If you have or are think­ing of mak­ing a non-fiction, i.e., spe­cial inter­est video to sell, you may have heard sto­ries where one sin­gle video title made its pro­ducer mil­lions of dol­lars and then he retired on a beach some­where and spends his days sip­ping mai tais. [Read more…]

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For those read­ers who aren’t video savvy, the fol­low­ing is a pop­u­lar arti­cle on get­ting started with mak­ing your own videos we posted at one of our other sites, VideoMarketingResourceCenter.com.

BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING

So let’s say you want to tape some­one or some­thing to put on your web­site. Where to start? Oddly, even the word “tape” is becom­ing out­dated, as many of the least expen­sive video cam­eras today don’t use tape any­more. They record to solid state chips or hard dri­ves inside the cam­era body.

CHEAP, SIMPLE & GOOD

Flip Video pro­duces the hottest items in the cam­corder mar­ket, the Flip Ultra and Flip UltraHD. These sleek cam­corders look no dif­fer­ent than dig­i­tal cam­eras and are small enough to eas­ily fit in a pocket, purse or back­pack. These nifty devices save the video to an inter­nal chip so there are no mov­ing parts, noth­ing to change, and unlike cam­corders that use com­pact flash cards, noth­ing to lose. Both mod­els offer a full two hours of record­ing capac­ity, a bright two-inch trans­flec­tive screen for no-glare view­ing even in direct sun­light, and an inno­v­a­tive AA recharge­able bat­tery pack that can be con­ve­niently recharged through the camera’s built-in USB arm. The Flip Ultra is priced at just $149.99, while the Flip UltraHD sells for $199.99.

These cam­eras could not be eas­ier to use. Just point and shoot. Flip Video cam­corders are the world’s first with on-board soft­ware to enable edit­ing, orga­niz­ing, and seam­less video upload­ing to web­sites. Even the built in micro­phone does an impres­sive job for for what it is. When you’re ready to upload to your com­puter, sim­ply flip (hence, the name) out the USB con­nec­tor and using the pro­vided soft­ware, trans­fer the video clips as sim­ply as trans­fer­ring a file. Then upload to a web­site or import into your favorite edit­ing pro­gram and away you go. Folks, it just doesn’t get any eas­ier than this.

MOVING ON UP

OK, the Flip Video cam­eras are not for every­one. For those want­ing higher qual­ity and more options, you will want to move up to either a con­sumer or pro­sumer cam­corder. The cam­corders today offer amaz­ing value. For around $300 and up you can get a qual­ity cam­era that will either record to DV tape, a mem­ory chip or inter­nal hard drive, will have options for adding a more pro­fes­sional micro­phone, and some even have a built-in light for work­ing in dark spaces.

There are scores of cam­eras avail­able in this range. If you stick to Sony, Canon, Pana­sonic, JVC, Sanyo and other well-known names, you can’t go wrong. B&H is one of our favorite sources for equip­ment. World renowned, B&H, is the place to be for all your video and pro audio needs. Their com­mit­ment to sales qual­ity and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion is sec­ond to none.

SOUND IS HALF THE PICTURE

You’ve prob­a­bly noticed that “tinny” sound most home movies have, and the way the back­ground sounds over­whelm the main sub­ject. That hap­pens when you rely solely on the built-in micro­phone. It isn’t picky about what it hears, and the louder the source, what­ever that is, the more it will be the main thing you hear. Plus your hands han­dling the cam­era, or if you are out­side, the wind can cre­ate a lot of noise.

For pro­fes­sional sound you will want to add exter­nal micro­phones. Lava­lier mics (wired or wire­less) are placed on the “tal­ent” and give a sense of pres­ence. They will make a 200% improve­ment in the sound of the per­son speak­ing over a built-in mic. You can buy a sim­ple lava­lier mic at Radio Shack for $26.49 online. I use a lot of $300 lava­liers and this mic isn’t bad at all com­pared to them. It isn’t as good, but at that price it is a great value. If you do want a more pro­fes­sional lava­lier, the Sony ECM 44-B is an indus­try stan­dard and can be had for $220 at B&H Photo Video and other places. These mics sound great and will last a life­time if treated with respect.

Shot­gun mics can be used on the cam­era, on a boom pole or a mic stand. Con­trary to what many peo­ple think, a shot­gun mic does not amplify or reach out to get the sound in front of it. It works by ignor­ing the sounds to the side and behind it, to vary­ing degrees depend­ing on the design. These work great when you need to iso­late a speaker or actor but can­not prac­ti­cally use a lava­lier mic. You can spend thou­sands of dol­lars on a top end pro model, but good qual­ity can be had in the $200 — $500 range. B&H Photo Video sells our favorite shot­gun mics from Sennheiser and Audio Tech­nica for under $300.

LIGHT IT

All video cam­eras love light. Most cam­eras today will oper­ate fine in darker sit­u­a­tions, such as an indoor room with­out a lot of win­dows, but you will improve the shot immensely if you add light to fill in shad­ows, add a sparkle to a person’s eyes, and bring out the col­ors of a scene.

Like micro­phones, lights can be cheap or very expen­sive, and unless you plan to shoot pro­fes­sion­ally there is no rea­son to spend a lot on lights. Sim­ple work­lights from Home Depot will work in many sit­u­a­tions. A per­son at a desk could be lit with a desk lamp pointed at them. You can get ornate with light­ing dia­grams (that’s the cool pat­terns the light throws on the wall behind the sub­ject), but the point is to light the sub­ject so as to fill in shad­ows (or cre­ate them, for mood effects) and to give the cam­era enough light that it doesn’t push the gain up and cause grain­i­ness in the image.

One of the chal­lenges of light­ing is that what your eye sees is not at all what the cam­era sees. Your brain evens the “color tem­per­a­ture” of light out, but the cam­era can­not do that. When you adjust it for tung­sten light, the kind that you get from stage lights or a tra­di­tional light bulb, it will see day­light as blue. If adjusted for day­light, it would see tung­sten as deep orange. So you may have to add col­ored gels to the lights to bal­ance every­thing out.

To keep things sim­ple, when shoot­ing indoors with tung­sten as the main light source, try to elim­i­nate day­light unless you want the blue effect (this can be quite nice, when done artistically).

I have given a very quick overview of what you will want to con­sider at all lev­els of shoot­ing. If all of this seems over­whelm­ing and high pro­duc­tion val­ues are your goal, you may want to call a professional.

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