Shooting Tips

I've recently been taking a second look at how I shoot my home videos and have a couple of tips to pass along.

Multiple Camera Angles: If you're like me, most of your home videos are of your family and especially your kids. These are difficult videos to make interesting for anyone who is not actually being shot in the video. I'm sure there are countless family rooms around the world with bored viewers, while the person who shot the video is raving about how exciting the home movie is. (I have been on both sides of this experience.) One way to make these movies more exciting is to use different camera angles when shooting the video and taking advantage of your editing software to splice the different angles and views together. Linking them with appropriate music for the activity being shot also avoids hours of boring home movies. If you've ever seen some of the demo movies put out by Apple for its iMovie software, you'll get an idea of how short clips with differing angles and transitions can make a movie more enjoyable.

No Digital Zoom: Know the optical zoom capabilities of your camcorder. You can typically notice when your camera switches from its optical zoom to its digital zoom. The picture suddenly becomes grainy and pixelated. The reason is because the lens is no longer zooming, but rather the camera is simply making the picture bigger. There may be an option on your video camera to actually turn off the digital zoom. Unless there is a reason to get a bad close-up shot of something, and you can't physically get closer, you might as well turn off the digital zoom. Don't be fooled that a video camera boasts a digital zoom of 100x or 300x. Typical optical zooms max out around 20x.