You don’t have to be a professional videographer to shoot video worthy of posting on your college or company website. Smart phone video capabilities become more sophisticated and simpler to use with each new release. But even if you don’t have the latest phone, you can upgrade your video quality by following these 10 tips:
- Turbocharge your camera. FiLMiC Pro is a $14.99 app for iOS and Android phones that gives you full manual control of exposure, frame rate, aspect ratio, color grading and more.
- Use a wireless microphone for better sound. View options at various price points by searching “wireless mic for phone video recording” on Amazon.
- Find an interesting setting with plenty of light and remove anything in the frame that will be visually distracting.
- Pick a quiet location with minimal background noise.
- Position your phone horizontally unless you are shooting for a social site like TikTok that requires vertical orientation.
- Use a tripod to keep the camera steady or a gimbal to stabilize the image when the camera is moving. The PHOPIC tripod and DJI OM 5 gimbal are good choices.
- If you are the subject and are shooting handheld, hand the phone to a friend. As the video director and/or star, you should not do the holding.
- Instruct the subject to look into the camera lens, not at the person holding the phone.
- When you’re finished, export the video using AirDrop; a cloud service like DropBox; or via USB cable to your desktop computer. Emailing or texting video from your phone will lower the quality.
- Edit the video with a simple app like iMovie (iOS only) or Adobe Premier Rush (iOS and Android). Add polish with transitions, titles and maybe even music.
And for those bigger video projects, the team at Allied Pixel is always available to help.
