Ever watched a dark, pixelated video of a half a person's face with a buzzing sound in the background? Nope, you haven't, because that crappy video is unwatchable. You can have the best promotion, the hottest body, or the most charming attitude, but if the quality of the videos you're trying to sell suck, people aren't going to come back for more after feeling like they got ripped off with a sub-par video.
The good news is that it's never been easier to create a video that doesn't look like it was filmed on a potato during an earthquake in a swarm of buzzing bees. By following the tips in this article to understand how a camera works, how lights make more of a difference than the camera you choose, and that sound quality can be just as important as image quality, you will lift your video production game and leave your customers begging for more.
Lighting
A camera's job is to capture light. Light goes through the lens of the camera and lands on a semiconductor inside the camera itself that turns light waves into 1s and 0s that a computer inside the camera captures. It's pretty wild when you think about it – magic sand that can record rays of light. This semiconductor inside the camera is called a "sensor" and it loves light, working at its best in bright conditions.
There's a plethora of YouTube videos about how to light your scene, but a basic technique is called three-point lighting. It's ideal for illuminating people and objects without creating weird shadows and separating the subject from the background. Start your YouTube searches there and you'll be miles ahead of most content creators that don't even set up a lamp or two to brighten up their face.
LED panels are the most popular type of lights for video because they don’t use a lot of electricity (so can run off batteries), don’t get dangerously hot and can change colour temperature (warm, cool, even colours!) They come in various shapes, sizes and prices, so it's tough to recommend a specific product. Things to keep in mind when shopping for an LED light are:
- Do you need to change the colour temperature (i.g: white, orange, yellow, blue) of the light?
- How bright is the light? Will it be strong enough to work in daylight to fill in shadows?
- Do you need to move the light around so would a battery powered or a very thin and lightweight kit be worth it?
- Would a set of lights you can control from your smartphone be useful to you and worth the cost?
Lighting a scene is literally an art people study for years, so don't stress about being all moody and surreal – just focus on the basics so your image is clear and then work from there. There's no right or wrong way to do this, so experiment with all the lights you can get your hands on!
Audio
For some viewers, the audio is just as important as the image. They want to hear everything as well as see everything, so getting the audio right can be crucial. The device we use to record audio is a microphone. Most cameras have one built-in or you can get a separate microphone that either plugs in to your camera or records its audio separately and then you merge the audio later in the editing process.
As much as the microphone you use is important, even more important is the room you're recording in. Here's some audio recording tips that work well regardless of how fancy your microphone is:
- Get the microphone as close as possible to whatever it is you want to record. The closer the mic is, the less chance of background noise getting captured.
- Hanging quilts or blankets from the walls and placing a rug on the floor makes a huge difference to audio quality. For video, you can place them out of the camera's view so nobody will even see them.
- Turn off fans, air conditioners, computers, or any other humming or buzzing noise. Close windows if it's noisy outside, like birds or cars.
Like lights, there's dozens of different types of microphones, each designed for a different situation. For most online sex workers, a “shotgun” microphone, just positioned out of the camera’s view pointing at you (but not too far away!), will capture better quality sound than the built-in microphone on a camera or smartphone.
Camera
Probably the least important thing in the whole setup is the camera. If you feed it enough light and have the audio sorted, then almost any digital camera made in the last decade will do a good enough job. That's not to say you can't spend a bit of money and get great results, but you'll be spending a lot of money to get something that's a decent improvement over a modern smartphone.
There are some excellent video apps for smartphones that offer more features and settings than the default camera app. Things like being able to lock down a focus point, colour temperature, audio visualisers, changing the file format, ISO settings and more. Blackmagic Camera for Android/iOS, Filmic Pro on Android or Kino for iOS are worth spending a few bucks on to really get the most out of your smartphone's camera.
You may already have a great camera you didn't know about – a digital SLR/mirrorless camera! Sony, Nikon, Canon, Fuji, etc cameras that are designed for photos are also excellent at video thanks to their big sensors and high quality lenses. Perfect for those who need to take high quality stills, as well as video. If you're in the market for a camera that can do both, a website like DPReview has excellent, unbiased reviews, plus a database of all the cameras on the market today.
Do you have multiple cameras already? Perhaps a couple of old smartphones along with your digital SLR. Why not use all those cameras at once and have multiple angles of the same scene? This technique is called multi-cam editing. Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere and Blackmagic’s Davinci Resolve all support multi-cam editing natively.
This is really handy for people that don't have a camera operator. Instead of someone walking around controlling the camera, you can place cameras around your subject, let them all record at once, then dump all the footage they record into your video editing software of choice and stitch it all together. Cut to a different camera for a close-up or cut to another one for a nice wide shot. Maybe even display two cameras at once for a split screen effect.
You don't even need to start them all recording at once. As long as all the cameras have their own built-in microphone, modern video editing software can sync the recorded video from each camera using the sound recorded by each camera, with your properly recorded audio as the main audio track when exported. How cool is that?
Throw Stuff At The Wall & See What Sticks!
Hopefully this article has given you some things to think about when recording your next video. Is your lighting sorted? What type of microphone are you using and where is it placed? Would it benefit from more than one camera? Is the camera you've already got more than enough and it's the lighting you need to improve?
What matters is experimenting. Fiddle around with the settings, move your lights around, configure the room you're in to be less noisy. YouTube is an incredible resource for any questions you might have about videography, so take advantage of it, start with the basics, then it's all trial and error until you get it right and learn from your mistakes.
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