Pete's guide to home video III - Shooting your video
Shooting your video
So, you have your camera and you have your software - everything you need to shoot and edit your first movie.
I don't claim to be a top-notch movie maker. I haven't been to film school and everything I've learned about shooting video I've picked up from experience and by reading an article here and there. I still consider myself very much an amateur hobbyist. Nevertheless I can give a few simple pointers for those just getting started - nothing too complex, just a few tips that might save you having to learn the hard way. So, for what it's worth...
Read the camcorder manual
This may sound obvious, but I'll bet there are loads of people who (like me) just want to load a tape and press the "record" button, and don't take time to read the manual properly.
My advice is to take an hour or two to read the manual cover-to-cover. It pays off because you'll understand your camera better and know about all the features it has to offer, even if you don't remember exactly how to use them all; if you need a feature and know your camera will handle it, you can always look in the manual.
Start early, end late
By this I mean don't wait until the last possible instant before hitting "record", and don't stop rolling the instant the action is over. When possible start recording a few seconds before the action you want to capture, and always get a few seconds of extra footage before you stop.
The reason for this becomes plain when you come to do your editing. A few seconds of lead-in and lead-out on a shot gives you a little more room to manoeuver when you're trimming and fitting the shots together to build your movie. If the shot ends a tenth of a second after the action you're filming, you won't have time to do more than a hard cut to the next shot - you won't be able to put in a cross-fade or fade to black, for example. The best you might hope for is to freeze on a single frame to add the time you need for a fade.
Don't use in-camera special effects
Many cameras offer built-in special effects - negative image, sepia, black-and-white, soft-focus and so on. Don't use them.
If you do them in the camera, you can't undo them during editing - so if you film in black-and-white then realize during the editing that you really needed full colour for one shot, you're stuck.
All NLE programs I'm aware of offer more such effects, let you combine multiple effects (something the camera probably won't let you do) and generally do them better anyway. You're really better off waiting until the editing phase - that way you can decide which effects you want, if any, and get the final footage looking exactly how you want it.
Avoid fast zooms during the action
Fast zooms in and out in the middle of a shot look really amateurish in the finished movie. If you need to zoom, try to keep it slow and smooth.
That's not to say that you should never use fast zooms. Sometimes they can be good for effect, especially if you've planned the shot in advance and you know it's what you want. Some people like to keep the camera rolling between shots rather than stopping and starting the camera, and will zoom quickly between "shots" to get the angle they need. On occasion this can pay off unexpectedly - I've heard of people catching something on film that they'd have missed otherwise, or ending up with footage that was so striking that they just had to put it in the finished movie because it looked so good after all.
B-reel footage
The next time you watch a movie, look out for sections where two characters are having a longish conversation in a quiet place. What you're looking for are parts where one character has a long dialogue. Watch the camera angles. Does the camera stay on that character for the whole time they're speaking? In general, it won't - you'll see the camera switch to the other person at intervals, showing them listening for a second or two, before going back to the speaking character.
One way this is done during editing is to simply lay down the whole shot of the speaker on one track, then overlay a second or two of footage of the listener (without sound) every so often on an "upper" video track.
To be able to do that, you're going to need footage of the listener simply sitting there, not speaking. That's B-reel footage, and you should plan to shoot a few seconds of that stuff here and there so that you can do just these kinds of overlays when you come to editing. B-reel shots like this add interest to your finished movie because they break up long, static shots. The crazy thing is that nobody will notice if you do this, but everybody will notice if you don't - they'll sit for maybe 15 seconds of watching your speaker speak in an unchanging field, then they'll wonder how much longer he's going to gas on before something important happens.
Sound
Getting the sound right in your finished movie is quite possibly the single most difficult challenge there is. When you're filming, your ears are selective - you'll hear what you want to hear and it's natural to think that it'll all sound the same on playback. Wrong! When you review your footage you'll hear all kinds of background noises that you just didn't notice at the time. They're distracting and annoying, and by the time you notice them it's probably too late to do anything about them.
As an example, if you like, take a look at my 15-minute documentary of a Texas Reptile Expo and watch the section starting at about 8:40 where I talked to the nice lady from the Texas Reptile Hospice and Sanctuary. The place was crowded so there's a lot of background noise, but in particular there were a couple of people talking loudly nearby that I just didn't notice at the time.
On playback it got really bad, with this guy talking about how he was breeding snakes and getting louder and louder until it drowned out just about everything else. At that point the footage became unusable and I had to snip it. (Incidentally, you may notice how I used B-reel footage in a couple of places in that segment.)
The point is to be aware of background noises so that you can try to control the situation. Had I been conscious of the loud people nearby, I could have done something about it.
In the next article...
Capturing your video.
So, you have your camera and you have your software - everything you need to shoot and edit your first movie.
I don't claim to be a top-notch movie maker. I haven't been to film school and everything I've learned about shooting video I've picked up from experience and by reading an article here and there. I still consider myself very much an amateur hobbyist. Nevertheless I can give a few simple pointers for those just getting started - nothing too complex, just a few tips that might save you having to learn the hard way. So, for what it's worth...
Read the camcorder manual
This may sound obvious, but I'll bet there are loads of people who (like me) just want to load a tape and press the "record" button, and don't take time to read the manual properly.
My advice is to take an hour or two to read the manual cover-to-cover. It pays off because you'll understand your camera better and know about all the features it has to offer, even if you don't remember exactly how to use them all; if you need a feature and know your camera will handle it, you can always look in the manual.
Start early, end late
By this I mean don't wait until the last possible instant before hitting "record", and don't stop rolling the instant the action is over. When possible start recording a few seconds before the action you want to capture, and always get a few seconds of extra footage before you stop.
The reason for this becomes plain when you come to do your editing. A few seconds of lead-in and lead-out on a shot gives you a little more room to manoeuver when you're trimming and fitting the shots together to build your movie. If the shot ends a tenth of a second after the action you're filming, you won't have time to do more than a hard cut to the next shot - you won't be able to put in a cross-fade or fade to black, for example. The best you might hope for is to freeze on a single frame to add the time you need for a fade.
Don't use in-camera special effects
Many cameras offer built-in special effects - negative image, sepia, black-and-white, soft-focus and so on. Don't use them.
If you do them in the camera, you can't undo them during editing - so if you film in black-and-white then realize during the editing that you really needed full colour for one shot, you're stuck.
All NLE programs I'm aware of offer more such effects, let you combine multiple effects (something the camera probably won't let you do) and generally do them better anyway. You're really better off waiting until the editing phase - that way you can decide which effects you want, if any, and get the final footage looking exactly how you want it.
Avoid fast zooms during the action
Fast zooms in and out in the middle of a shot look really amateurish in the finished movie. If you need to zoom, try to keep it slow and smooth.
That's not to say that you should never use fast zooms. Sometimes they can be good for effect, especially if you've planned the shot in advance and you know it's what you want. Some people like to keep the camera rolling between shots rather than stopping and starting the camera, and will zoom quickly between "shots" to get the angle they need. On occasion this can pay off unexpectedly - I've heard of people catching something on film that they'd have missed otherwise, or ending up with footage that was so striking that they just had to put it in the finished movie because it looked so good after all.
B-reel footage
The next time you watch a movie, look out for sections where two characters are having a longish conversation in a quiet place. What you're looking for are parts where one character has a long dialogue. Watch the camera angles. Does the camera stay on that character for the whole time they're speaking? In general, it won't - you'll see the camera switch to the other person at intervals, showing them listening for a second or two, before going back to the speaking character.
One way this is done during editing is to simply lay down the whole shot of the speaker on one track, then overlay a second or two of footage of the listener (without sound) every so often on an "upper" video track.
To be able to do that, you're going to need footage of the listener simply sitting there, not speaking. That's B-reel footage, and you should plan to shoot a few seconds of that stuff here and there so that you can do just these kinds of overlays when you come to editing. B-reel shots like this add interest to your finished movie because they break up long, static shots. The crazy thing is that nobody will notice if you do this, but everybody will notice if you don't - they'll sit for maybe 15 seconds of watching your speaker speak in an unchanging field, then they'll wonder how much longer he's going to gas on before something important happens.
Sound
Getting the sound right in your finished movie is quite possibly the single most difficult challenge there is. When you're filming, your ears are selective - you'll hear what you want to hear and it's natural to think that it'll all sound the same on playback. Wrong! When you review your footage you'll hear all kinds of background noises that you just didn't notice at the time. They're distracting and annoying, and by the time you notice them it's probably too late to do anything about them.
As an example, if you like, take a look at my 15-minute documentary of a Texas Reptile Expo and watch the section starting at about 8:40 where I talked to the nice lady from the Texas Reptile Hospice and Sanctuary. The place was crowded so there's a lot of background noise, but in particular there were a couple of people talking loudly nearby that I just didn't notice at the time.
On playback it got really bad, with this guy talking about how he was breeding snakes and getting louder and louder until it drowned out just about everything else. At that point the footage became unusable and I had to snip it. (Incidentally, you may notice how I used B-reel footage in a couple of places in that segment.)
The point is to be aware of background noises so that you can try to control the situation. Had I been conscious of the loud people nearby, I could have done something about it.
In the next article...
Capturing your video.
Labels: Video
posted by Pete Ford at
12:36 PM
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