It’s OK. You can admit it. You own the latest digital video camera, have a great editing setup on your new Apple computer; you’ve shot and edited a bunch of video using the latest and greatest digital video effects, yet you’re continually disappointed in the finished product. Sure, the kids looked great – they’re cute on camera, but things just don’t come out right. You realize there is a lot more you could be doing to make your videos more enjoyable for you and others to watch. Let me suggest that it has little to do with how much you’ve spent on gear.

Perhaps you have that brother-in-law who edits his home movies on far inferior equipment to your own and still wows the family at the reunions – really makes your videos look like they were shot by an amateur. Maybe you just want to up the “production value” of what you shoot and produce video commercially about a hobby you enjoy. Or, maybe you want to produce some content and post it on YouTube. Well, there is no better time like the present and my hope is that what is contained in this guide will help you become a better Home Producer.

There is no question that the digital revolution has changed the way we can capture our world. The amount of effort that it takes to capture video or an image, transfer it to a PC, edit and create a DVD or online clip is incredibly small. What I call the “production workflow” or the number of steps that need to be taken in order to produce a video from start to finish have been drastically reduced even from the last decade. That said, however, the number of different ways that media can be captured – video cameras, mobile phones, digital still cameras; and subsequently enjoyed on – DVD players, internet streaming, personal video players, mobile phones, has grown much larger.

Never have there been so many devices in the market place designed to present media to the consumer in so many ways. There are myriad companies that are designing hardware and software out there to create media whether its music, videos, web pages or animations. I was in Seoul Korea recently pitching our product and showing a demo of some of our latest stuff. I had recently completed a video of my children and had compressed to a popular digital format and transferred it to my Web site. It was wonderful to be able to sit in the lobby of the hotel waiting for our guests to join us and watch a video of my kids on my phone several thousand miles from home. I was able to take that same video and burn it to DVD along with some of the latest family photos to send to my parents who were living outside of the country during that time. Other versions of this same home movie made it onto VHS to send to other family members around the country.

Whatever your reasons, you arrived here because you wish to improve the quality of the home video or other video projects that you are planning, and wish to take the proper steps to preserve your finished videos for later generations. There is nothing more rewarding than watching a finished project and enjoying it with family and friends or even better with a paying client. Videos, like books, are great product. You may be considering making a video that you’ll sell commercially. With the technology available today, you can produce and distribute your own video projects with very little up front cost. With high definition cameras, editing packages and TVs now readily available at consumer prices, even the home producer can create videos that are as well made as any Hollywood blockbuster.

However, as we’ll discuss, the advances in technology won’t make up for poor technique. A $3,000 video camera with its various digital features cannot make up for poor shooting. Likewise, the latest digital editing program with its 1,001 video transitions cannot make up for a poorly edited scene. There is much to consider even before you hoist the camera, even if you’re only shooting your child’s first day of school.

The first question you have to ask yourself is, are you willing to put some time in on the preparation side? This guide is a good first step. We’ll discuss some important principles that will guide you through the process. You really can get professional looking results with some fairly straight forward changes in the way you produce your project. The principles discussed here will apply equally as well regardless of your choice of capture format.

Will this guide tell you how to do it on no budget? Perhaps, but how much you spend all depends on the type of project that you’re going to tackle. You’ve probably already spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, on your home video equipment and may be thinking about what you could do to beef it up a bit and make your projects better. This guide will teach you how to utilize what you have better, and get you thinking about the types of tools that might be appropriate as you add to your toolkit.

This guide is laid out in chronological order - guiding you through the steps to make a home video from scratch. An Index and Glossary of Terms is provided at the end in case you need to look up something specific. Anything you see in quotes is included in the glossary.

Before we get into the practical portion, lets take a step back. When you think about making a video, think about the different elements involved: Light, color, sound and story. These are the very basic elements of any production no matter how large or small. Poor execution of any one of them can be detrimental to a project.

Once produced, you need to think about distribution and preservation. You’re putting a lot of work into these videos – only natural that you would want to share them with others and make sure they’re around for many years to come.

Light

Light is the most basic element in use anytime you pick up and start recording something. The camera lens soaks up as much light as it can by regulating the size of the opening that the light will pass through and focuses it on to an Image sensor that captures it. The image sensor then passes the captured image into the camera internals for recording. It does this anywhere from 24 to 60 times per second or more depending on the camera’s capabilities.

The principles involved in capturing light to a camcorder are very similar to those in still photography. Today’s camcorders are very good at regulating and capturing all the available light around whatever we’re shooting at. We’ll dive into this a bit more later on, but suffice to say if there isn’t enough light available for the camcorder, your picture will look like mud.

This is where “lighting” comes into play, which is effectively the technique of adding light to a scene. This is done, not just to expose more of the detail for the camera to see, but also to communicate other detail to the viewer and generally produce the art form of the product.

Color

Have you ever thought about what color light is? What an interesting question although your first thought may be “light doesn’t have a color!” In fact, light is made up of 3 colors – Red, Green and Blue also known as “primary colors”. The mixing of these colors in different proportions can give us any other color. When all three are mixed equally, we get white light. This type of color scheme is called “additive” color because adding color progressively moves us toward white light. To illustrate how this works, imaging aiming three flash lights at a white wall. Each flashlight has a color filter over the lens producing a red, green, and blue light. When you overlap the lights on the wall, you would see something like what is shown below:

This is very different from “subtractive” color, which produces black when all colors are mixed together. Think of real world water color painting – the more colors you mix, the closer to black the color gets.

In order to achieve the proper mix of colors, your camera has a feature called “white balance” which I’ll discuss later on, but this is essentially what your camera does to make sure that whatever object is white in real life in your scene actually looks white under different color conditions.

Have you noticed that when you have shot video in a room lit by incandescent bulbs everything has a “warm” yellow-orange cast to, while shooting on a cloudy day outside can cast a “cool” blue cast. Color is a factor in every shot you make. Color, like light can help to convey the mood of a scene. It can also make your scene look terrible if the color balance, or the proper mix of red, green and blue which normally makes colors look natural, is wrong.

Sound

Light and color make up only the visual experience of video, however this is only half the experience. The importance of sound to the overall value of the experience cannot be over emphasized I would even go so far as to say that film is NOT visual medium. That statement may have gotten me in trouble with some of you, but think about your favorite movies – what made them your favorite? Along with story and characters, at the top of the list is probably the way the visual and the sound interacted to produce an amazing experience.

I love to go the movie theater and see films on the big screen, but the visual is only 2 dimensional. More impressive to me is the sound system. I tend to frequent theaters that have the latest in sound technology. Sound is 3 dimensional – so called “surround sound” systems are a major part of any home theater installation and in some cases, as much money, or more is spent on high quality speakers, receivers and even room acoustics than the monitor or projector.

I’m not suggesting that you will attempt to professionally produce multi-track audio as a part of your home video production. My goal here is to simply raise your awareness of the importance of sound, and to keep it in mind as you go through the production process. Sound will either enhance and help to tell a great story, or it will detract from it.

Distribution

All right, so maybe you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to ship your film to theaters all over the world, negotiate foreign rights, spend millions on lavish marketing campaigns complete with Mattel action figures.

But, you do want your whole family to watch it, and not just by crowding around your laptop while you play it back from your editing program. It’s fairly easy to produce a DVD these days, but what if you want to share it over the Internet to a mobile phone? You will certainly have to worry about how your project will look when you reduce the size down to 320 pixels by 240 pixels to fit on a mobile phone (and what the hell is a pixel anyway?) and reduce the frame rate in order to save space and not overburden the phone. What type of digital compression will you use? Mpeg 2, DIVX, Windows Media, Quicktime? What if, in the future, the format you have chosen becomes obsolete?

These are all questions related to distribution of a project that must be managed in order for your audience, no matter how small, to enjoy it the way you intended it.

Preservation

Distribution and preservation are very much related. Preservation is just distribution with a time dimension added to it. Odds are, this is something that you may not have thought much about. The danger, of course, is that you lose something that is irreplaceable – moving memories.

Of all of the generations that have ever lived, only the past couple have had an economical, personal ability to preserve a true “motion picture” record of our lives. However, because our experience with this type of media is so new, individual strategies for how to preserve it still need to be worked out. This should hit home for anyone who started shooting home movies in the 70s with Super 8mm film and then on to VHS and 8mm videotape in the 80s and 90s. You probably have piles of reels and tapes sitting in a box somewhere right now.

It is no less of a problem with digital content. While it is possible to make perfect copies of your digital media, the question becomes what format do I copy it to and into what media? What will digital devices look like 20 years from now and will the format that I choose today work then?

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