From the course: Social Media Video Strategy: Weekly Bites

Basic production: Camera and lighting - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Social Media Video Strategy: Weekly Bites

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Basic production: Camera and lighting

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- Once you've done all the important work in setting up your space and designing your general aesthetic, it can often be tempting to just hit record. But there are a few more things to consider in terms of camera and lighting that I'd like to talk about now. Let's first talk about lighting. Whether you rely on natural light or indoor light, you need to make sure that you've got good and consistent lighting conditions. Consistency is especially important if you're relying on light from a window since outdoor light changes a lot over the course of a day and with different weather conditions. Also be aware that the color of indoor light and outdoor light is often quite different, and mixing indoor and outdoor light on camera can be visually problematic. To avoid any issues related to mixed lighting you may want to invest in daylight bulbs for your indoor lights. You may also want to work with additional production lights to fully illuminate the scene. Common lighting setups for a basic talking head to camera shoot are either two-point lighting or three-point lighting schemes. Two-point lighting assumes a key light to act as the primary lighting source and a fill light to act as the secondary lighting source, with each positioned at an angle focused at the subject's face. You can experiment with the lighting strength, color, and angle, but in general two-point lighting is a great place to start for basic video shoots. Three-point lighting takes that model up a notch by also adding a backlight so that the subject is better separated from the background. You can check out these courses to learn more about various lighting schemes that you might want to use for your own video shoot. In shooting this course, I bought a lighting kit for less than $80 off of Amazon. It may look a little fancy, but it's just three daylight bulbs along with some light stands and reflection umbrellas. I've set up two-point lighting and I've turned off the fluorescent lights in the room to avoid mixed lighting conditions. For a simple talking head shoot like this you can use so many different types of cameras. Lots of people simply choose to use their webcams, which is a very popular social media video option. While built-in webcams are getting better and better, you also may want to invest in an external webcam to increase your resolution, clarity, and camera angle options. If given the choice, I actually tend to prefer using a separate video camera, even if it's just my phone camera. I like that it gives me more flexibility in terms of my camera positioning as well as higher resolution. That's actually what I'm recording with now. When I record with my phone, I assemble a mobile filmmaking rig. This just consists of placing the phone in a central hub, which offers me stability and connectability. The case I use is made by iOgrapher and it allows me to easily mount the hub on a tripod. I can also attach items to the case itself, accessories like mini shotgun microphones and lights and lenses. In recording this course, I simply inserted my phone in the iOgrapher case and mounted it on a tripod. I just spent about $120 for both the case and the tripod. And for this particular production, I didn't use any other add-on accessories except for a lavalier microphone. So a really simple setup. To learn more about shooting high-quality video using this phone-based setup, you can take a look at these courses in our library where I teach you how to create different types of videos from start to finish. Video cameras, and particularly phone cameras, are largely point and shoot without too much you need to change about the recording conditions. But I will mention just a few things that I think are important about shooting this type of video. First, I'd recommend that you record at a very high resolution if you can. I record in 4K, which means that the video has a resolution of 3,840 pixels by 2,160 pixels. The reason to do this, other than the image being nice and crisp, is that it gives you a lot of flexibility if you need to cut back and forth between different shot sizes. So you can cut from a medium shot to a closeup like so and the zoomed-in image won't be fuzzy. Doing this on lower resolution footage will often result in a closeup that's too soft. And then of course you can cut back to the medium shot again when you like. So why exactly would you want to do this? Well, before when I talked about piecing together portions of takes, this is one method that allows you to do this without creating discernible jump cuts. Or if you need to remove those ums and ahs and dead air, this is a great way to get that done. Granted, some people work jump cuts into the style of their brand, but I personally like a cleaner approach. So if you do too then just record at a higher resolution. One more thing I want to mention about recording from a phone camera is that I use a video recording app called Filmic Pro. This app gives you greater control and flexibility than the phone's built-in video camera. There are both automatic and manual controls to dynamically adjust the color balance, exposure, focus, and zoom. It lets you monitor overexposure and check critical focus and more. And there are a lot of additional settings to change dozens of other camera characteristics. You can check out Filmic Pro's YouTube channel for lots of really useful tutorials on how to use the app. for this particular video shoot. and my two production lights set up in two-point lighting. Other than the phone itself, this production setup cost just a bit more than $200. setup cost just a bit more than $200. So for just a small investment you can really So for just a small investment you can really improve the visual quality of your video. improve the visual quality of your video.

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