If you’re thinking of shooting a video using your iPhone, Wistia offers helpful tips and advice in their short (roughly 4 minutes) ‘Shooting Video with an iPhone’ video. In fact, many of their tips are valuable for shooting low budget video period.
The best way to get the information is to watch the video, but I’ve listed a few of the salient tips below:
- Don’t shoot vertical video – shoot horizontally! (As the commentator points out, “because we’re living in a wide screen world, Baby!” … laptops, TVs, your twitter feed, your website).
- Use a tripod for a consistent, non-jerky video … it’s tough to shoot videos that aren’t somewhat jerky if you’re shooting handheld.
- Don’t use the iPhone zoom … move your camera closer until you have the perfect shot.
- Use off camera lights rather than iPhone’s built in lighting … it will enhance the quality of your video (watch the video for lighting suggestions).
- Without camera lighting, use natural lighting: position yourself facing a window and use the sun.
- Use the ‘focus exposure’ lock when taping one person talking to the camera … this will save the camera from constantly trying to focus and then refocus while they’re delivering their lines.
- The key to good sounding audio is to get your microphone as close to the person speaking as possible. For this you need a second iPhone (record as voice memo) or external microphone, positioned above your head, to record the audio:
- clap once at the beginning of each video take, so you have a reference point to sync the bad sound from the video with the good sound from the iPhone voice memo or external microphone
- Edit your video on your computer, not on your iPhone. The video shares some suggestions about what to use for editing and points out “if you’ve never edited before, there has never been a better time to start.”
If you’re looking for a short, humorous (and helpful) video on how to act on camera, check out Get Loose for the Camera, also from Wistia.