Improving Web video

Do three simple things and your online video will look better, says videographer Peter Ralph on his Shooting by Numbers blog.

1. Keep your lens clean. This is especially important if you are shooting hand-held, Ralph says, because you’ll be shooting wide open to keep the image steady and any smudges on the lens will be magnified.
2. Brighter images are better images. Don’t use a filter unless you have to. It’s better to overexpose some unimportant parts of an image than to pull down the overall exposure and wind up with murky video.
3. The less control you have over the shoot the more control you need over the camera. Image quality isn’t everything, he says.

Having controls buried in menus is the second biggest “gotcha” impacting the usability of consumer cams in demanding environments. The biggest “gotcha” of course is “digital zoom”. But I don’t think that one fools many people these days.

You do know the trouble with digital zoom, right?  Check here for the answer.

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