Top Ten Tips

Top Ten Tips

In professional video production, the visual and audio acquisition commonly are performed by two people - something I recommend whenever possible.

The time needed to prepare a shot is always slightly less that the time available, and you always allot audio preparation to the portion of time you really don't have.

If you're going record weddings, training, or any other kind of video where the quality of audio reproduction is important, I suggest that you invest in a decent lavalier mic, a small mic that can be clipped to a necktie or blouse.

Video production can be a lot of fun. With a little practice, you can learn how to influence people to feel positively or negatively about a subject simply by how you present the information.

Ambient sound is silence in the environment where you are shooting. Silence is very different from one location to the next.

One of the greatest advantages of a nonlinear editing system (NLE) is the ability it gives you to embellish your video with beautiful drawings, photos and animation - all with incredible ease.

When changing an image size in an image editor, smaller is always better, larger is usually a degradation of the image.

If you intend to distribute movie files on CD-ROM for copying and playback on a hard drive, Cinepak may be overkill. The default Microsoft Video codec should work fine for playing a movie from a hard drive.

As a general rule, if you don't know who will be playing your movie, be conservative. A 2X CD-ROM drive can handle a data range up to 200K per second.

To maintain any kind of energy in a video, you need to determine what's interesting, and then cut it in half. The best and easiest way to create interesting and exciting video is to have less of it. You maintain people's interest by giving them just enough in order to understand your message and no more.