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Fundamentals of Shooting Video

So what we're going to do is talk to you guys about shooting and how to understand it, how to get the best possible video clips out of your dslr because, like I said before, garbage in garbage out when it comes to video, and if you can master getting clean image into the camera, you're going to get a better fusion piece coming out, so we're going to talk a lot of of all the things that you really need to know, but I want to point out what you guys already know as photographers, as photographers, your visual artists, so you really have almost more than half of what you need to become great storytellers in video, the first thing you already know about its composition. This translates directly over to video there's nothing different about it, except that aspect ratio your aspect ratio is exactly this it's sixteen by nine as opposed to a four by six type ratio that you're used to in photographs it's always horizontal, never vertical don't shoot, don't shoot! And he says that he can say tha...

t because we just stumbled upon a really old video of his work he shot critically hey it's, experiment yeah, it was cool, so compositionally you're going to use all the same things that you already do you're going to use your rule of thirds you're going to make sure that your angle on this subject is good and flattering you want to make sure that there's no horizon lines going through their heads make sure the street horizon lines things like that all of your composition skills and your knowledge think the exact same way when you're shooting for video may I just real quick on horizon lines really important because not what photograph you could just kind of like crop and then move in you do that with video you're losing resolution so you can't exactly go you can fix you know crooked horizontal lines but just try to get him right in camp is possible you can fix it what it will do is it'll stretch your actual initially the quality will go down your exposure your exposure is relatively the same obviously if you have shooting maybe a senior or some sort of studio set up and you've got all these strobes going on you can't use your strobes in your video so we're talking about natural light when we're talking about the exposure so your exposure is the same when it comes to the way that you set your depth of field then you're getting that kind of look same thing's going into your camera for video when you switch to your live you mowed your exposure does very, very slight feeling just a little bit little bit dark because of the twenty four frames per second frame rate because we're there's, you know, it's emotion shutter it's stopping down you're losing a little bit of light, so you might have just compensate a little bit. Let a little step for step up yeah, you might need to, but it is very slight and you might not even need to change your exposure, so if you're in a nice natural light situation like will be later when we're shooting our senior, I'm probably not going to change my exposure when I slip over into the video mode and go from there, you're pretty much going to say exactly what you are depends on the frequency of the lights too, sometimes like his lights operate on their own frequencies it's very possible that it might you might get a little flicker something depending on what your shutter speed is, so when you flip over more less, it should be similar if not just again just minor tweaks wait should probably touch on that if you're going to bring up the flicker. Yeah, basically some fluorescent lights operated different hurts and then your shutter interprets those hurts differently depending on what your shutter speed is on, what the frequency of the lights are a lot of times you'll get what's called rolling shutter where it's either a wavering of the image itself, where you finding these lines that are going up the screen a lot of time adjusting your dropping your shutter speed will help, but it may not eliminated completely if you want to visualize this and if you guys ever tried to like video on tv and liquor and that's exactly the same thing, but you get it from some of the fluorescent light and you when you're not even shooting the light, but you're shooting a subject that's under the light, you'll get that flicker it's very common in reception venues that have up lighting there's. A lot of the plating operates on different frequencies actually know some guys and what they actually tried change the lights frequency, and it is possible to do it, but you don't be surprised if you have that sort of artificial lighting, and you're seeing those artifacts it's common and there are ways to eliminate and we'll get into that a little bit more time. But the basic way to eliminate it would be too slow down your shutter speed, but for the most part you are using natural light and the concepts that used for natural light and what I mean by natural it's, just not. Flash or stroke when you're using that is the same so the same slimming techniques that you use in your in your posing and you're lighting techniques used the exact same thing when it comes to video if you're going for really like grungy, harsh type look with a lot of contrast your photographs, you can use the exact same thing in video think of it this way filmmakers directors of photography cinematographers I'm talking about are nothing more than photographers there photographers they're using light the same way you're going to use light they're using composition very similarly they are photographers and just because you're switching to video mode doesn't mean you're not a photographer anymore you're very much a photographer take what you know and apply it and you're going to find that your video images look just as good if not better than your photographs a lot of time. All right? The other thing is depth of field one of the really great parts about the great things about being able to use these cameras is depth of field and being able to use the ones is that you use with regular video cameras at least the ones you know that our forty fifty thousand dollars videographers couldn't really hard to step the field the way that we can sew depth of field is one of your greatest assets when capturing video in the o r so make use of your your one's is shallow depth of field and great depth of field and we'll give you a few guidelines a little bit later to make sure that your depth of field this is nice and it's dynamic but not so low and so shallow that your subjects are moving in and out of your your you're playing to focus which also could be another technique which we'll get into a swell but utilize their depth of field take it into account this's these air your strengths here and particularly posing and working with your subjects naturally as photographers you guys know how to do that it's like you want your camera and then you learned the people you know you got to learn howto photograph people one has to move them learn how to put them into position that is flattering for them and that you already know so these air all of different strengths composition, exposure, it's natural light posing, working with your subjects and depth the field this is what you already know and there's actually more of what you already know then what you need to work so what you do need to learn that is shooting study and rob is going to show you a lot of different techniques on how to keep your camera still we talked a few but few of them beforehand but shooting study is one of the most important things about shooting video have you ever seen like shaky video not intentional shake like you know crimes and drama the shaky video and it's awful it's just like I feel sic k didn't turn that off now she screams amateur it's an intentional video shake equals an eter you'll never see high quality polish video productions with shaky video unless they meant to do it really important. Yes do you want to make sure you shoot study? You're going to add action movement because of video is someone like this isn't so great you need to obviously take your posing and work with it and add the action to movement to create a story if you aren't already doing this, managing your exposure manually is important who shoots on him? Good night oh that's awesome! I love when I see everything so this isn't really something you need to learn which is great, but you do want to make sure that you are managing your exposure manually because a lot of the shutter priority or the aperture priority modes well sometimes change the esso in there and then that's going to really the way your image looks and at noise and noise when it comes to video it's like bad tv reception, it does not look good it's not artistic you cannot thirty two blocks away make it super contrasts and make it look artsy doesn't work out that way we've all done it watch some of the music videos from the eighties there's a lot of them in black and white that really grainy that's just because the technology the time didn't allow for clean video capture a lot of them, and they just let's just be saturated, managing focus manually, the honest who's really scared? Yeah, managing focus manually is a little bit difficult to begin with a remarkable idea. It was probably the most difficult part to learn as a photographer were used to auto focus, but we really have a lot of techniques that that make it much easier to handle than then, you would think and a lot of different toys like we already mentioned z finder that can magnify it, and they're certain settings in your camera that a healthy with focuses while so it doesn't have to be so scary, and you're not gonna be running around like, you know, focusing every step of the bride walking up the aisle or like chasing a child or a dog around, you know, we'll show some techniques on how to work with fast moving people lot of boils down to decision making, knowing what you're going to shoot and make a decision that how you're going to approach it, and that will manage your focus for you and we're gonna get will explain and demonstrate and then the last thing is managing continuous lighting along with your white aunts and a really good example of that is I was shooting for rob a wedding in a extreme extremely dark reception hall and they had a plague which is great but they have that kind of applying that changes every thirty seconds or even faster and a lot of spotlights and although my calvins were set for what it should be at the room it changed so so so much so in that decision I had to use what a white pounds because the other white bounce is going to change along with the lights faster than I could but you wanted keep in mind that you've you've kind of entered the fourth dimension as hope calls it you've entered time so all these things that you're doing you're used to doing for a split second at at a time and has to work for that split second of that photograph but when you're adding video you need it to work for five seconds or ten seconds. So managing the light where the light is moving during that time where you're moving or your subject's moving and your white mountains is moving is something more more to get used to and even to really learn and it takes experience I mean we can talk to you till we're blue in the face but until you get out there and shoot you won't be able to overcome these obstacles unless you practise practise. Practise it. Really? It's never been more true than with photography and video. Practice makes better. Always perfect, perfectly subjective.