Amateur Home Video Tips

I’ve seen a lot of bad home videos lately, some of which was my own early work or when I trusted someone else to tape me with my video camera.

Here are some video recording tips that are easy to do:

• A steady hand helps a lot. Practice tucking your elbow tight against your body for stability.
• Use a tripod. Even a monopod (single leg) works well.
• Avoid using the zoom unless you can do it without that jerky look and feel.
• If you use zoom, use optical for the clearest image quality. Digital zoom is to extreme and your quality will suffer.
• When you pan (left-right movement), do it slowly and steadily.
• Don’t rock side-to-side like you might see on MTV. It just makes the viewers nauseous and limits how you can use the footage in the future. Keep it steady.
• Save fancy effects for when you are editing, not while shooting.
• Always start recording before the action begins and leave it on a few extra seconds after the action ends.
• Record multiple takes of each scene, preferably from different angles or mid shot vs close up.
• If you are using two video cameras, you may have a harder time in post-production making the footage look like it’s all from the same scene. Rather than spend lots of time trying to clean it up, commit to either a single camera shooting style, or use identical/similar video camera models.
• Lighting, lighting, lighting. Use reflectors and anything you can to mute the effects of interior incandescent and florescent light.
• Sound — Do whatever you can to make sure you can hear the subjects of the video. If you’re using the built-in video camera microphone, try to get in close and have the subjects speak up. If you have a mic input jack, run an external microphone closer to the action.
• If your footage looks great but you couldn’t hear the subjects, there’s not much you can do to fix. You may be better off replacing the audio with a music sound track while editing.

Above all, have fun. Enjoy it. Don’t let yourself get frustrated.

If you have a tip, please let me know.
Good luck!
-Roland