4 Tips for Making More Professional Videos
- Features to Look for in Video Lighting
- Elevate Your Creativity With Your Own Personal Lighting Assistant
Making professional videos is open to anyone with good video gear and the ability to light and edit well. Additionally, many professional video techniques can be done with video lighting and other videography gear that are reasonably priced and easy to use.
Let’s look at four tips for making more professional videos that include video techniques and videography gear.
Editor’s note: If you’re in need of quality lighting gear for your video work, check out TEKE Reactive and Animated DMX Lighting System. This innovative and affordable lighting system is essentially a personal lighting assistant you can use to create Hollywood style lighting effects for your videos.
How to Create More Professional Videos: A Steady Platform
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A common denominator separating video that looks professional versus amateur video is how steady the camera is during filming. While you may not need to always have your camera on a video tripod, finding a way to smooth out any motion and keep the camera still will greatly improve your videos.
A video tripod with a fluid head can be used in many situations you’ll be filming. If you are filming interviews, instructional videos, or a promotional video, it's a good video technique to use one.
Other options are camera cages, stabilizing grips, gimbals, or practicing video techniques for hand held shoots such as propping up against a wall or fence and limiting camera movement such as pans and tilts while the camera is hand held.
How to Create More Professional Videos: Good Video Lighting
A few of the things to consider for choosing your lights for video are the quality of the light output, how convenient the video lights are, and how simple and easy they are to use.
There is no rule in videography stating that decent videography gear is required to be bulky, expensive, and hard to use. In fact, for beginning videographers or experienced photographers moving into video production, having access to easy-to-use video gear and video lighting makes it more likely they’ll be used for good results.
A few of the features to take into account are the CRI of the light output, the convenience of setting up the video lighting, and being simple enough to use to allow for the techniques of professional videos.
I’ve had the recent privilege of testing out new lights for video by TEKE. The TEKE Reactive and Animated DMX Lighting System meets all the criteria listed above (and then some) and adds in the benefit of being very reasonably priced.
The CRI or Color Rendering Index, which is a measure of how well the video lights deliver color accuracy, is 90+ for these lights, so the light quality is high. You get flicker-free, full-spectrum addressable RGBW light with an adjustable color temperature of 2700-6500K for your convenience. Combined with up to 1400 lumens of output, you get high-quality and very bright lighting for whatever video work you have to do.
They come in two sizes (20-inch and 40-inch) and have mounting points for light stands as well, meaning they can be handheld or mounted to serve whatever purpose you need. They can even be connected together if need be.
A huge feature is being DMX controllable and having that control available through a smartphone app. DMX allows videographers to set up multiple lights and control them all together. DMX also lets you pre-program changes and add in audio and special effects.
For instance, these lights are sound reactive, so if you need lights that pulse to the beat of music, this is your answer! You can also instantly apply animated effects, movie looks, and dynamic moods right from your smartphone or computer.
You can also create gorgeous animated gradient effects to give your videos dynamic, eye-catching lighting that will elevate the quality of your finished product.
TEKE has devised a lighting system that’s extremely easy to use. Smartphone control means you can access an ever-growing library of lighting effects that allow you to utilize presets that give your videos a professional look.
What’s more, you can create custom effects and color palettes instantly by uploading a video clip or a photograph for the app to reference. Just place the selection points where you like and TEKE will copy the color temperature, hue, shade, and brightness for the selected pixels and save them automatically. It just doesn’t get any easier!
Be sure to take advantage of some of our previous lighting tutorials since great video lighting for professional videos is a mix of high quality lights for video coupled with video techniques for using them properly.
Learn More:
How to Create More Professional Videos: Record Great Audio
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The difference between capturing great video and good enough video sometimes comes down to how good the audio is recorded. As with your video recording mode quality, you want to set your camera or recorder to the best mode available if possible.
Higher quality recording for the audio or visual recording aspect makes large files which take up more room and often require longer editing and processing time, but the end result is what we’re aiming for - more professional videos.
Simple and easy-to-use video gear such as a shotgun mic on camera or lavalier mics on the subjects will capture much better sound than the built-in mics of our cameras. If you’re ambitious, you can also record audio separately and combine during editing, which is how many professional productions do things.
How to Create More Professional Videos: Spend Time Editing
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#StraightOutOfCamera is a hashtag you won’t find on professional videos or professional still images. The reason is because higher quality image, video, or audio files will require processing to end up in a file type that can be shared. Also, no matter how perfectly you arrange everything, there will always be some tweak that can enhance professional videos and still images.
Therefore, learning editing skills is a vitally important part of our video techniques. You aren’t required to be a member of the American Cinema Editors (the A.C.E. you see in movie credits), but having and knowing how to use a good editing program will greatly improve your finished videos.
Don’t try to rush the editing, either. That’ll just give you a headache. Eye strain from lower resolution monitors will also give you headaches but there are several very good new monitors for video editing that won’t break the bank.
Professional Quality Videos Can Be Yours
Making more professional videos takes a little more time, some initial costs for good videography gear, and a lot of putting into practice professional video techniques.
You can make your videos look more professional by shooting on a steady platform such as a video tripod, using high-quality lights for video like the new lights from TEKE, recording great audio with external mics, and spending time editing with the right program on high-resolution monitors.