Basic Video Production Shooting Tips

David Rotan: Hi! I am David Rotan, Video Production Manager with monkeysee.

com and I am showing you how to produce the perfect user generated video, to upload to our website. I am also just talking about some basic video production tips, that will help you with your home videos.

Right now we are going to talk about some shooting tips, involving everything from the clothing that you might wear when you shoot your video, to some basic video production concepts such as coverage and pre-roll, which are very important to keep in mind when you are producing your videos.

For whatever reason without getting into the science of digital pixels and video, tiny little patterns like pinstripes, or dots or small patterns, just do not show up well on video at all, it causes a strange affect called moire which causes the shirt to look like it's moving and it's just very strange and very distracting to the viewer as you can see in this example.

So try to avoid shirts like that and tell your experts or yourself, if you are doing this yourself, make sure you are wearing solid colors, some colors show up better than the others, a bright white might not be a good idea, specially if you are outside with a lot of bright sunlight. Fire truck red, might cause some issues too, depending on the quality of the camera you are using. So just plain basic colors or larger patterns, at least, are recommended just so you don't have this strange effect on your video.

The next tip we are going to cover would be tripods. Tripods are very important, yes you can go handheld but there is a major difference in just the professional look of your video, when it's hand held and slightly shaky and moving around a little bit with every bounce and movement, as opposed to a very good steady locked down shot. So tripods really add to the production value of your video and I would highly recommend it.

To make sure you get great close-ups of the action in your video, if you do have access to editing program software and you are going to be able to edit this video more thoroughly, then just simply shoot, twice. In other words, you would shoot the entire video in a wide shot as demonstrated here, where you can see your expert fully, and then after you did that, you would go back and shoot the exact same sequence all over again, only with the camera now zoomed in closer and tighter to the action, and you could take that in and edit it together later to go from the wide shot to the close up, to really show in detail what's going on.

Video voice: I apply the two slices together like this and then I wanted to be fancy I could cut it into two slices.

Here is a tip that's really going to help you out in the editing process of your video if you understand it now, while you are actually shooting the video and that's the concept of pre-roll. All the cameras take a little time to get going when you hit the record button, no cameras are instant, they don't instantly begin capturing to the tape. It takes just a second to start the tape rolling and to capture it. So you do not want to just start talking, as soon as you hit the record button, chances are, if you do that, it's going to cutoff the first few words of that sentence.

So it's always a good idea to hit the record button, start the camera and then give it a few seconds, count to three, count to five, before you start talking, that's a good way to remember to have plenty of pre-roll, so that when you get in the editing room, you have the whole sentence there. Nothing is worse than getting into the editing room and discovering that you didn't give it enough pre-roll time and that it cuts off half of the sentence and you have to go back and reshoot just to get that sentence in your video.

So those are some video shooting tips to help you when you are producing your video. Next, we are going to talk about some basic camera framing techniques to help you frame the perfect shots.