Digital Lifestyles Reference Guide

Aug 27, 2004

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The most effective way to improve your digital video is practice. The more video you shoot, the better you'll get at dealing with all of the many tricks associated with getting great shots. The more video you edit, the better you become at identifying the perfect places to cut and splice your scenes. A few tips will help make sure your video is as good as it can be no matter what your experience level.

Use a Tripod or Monopod

The number one cause of bad looking video is a shaky hand. Electronic image stabilization is limited in improving the quality of your video image. Instead of attempting to hold your arm immobile for the duration of recording, use a tripod to stabilize the camera. If you don't like the idea of lugging around something as clunky as a tripod, invest in a monopod instead. Your two feet become the second and third points of stability, but the pressure to hold your arm muscles in a fixed position in greatly reduced. If you don't have a monopod or tripod with you, find something in your surrounding area to help bear the burden of keeping your camera still by leaning against a wall or tree.

Frame Your Shot

There's a rule of thirds in still photography for dividing the visible area in to three horizontal and three vertical sections. This rule of thirds is just as applicable to video and helps line up the perfect shot. As you're shooting try to anticipate what might be coming next and plan accordingly. If you record action moving from left to right, frame the subject of your video to the left and lead them with the camera so they never walk out of your frame. If you need to visually cut someone's head off to fit your shot, take a little off the top - removing someone's chin from the shot just looks strange.

Use an External Microphone

Microphones built into consumer DV cameras are lousy. Space is limited inside the camera, so low quality hardware is used. The microphone positioning is never optimized to get close enough to the person or thing you are recording to get good sound quality. The result is lots of background noise or an audio track that sounds very distant in relation to the image. In an ideal universe, you want an external microphone placed in close proximity to the subject. A lavaliere or handheld microphone dramatically improves sound.

Obviously, you can't get close with a microphone in circumstances like your kid's soccer game, but there is a solid compromise. A shotgun microphone mounted to the hot shoe on top of the DV cam targets sound in a narrow trajectory aimed in the direction the lens is pointing. Shotgun microphones are designed to minimize nearby sounds, filtering out close proximity background sounds. You get more of the audio from the on-field action and less crowd noise, resulting in a better sounding video.

Improve Your Lighting

Sometimes recording video means having minimal control over the lighting, especially when shooting outdoors. Whenever possible, take control of the lighting to make sure you end up with a great shot. One way to improve your light situation is to avoid mixing many light sources. If you have natural light from a window and indoor lighting in the same shot, eliminate one or the other if possible. The temperature of natural light and indoor lighting is much different which can result in blue or red cast images, depending on which source dominates.

Reduce or eliminate backlighting when ever possible. If you are outdoors, position yourself so that you use the sun to your advantage by getting the angle of sunlight in any position other than directly behind your subject. If the primary light source is behind your subject, the video will turn out with lots of shadows on your subject, which is almost impossible to fix in post production when using consumer editing tools.

Using a white reflective surface to bounce light onto your subject reduces shadows. Foamcore makes an affordable bounce card available from any office supply store. If you're out on a picnic, a cooler lid may also do the trick. You can rely on virtually any white shiny surface to help through so light in your shot.

Monitor Your Recording

Plenty of attention is given to watching video in the attached LCD as it records, but it's equally (sometimes more important) to monitor the audio. People are generally more forgiving of bad video when the sound quality is tolerable. By monitoring the volume, you get a better idea of what's too loud or soft and can make adjustments to your volume setting accordingly. Any set of headphones works great for this, although the over-the-ear kind tend to block more background noises.

Black Your Tapes

DV cameras assign time code to every frame on a tape. If you insert a new tape in your DV cam and start recording, the tape starts at zero and continues until you either run out of tape or you shut the camera off. Start back up and you're at zero all over again. There was a time when software did a lousy job of handling this. Instead of capturing everything on the tape, the software would capture from the first zero until the time code hit the end of a section and returned to zero. This software glitch is longer a problem, but broken time code still creates problems for accurately cataloging footage. You can't be sure that the third segment on your tape starts at 00:43:01 because the tape started and stopped several times with inconsistent counter positions.

The solution to this problem is blacking the tape. Cover the lens with the lens cap, mute the sound and record over the entire tape from start to finish creating unbroken time code. When you record your segments over the tape later, you can reference consistent numerical values of information.

Turn Off Digital Zoom

Every digital video camera brags about the size of digital zoom supported, sometimes to the tune of hundreds of magnification multiples. Unlike optical zoom, which magnifies what you are shooting, digital zoom increases the size of each pixel that makes up the image. As the digital zoom is increased, the image quality dramatically decreases into a series of large blocks. When optical zoom won't get you close enough to your subject, the best thing you can do is move closer. Digital zoom will not improve your shot. Another alternative to digital zoom is purchasing an add-on lens for the DV cam.

Add a Lens

Digital video camera companies offer add-on lenses for most of the consumer DV cams. The ones that don't have add-ons might benefit from a third-party add-on. For under $50 you can improve some of your shots simply by using an additional lens. The two most common additions are wide angle and telephoto options. The wide angle lenses come in handy when you're trying to grab subjects close to your camera and can't pan out far enough to frame your entire shot. Sometimes there's no room to back up far enough to frame everything. By adding a wide angle lens you increase the camera's field of view, getting everything in the shot.

Telephoto lens add-ons help solve the problem of not enough optical zoom. Ideally, you want your DV cam lens optics to do all the heavy lifting, so make use of whatever zoom you can get, but when you run out of zoom, the telephoto will help bring the subject closer without the pixilation associated with digital zoom.

The downside to these low cost lenses is the cheap materials used to make them. Handle with care and you'll get great mileage out of an otherwise cheap solution.

Tell a Story

Every movie tells a story in some way, but most people don't want to sit through all the incidental stuff that happens between the plot points. You may want to capture every part of your son's first day on his bike, but keep in mind this event is more exciting for you, his parent, than it is for your friends and family who watch the movie. Edit out the ten minute negotiation between the time he sits on the bike and the time you finally convince him it's safe to put foot to pedal and start down the sidewalk (save it to embarrass him when he invites his first college girlfriend home for break). Give public performances of the highlight-reel version of the story, where your son marches to the bike, helmet on head, prepared to lay training wheel rubber to the brushed concrete.

Edit Liberally

Liberal editing goes along with telling a story. Think about what you are depicting in your movie and eliminate anything that doesn't fit that vision. Obviously shoe gazing shots are the first thing to go. Cut shaky hand motion, unless your goal is a Blair Witch style camera shake. It gets tricky when you have to select start and end points for the "real" footage. Leave enough of the shot to convey the onscreen action, but get in and get out without dragging out the shot. Tight edits make for smooth transitions between scenes.

Avoid Complex Transitions

Wipes, those clever transitions that mask your video in a star or heart as you move between scenes, may look cool the first time you watch them on screen, but in general they do nothing to improve your video. In fact, because they involve a complex series of motion and changes to your video, they make it worse for online sharing because they increase the overall file size by adding frames to your movie. They also add additional rendering time because the editing software needs to do some heavy lifting to integrate the wipe with your footage. Unless you desperately need to crank the cheese factor to eleven, use complex transitions sparingly for projects appearing anywhere other than on DVD.

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