
When shooting video, whether for your family or for your startup here's
a list of steps you should consider:-

### 1. Get a good HD camcorder

Even the cheap lightweight ones do a great job these days. I use a Canon
HF100 for most of my video. You can get better camcorders but they tend
to be larger and heavier. There's a lot of truth to the saying "the best
camera is the one you have with you". Having one small enough to carry
in your pocket may make the difference between capturing the moment or
not.

### 2. Get a tripod and use it

Use a tripod, (or if you don't have one with you, a fence, rock or
column) to brace against. This will make a significant difference to how
professional your video looks. Holding the background motionless will
also improve the overall video quality of your movie when it's displayed
on the web because video compression codecs work best when there's less
motion. Codecs allocate information carrying bits to the parts of the
image that need them most. A stationary background doesn't need many
bits to represent it. That leaves more bits available to encode the
subject in more detail.

### 3. Never walk with your camcorder while it is recording

Unless you are deliberately trying to create a nausea inducing, Blair
Witch -like project stand still. Shoot, hit stop, walk to new location,
hit start.

### 4. Shoot from multiple angles

Before the show begins at your school performance, or during applause,
shoot some audience footage. You can splice this in to the show to make
the video more interesting. Having some "b-roll" footage like this is
also useful to replace any bad bits of video from the performance as a
whole. For example, in the middle of the show you leave the camcorder
running to capture audio but you move the tripod to the other side. You
can use your b-roll footage to replace the video but leave the audio
from the original track.

### 5. Never pan or zoom

Panning is useful only for landscape shots and to look good it needs to
be done using a tripod with a smooth panning action (fluid head). In
nearly all other situations panning is bad and unprofessional. The same
holds for zooming. Don't use the zoom feature on your camcorder while it
is running unless you can do it very smoothly so it's barely
perceptible.

### 6. Treat your video camera like a still camera

This encompasses some of the previous points. You want to set up a shot,
shoot it, and then stop the camcorder before moving to a new position,
zoom level or direction.

### 7. Audio is 75% of video

As a rule of thumb some professionals say that the audio is 75% of the
experience you are delivering. The human brain can extrapolate and
interpolate images really well to make sense of even the most jumbled
video, but if your audio is not clear, if you can't hear your child on
stage delivering their speech, your video is worthless. So before
investing in a bigger camcorder consider getting a better microphone for
the one you have. At the very least, find somewhere to stand where you
can minimize the background noise, away from the A/C units, away from
that noisy person who won't stop talking, ...

### 8. Get some light on the subject

Get people outside where there's lots of natural light, or get them to
stand under a light to improve the quality of your video. Even a couple
of garage-style halogen lights can make a huge difference when shooting
indoors. But don't ever point them directly at the subject, bounce them
off a ceiling instead to get a more diffuse and natural light without
harsh shadows.

### 9. Use your video to tell a story

Begin with a wide, establishing shot so the audience can identify the
location. Shoot a clip of the city sign as you drive in, shoot a clip of
the venue from the road. Next shoot some medium shots: the stage, the
audience, ... And finally shoot lots of close up shots.

### 10. Do it twice!

If you get the chance, for example, the school play is held twice, two
nights in a row, attend both and shoot both. Maybe shoot one as close
ups and the other as a medium shot to capture the whole stage. Now you
can edit them together to create a much more interesting video.

### 11. Avoid moving backgrounds

A stationary background with a tripod mounted camera will produce the
best looking compressed video output. Filming with the sea behind your
subject for extended periods of time is rarely a good idea.

### 12. Avoid using lots of different effects and transitions in your edited video

There's a saying amongst video professionals: "transitions are for
people who don't know how to cut". There's a lot of truth to that. But,
if you really must use transitions, use them sparingly and pick just one
and use it consistently through your video. Transitions can be used to
good effect to show that something is happening in the story you are
trying to tell, e.g. the move from one location to another.


How to shoot good video


On October 25, 2001 I set a Guinness World Record by editing a music
video from camera-roll to publication in 3 hours 46 minutes and 19
seconds beating the previous record which stood at 4 days. I was showing
off Windows Movie Maker in Windows XP and edited non-stop for the entire
time to create the video. We filmed an English band called *Electric
Soft Parade* on the roof-top of HMV records in London and on the streets
around HMV records. There were nine separate tapes that had to be edited
together to create the finished video. The video included a cameo
appearance by Steve Ballmer dressed in a bowler hat.

Editing non-stop on stage using an editor that was not designed for
multi-track editing like this was an exhausting experience but Windows
Movie Maker performed flawlessly. I suspect this may also qualify as the
world's longest live demonstration of a software product on stage!

This is NOT the version I created on stage but it's the same song
"There's a Silence":


The Blog of Ian Mercer.

Topic: video

How to shoot good video

World's Fastest Music Video Production - Guinness World Record