Shooting video with a DSLR camera has lots of advantages. They’re smaller than a traditional video camera and videographers use them for ‘the look’ and I have to agree, that’s the reason I often use my Canon 5D Mk lll. But the one problem all DSLR’s have is sound. My Canon C100 Mk 2 video […]
I’m not sure who said this, but its true. “Viewers will more readily accept poor pictures with great sound than great images with poor sound”. At first reading, this sounds wrong. Surely, it’s all about the image? On-line discussion in video forums, etc seems to be always about the latest camera and its 4K abilities. Isn’t image quality the […]
When The Shooting Stops … The Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story. This is a great book by Ralph Rosenblum, a New York feature film editor. Whilst it’s written about editing with 35mm film, there are some great lessons for any one who is about to sit down to edit their footage. Workflow – plan it […]
One of the key skills a videographer needs is to know how to shoot an interview plus B roll or cutaway footage to tell a story. And there’s a way to get free lessons very night in your living room. TV News and Current Affairs programs are based around the interview. Almost every news story contains the same […]
One of the most misunderstood settings on a video (or still camera) is the one labelled ‘colour balance’. The menu behind this setting often looks like this one. From left to right, these symbols tell you what settings the camera has available – so which one do you select? When colour photography was first invented […]
This post is part 2 of a series on editing your first video. (Read the first post here) Know your Grammar When you write, you use grammar. Grammar is what gives you the structure of a sentence. Defn: Grammar: ‘The study of how words and their component parts combine to form sentences’. Film and video also […]
This is the first post in a series that follows my three earlier posts on check list for your first video shoot. I’m assuming you know your way around whatever NLE you’re using and you’re now ready to start editing the footage you’ve shot. (NLE – Non-linear editing. This describes programs such as Final Cut Pro, Adobe […]
Every time you write something, an e-mail, a blog post, a script or something longer you use words. Those words usually come from your memory and experience. You think about what you want to say and then you select the right words and put them in the right order to communicate your thoughts. Another way […]
Can you e-mail me the video? I often get asked this question and my answer is usually ‘no – because it’s a video file and therefore too big’. I thought it might be helpful to set out the following explanation and then suggest some solutions. The growth of Smartphones with built in cameras has seen […]
The world of digital video is full of strange names, numbers and abbreviations. Things like ‘mpeg’, ‘avi’, ‘mov’ and ‘m4v’. Then there are numbers like 1080i or 720p. What do they all mean and which ones do you need to know? Film formats. When movie film first came out it also came with a set […]