ 13

Quick, expensive and complicated. ......................................... 13

Tip 6: Minimise movement ........................................... 15

Why? ............................................................................... 15

Compression and its problems ................................................ 15

Why does Youtube have problems? .......................................... 15

Use the limitations to your advantage ...................................... 16

Tip 7: Use good sound ................................................ 17Why? ............................................................................... 17

Sound in your videos ........................................................... 17

Sound effects ..................................................................... 18

Tip 8: Review all your footage before editing ................... 19

Why? ............................................................................... 19

Bonus: What if you're missing a shot? ....................................... 20

Tip 9: Shoot at 24 FPS ................................................ 21

Why? ............................................................................... 21

How? ............................................................................... 21

Tip 10: Don't compress! .............................................. 22

Why? ............................................................................... 22

How? ............................................................................... 23

Summary ................................................................. 24

The 10 tips ........................................................................ 24



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Chapter 1: The Ten Tips summarised

Here are the ten key tips for making your video look really good. Each ofthese tips has a chapter associated with it later in the book but if you just

want the summary here you are. For the detail, read on!

Tip 1: Plan your shots in advance so they edittogether

Garbage in Garbage out. If you shoot hours of footage without some

sort of plan you'll end up with hours of useless footage. Shoot with a plan in

mind.

Tip 2: Use a good, solid tripod

Shakeycam is bad (Unless you mean it). Get a good solid foundation for

your camera with a tripod

Tip 3: Frame Your Shot well

It's easy to tell the amateur cameraman from the professional one: Theamateur uses lots of zooms and pans. Stay away from this!.

Tip 4: Light Your Shot Well

Lighting is absolutely crucial to your video. But you don't need to spend a

fortune on lights. There's a really good, very bright light source just up there

in the sky......

Tip 5: Use Shallow Depth of Field

Having things out of focus is bad. Unless they are the things you WANT

out of focus. This is depth of field.

Tip 6: Minimise movement.

This is especially useful if you're thinking of sending data to Youtube.

Keep the movement to a minimum, this will keep the file size to a minimum.



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Tip 7: Use good sound

Someone once said that 70% of a picture is actually the sound. Sound

makes all the difference to a video.

Tip 8: Review all your footage before editing

You need to have a great understanding of what you've shot before you

can start editing.

Tip 9: Shoot at 24 FPS

We know what film looks like. We've been watching it for ever. We know

what video looks like. We've been watching that forever too. Shooting videousing film frame rate will merge the two together and make them look

similar.

Tip 10: Don't compress!

Keep your footage at the highest possible quality for as long as possible.

You'll thank me in the end.

So now we've looked at the 19 tips at a high level the following pages

will explore each of these tips in more detail.



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Tip 1 : Plan your shots in advance so theyedit together

Why?

Knowing in advance what shots you need (or want) will make it easier

when editing to create something your audience will want to watch. After all

you do want an audience to watch your video effort, don't you?

Solution

This is very difficult to do unless you have a script to follow. But it will

pay dividends when editing.

Suppose you've gone to SeaWorld for the day. Make sure that as well as

following what people are doing in your party you also try and get some of

the little shots that will make it all fit together. For example, as you enter

Sea World, make sure you get a static shot of the big sign outside that says

"Sea World. It will come in useful later to help tell your story. As you are all

watching Shamu perform in the big whale tank, make sure you turn the

camera on the audience and get some good reaction shots. These help sellthe scene and they also act as good cover-ups when you need to cut between

to shots that don't quite fit.

Other tips include:

If there is a show of some sort, you might want to watch it twice,

once to film the show and once to film the audience reaction

Try and get shots of people talking. Ask them questions if you want.

This footage can be used to provide some audio to lay over your

footage in editing.

Plan to run ahead of people and film them walking towards you.

There are few things less interesting than watching peoples backs as

they walk away from you.

Catch the candid moments. Keep the camera ready to just pick up

something candid. You never know what you might get and how useful

it might be. Gary Comerford 2008 Page 7 of 24


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Tip 2: Use a good, solid tripod

Why?Nothing screams 'amateur' more than shaky video footage. Take a random

look at any Youtube video and chances are you'll see one or more of the

following things happening:

Shaking, excessive zooming, lots of panning (moving side to side) and

bad focus.

In the heat of the moment it's often easy to forget that what looks good

when you are there often looks atrocious when you view it back on screen.

The solution

Get yourself a good tripod and use it. This will give you a firm foundation

for your footage. It will allow you to frame your shot well and keep it framed.

Avoid using the zoom unless absolutely necessary.

Tripods for video camera's are different to still camera tripods. But if a

still camera tripod is all you've got then that will have to do.

Cheap alternative?

If you can't get a good tripod use the following alternatives:

1. Stand with your back against something firm and hold the camera to

your body. Regulate your breathing

2. Use a wall or other stationary fixture to balance the camera on.

3. Place the camera on a soft bag or squashed jumper to provide a firm

base

4. Hold the camera at your waist or against your body rather than at

arms length or head height.

Remember the objective is to reduce movement, however possible.



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Tip 3: Light your shot well

One key differentiator between good footage and 'not-good' footage isthe lighting. If you shoot something that is badly light, or not lit well, it will

give you footage that appears to be worse than it actually is. Lighting makes

more difference to a movie than almost anything else (Actually sound makes a

big difference as well see Tip 7).

Out in the sunshine with a little bit of thought, you can have your

footage lit really well (after all, the reason Hollywood is where it is relates to

the weather. Southern California had lots and lots of sunshine so they built

the studios there with glass roofs to take advantage of that). So if you can use

the sun to light your footage then do so. If possible arrange your actors so

that the sun is at an angle to them rather than straight on. If you can't do

that, position yourself so that the sun is coming over one of your shoulders to

film a shot.

Inside, the use of artificial lighting to add illumination causes colour

temperature issues (basically interior lights are not recorded by video

cameras at the same colour your eye sees them. You need to use the white

balance function of your camera to effectively tell it what colour white is),

but most people forget to add the right amount of light to a shot regardless ofthe colour temperature!

A basic 3 point lighting set-up is the most effective for lighting someone

talking:

Three point lighting

Three point lighting is the standard for lighting a subject in film and

television. It involves using a number of light sources to create light falling ona subject from three directions (duh!)

The first light (or key light) is the main source of illumination. usually

it come at the scene from a 45 degree angle either from the left or the right.

This controls the level of illumination of the whole scene. if the scene needs

to be darker this light is reduced, if lighter it is increased.

The second light (or fill light) is a reflected light source. It usually

enters the scene from the opposite side of the frame to the key light. Its use



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is to throw some light onto that part of the scene that is in shadow as a result

of the key light. If we were lighting a face, the key light would light the left

side, say, and the fill light would throw some light onto the shadow on the

right side. The fill light can be a separate source of light completely from the

key light or it can be a reflection of the key light thrown back onto the sceneby means of a white or gold reflective surface. Generally the fill light is

weaker than the key light.

The third light ( or back light) provides illumination behind the

subject. It is used to either show the background itself or - more usually - to

throw light onto the back of the subjects head thereby giving the head more

definition and separating it from the background. This is usually characterised

by a slight 'halo' effect around the hair.

Next time you're watching an interview on television watch out for these

three lights.



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Tip 4: Frame your shot well

Why?Well framed shots draw the viewer into the action. A badly framed shot

will jar the viewer out of the moment and ruin your movie. How many times

have you watched a movie and seen, for example, a microphone boom

appearing in shot? Didn't it ruin things for you?

Solution

Well framed shots use what's know as 'The Rule of Thirds'. The theory isthat if you split your frame into three both horizontally and vertically the

main action should occur where the lines meet. If, for example, you are

shooting a sunset, make sure the horizon lines up at the bottom third of your

shot rather than in the middle. The difference is very subtle, but noticeable.

The other secret with framing is to make sure you only show the absolute

minimum you have to in order to tell the story.

Frame things as tight as you can. Don't have extraneous movement of the

camera. This includes those nasty pan-and-zoom shots we mentioned earlier

on. Shots like that will just make your audience sick.



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Tip 5: Use Shallow Depth of Field

Why?One of the key differences between film and video is the use of focus. A

shot which has the subject in sharp focus and the background blurred is

automatically assumed to be more 'filmic' than one where everything is in

focus (although this is not always the case as 'Citizen Kane' is a movie that has

almost all the movie in ultra-sharp focus at all points). This is known as

shallow depth of field.

Video cameras generally have a deeper depth of field (i.e more things in

focus) because of a technical matter to do with the size of the chip that

actually records the image. In a 35MM camera the effective area is larger

than on a video CCD and therefore depth of field is more easily achieved.

If you want your image to have good depth of field there are ways to

cheat this in video. One is simple, cheap and easy. The other is simple,

expensive and complicated.

Quick, cheap and easy:Move your camera back and away from your subject, zoom the lens in

and focus on the subject. This changes the framing and thereby gives the

effect of blurring the background. It doesn't always work well, and it's not for

every situation, but when it works it's very effective. Doing this has two

effects:

1) It changes the composition of the photograph so that the viewfinder

may show something in the foreground that isn't there in the previous frame..

2) It appears to show that the background (and any immediate

foreground object) are less sharp and more blurry than the area 'in focus' in

the middle. This is the shallow depth of field. In reality the depth of field on

both of these is the same (all things being equal) it's just that it appears to be

out of focus because of the way the perspective has changed.



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Quick, expensive and complicated.

Use a 35MM adaptor. A 35MM adaptor is something put in front of your

camera to fool it into thinking it is film rather than video. These adaptors are

expensive, sometimes unwieldy and often produce upside-down images thatneed to be flipped in your editor.

Don't go thinking that a 35MM adaptor is not for your cheap video

camera, though. They can be bought (or rented) for quite a few consumer

camera's now. The results are usually extraordinary, but you have to consider

the cost (and inconvenience) when shooting.



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Tip 6: Minimise movement

Why?If you are thinking of using your video on Youtube (or any other video

sharing website), this is particularly important. The limitations imposed by

the upload and display process mean that you are restricted to the size of file

you can use. This brings us to the area of compression.

Compression and its problems

The thing to remember when preparing for Youtube is that you arelimited to both file size and length. As a result, everything you do for Youtube

will be a compromise between having enough detail to see what you're doing

and having a small enough file size to make it worth watching. Your upload

limit is 100MB for a 10 minute film. Given that normal digital footage from a

camcorder is recorded at much greater rates than that (I have a 10 minute DV

film that takes up about 2GB, for example), you are on a losing stance to

start with.

Why does Youtube have problems?

Before we go any further let's recap on what happens when preparing a

video and reducing its file size:

The actual dimensions of the file can be reduced (Your TV sized

video footage can be reduced to the smaller Youtube size of 320 x

240)

The bitrate can be reduced (This effects the speed at which the data

on the video footage is processed. Larger bit rates mean higher

quality. Smaller bit rates mean lower)



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The footage can be compressed using a 'differences' algorithm. This is

similar to how DVD's are compressed. A frame is taken as a starting

point. This is encoded as a complete frame. The subsequent 'x'

number of frames are only analysed to determine the difference

between them and the key frame. The differences are saved, not thewhole frame. After a set number of frames, which can be changed, a

complete new frame is saved and the process starts again.

Use the limitations to your advantage

The key is to take advantage of the Youtube limitations to make your

video the best it can be.

It stands to reason that if your file is going to be compressed using the'differences' algorithm, then any large differences are going to increase file

size. If you can keep movement to a minimum this will benefit you. This also

applies to things such as the background. If you have a shot of someone

talking and they are against a 'busy' background, any slight move of the

camera will register the whole background as being changed needing a large

write to disk to save the information. The solution? - shoot against a plain

background.



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Tip 7: Use good sound

Why?The movie going experience is actually 70% sound. Want to validate this?

Watch a film like Jaws' with the sound off. Is it anywhere near as scary as

when you saw it in a dark theatre with the full sound effects? In fact watch

anymovie without sound and you'll see that it loses a large amount of the

impact. That's why even back in the days of 'silent' movies - there was at

least a piano playing in the background to bring some atmosphere to the

piece.

Sound is essential for a good film or video experience.

Sound in your videos

Usually the onboard microphone that comes with your video is good for

one thing and one thing only : recording the sound of you breathing behind

the camera and the wind whipping around your head. In terms of capturing

the dialogue or noise from the subject you are filming? Fugedduboudit!

So what do you do?

There are 2 solutions

1. Buy a nice expensive microphone usually a lavalier microphone that

can clip to someone's tie and capture their dialogue far better than

the on-board mike.

2. Turn the sound off and deal with it later.

Admit it, how many times do you reallyneed to listen to what yourecorded? Sure, if you're recording a speech or an interview then buying the

microphone may be the easy solution. But if it's a holiday video showing you

and the kids at Sea World, the best solution is usually to add some sound in

your edit. That's right, drop some music over the whole video and render it

out like that at home!

Several years ago I spent a long weekend with a couple of friends in

Norway skiing. I took my camera and got some great shots of us all hacking

down the mountain etc. When I got home I edited it all together and then Gary Comerford 2008 Page 16 of 24


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placed some ski sound effects under some background music and rendered it

all out. The result was a 10 minute video that everyone enjoyed. None of the

original sound was kept.

You would be surprised how often this happens on Hollywood movies aswell....

Sound effects

There are several sites on the internet where you can get free sound

effects. They vary in quality but don't let that put you off. Look at sites such

as:

Detonation films (http://www.detonationfilms.com)

Find Sounds (http://www.findsounds.com/)

The FreeSound project (http://www.freesound.org/forum/index.php)

http://www.findsounds.com/http://www.findsounds.com/


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Tip 8: Review all your footage beforeediting

Why?

Watch ALL your footage before you start editing. This will give you an

idea of what you have and what you don't have. It's easy when filming footage

to forget that sometimes you need some little shots to help your edit. For

example when you went to Sea World and shot footage of Shamu did you

remember to get a shot of the main entrance with the "Sea World" logo? I bet

you didn't. Make a note of stuff you missed.

Identify shots that will NOT appear in your video. These are the ones

where the camera whips around quickly, where the focus is wrong, where

there is nothing but zooms and pans. These will make your audience sick! Also

identify the ones where there is lots and lots of repetition: Jimmy running

into the waves and back is interesting once or twice, but not 8 or 10 times.

Identify the best shot from the sequence and use that.

Look for 'reaction shots' i.e. shots that show people looking at things

or discussing things or being candid. These are useful for bridging gaps in theaction later on.

Cut in late and out early. By this I mean only use that part of a shot that

shows JUST the bit your interested in and once that interesting piece has

finished, cut out. So if you've got footage of Jimmy on the beach throwing a

frisbee, show him throwing the frisbee. Don't show him shouting at you to

move back towards the left and 'to go deep'. Don't show him making a couple

of practice throws or stopping to watch the dog play in a tidal pool. Just show

the throw. Once he's thrown the frisbee and it's out of shot, cut away. . . .

Remember, ideally you should have something that tells a complete story

from start to finish. For longer shots that are boring (or contain things you

don't want in your movie), use your editors 'trim' function to cut bits out from

the start or end of the footage (In some editors you may have to drag the

same clip into the timeline several times to allow you to take chunks out of

the middle of it).



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Bonus: What if you're missing a shot?

Suppose you've reviewed your Sea World footage and realised you've

missed the shot of the main gate at Sea World. What can you do?

There are a couple of alternatives:

Try and find someone else in your group who had a camera and

did shoot the main gate.

Try an find a stock image from the internet (Use Flickr or Picaso

and search for images with a Creative Commons license so you don't

infringe copyright).

See if someone actually took a still picture of it. Stills can be

inserted into a video very easily. Some packages even produce what's

called The Ken Burns Effect where the camera appears to move

over the photo giving an impression of movement



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Tip 9: Shoot at 24 FPS

Why?Film is a medium which exposes an image to your eye 24 times per

second (frame rate). Your brain fills in the gaps and makes smooth motion of

what you see.

For UK based folks have you ever wondered why news footage from the

US looks 'different' to news footage from here? One reason is the different

colour system they use (PAL vs NTSC), but another is the different frame

rates.

Video - being electronic based - is constrained quite a lot by the

frequency at which the circuits are being used. This means that UK based

video's take 25 frames per second (FPS) and US based video's take 29.97

frames per second (don't ask why it's 29.97 and not 30!).

The resulting image is very much different. Movement is sharp and

'strobe like' and your brain interprets it differently.

How?

There are cameras on the market now that have a 24 frame-per-second

ability. These are the ones that need to be used for getting the film look from

video. Actually UK users can stick with 25fps because the 4% difference is

almost unnoticeable.

And make sure, if at all possible, that you capture this non-interlaced.

The general rule is 'if you can capture it non-interlaced (or progressive) it will

make your footage look better. Interlacing is he process whereby a videoimage is split into two separate 'fields' each containing half the picture. These

two halves are then shown alternately to reproduce the whole. It is a legacy

of early TV systems which couldn't handle the full information quickly

enough. Now we're stuck with it. The problem is that interlaced footage looks

awful on a computer where the screen doesn't handle interlacing.

Shoot progressive instead. It's much better!



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Tip 10: Don't compress!

Why?Video compression is a fact of life: Video takes up space - a LOT of

space. I have a 10 minute video from a New York trip that takes up almost

2GB of space on my machine. It's really easy to fill up the whole of your hard

drive with video.

But here's the thing that I find astonishing: The video that we download

from our camcorders onto your hard drives to edit has alreadygone through

video compression and is already compressed by a factor of 5. That's right,

the 2GB New York file is actually 10GB of video that is compressed.

The thing to remember here is that the compression cannot be

reversed. Imagine the scenario where you have a DVD with some footage that

you want. You can use one of the many DVD tools to extract the video from

the DVD, edit it using a free editing tool and then save it back to Youtube.

But it's going to look awful. Here's why:

Original footage 1:1 (as shot on your camera)

Compressed DV 5:1 (as stored on the camera tape)

Edited and saved to AVI format: 8:1 (as created from your editor)

Compressed from AVI to DVD : 12:1 (as an example - when loaded to

DVD)

DVD transferred to AVI for editing : 1:1 (When ripped from DVD)

Compressed from AVI to DVD : 12:1 (as an example when loaded back

onto DVD after editing)

Thus your original 1GB of video has been compressed many many times

before it ends up on your DVD. Each compression will lose quality.

This is why you need to remember the key mantra of video production:

Don't compress until the last possible moment.



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This means to keep your video as raw as possible and only to compress at the

latest possible point before you put it into your end format, whether this is

DVD or Youtube.

How?

Not easy. Most editing tools will re-render (and compress) every time you

save or create a movie. So if you take your basic footage, drop it into an

editor, add a title and a couple of transitions then render it out, you will be

creating a compressed version of the file. The secret is to make sure that you

don't then take that compressed file and do anything else with it. You may,

for example, take that file and save it to YouTube. That will compress it

again. If you take your output file and write it to a DVD that will compress it

once more.

For the best quality output, make sure you render your video out in the

format it is going to be needed for final display. So if you are sending it to

Youtube, render it out in the format that Youtube will accept so that it

doesn't get recompressed. If sending it to DVD, render it in MPEG format so it

isn't recompressed.

Compression is the 'evil little secret' of video. Without it we wouldn't be

able to watch video - our computers couldn't handle the data quickly enough

but with it we get compression artefacts. To see what I mean do this:

Follow this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76i6aZgo2io. This is

the video for Nickleback's 'Rockstar'. Right at the very beginning, the very first

picture you see is a close up of the young boy who takes a deep breath and

(in Chad Kroger's voice) says 'I'm through with...'. Watch it a couple of times.

What do you see? Can you see those large, square 'chunky' things that appear

whenever the boy takes a breath? What about whenever the picture cuts from

one person to another? Can you see the same things there? These are

compression artefacts/artifacts. These are the result of taking things that arecompressed and compressing them down further.

Anything you can do to avoid this is good.



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Summary

The 10 tipsI've been working with video for many years. The ten tips given to you

here are my top ten tips for getting the best out of your video. Of course you

don't have to follow all of these. In fact you don't have to follow any of them,

but to guarantee that your video will look it's absolute best it's a good idea to

at least try and follow some of them.

Looking at many video's on Youtube or other web sharing sites it is now

possible to identify what causes them to look the way they do (both good and

bad).

Ignoring the rules is all about knowing the rules. Spielberg used 'shaky'

cameras in the beach scene of Saving Private Ryan. I hated it, but it didn't

seem to damage the film at all.

Orson Welles and his cinematographer, Greg Tolland, made a decision to

not have anypart ofanyframe out of focus in Citizen Kane. Their depth of

field was huge. It was one of the reasons the film has become a critical hit

since its release over 60 years ago.

Oliver Stone is renowned for mixing film stock in his movies. 'JFK' had

35mm, 16mm, 8mm all mixed together. It had different frame rates and

different aspect ratios. It looked weird, but it told the story he wanted it to.

So knowing the rules allows you to define when and where you can bend

or break the rules.

With the ten tips in this book you are well on your way to knowing the

rules and, incidentally, making better videos as well

Enjoy your shooting!



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Copyright.

The contents of this ebook are copyright Gary Comerford 2008.

They are released under a Creative Commons Share-Alike, Attribution license. This means

you are welcome to copy and pass this information on as needed - however you must pass ALL

this information on and you must keep this copyright information intact including the websitebelow.

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10 Tips for Good Quality Home Video