Lights. Camera. ACTION! Filming a video can be a lot of fun. However, there are a number of technical questions that may leave you scratching your head. Never fear! Reflection Films is here to help relieve some of that confusion. Today, we’re providing a couple of tips to keep in mind if you are filming a video. We hope with this advice, it will make your video production experience much more enjoyable.
Rachel: We get some technical questions asked of us pretty regularly, so today I thought perhaps I would answer a couple of those for you.
Question #1: Can you edit my Do-It-Yourself footage?
Sometimes our clients will say, “Hey, Reflection Films, we have all this footage shot by different people within our organization using different cameras. Can you guys work with that?”
The answer is YES.
So that’s probably about all you need to know, but just in case you’re looking for a longer, here’s one for you: Basically, these days it’s very rare for us to get a piece of video that our software doesn’t recognize. If that were to happen, we have other software that can convert it into a format that’s more suitable. So it’s not a problem.
Question #2: Does it matter if the video footage I give you is horizontal or vertical?
Sometimes folks who are shooting their own video don’t realize that it’s different than taking a photograph, and so they’ll orient their camera vertically.
You might be tempted to do this because you want to see Geoff from head-to-toe doing his jumping jacks. But you see it leaves a black border on the left and right of the image. And that’s probably not what you want. And in order correct this, the video need to be blown up to fill the frame.
But that reduces the video quality, which is also something you want to avoid. So you’re best off just keeping the camera in the horizontal position, getting a wide shot to capture the context of what’s going on, and then moving in to get a closer view.