Videography Tips You Need to Know 

Top 4 Tips to Improve Your Videography 

If you are a photographer trying to get into videography, these starter videography tips will help you to make the transition. 

Videography, while being similar to photography because you use a lot of the same gear and settings and techniques, is quite different from photography.

There are some skills and settings that are important to be aware of so that you can take the best video content.

Kevin from Easy Tiger Creative walks through the top 4 most important things to know when starting videography in this video tutorial.

The Top 4 Tips You Wish You Knew Sooner for Videography

Starter Videography Tips #1: Make sure you Use a Variable ND Filter

What is a Variable ND Filter? It’s a Neutral-density lens filter that is transparent but reduces how much light enters the camera sensor.

Your camera settings for video should be following the ‘180 degree rule’. This is a ratio between your frames per second and shutter speed, where the denominator of the shutter speed should be double the frames per second. 

For example, if you have 60 frames per second, the shutter speed should be set to 1/120. This mimics the way the eye sees motion in real life, so you get natural looking video.

But with the shutter speed set like that, you need something else to help adjust the light, which is where the ND Lens Filter comes into play.

Starter Videography Tips #2: Have a Good Microphone

You don’t want to rely on the audio quality from you camera if it has a mic. Most people can endure a video with poor image quality, but most won’t enjoy a bad sounding video.

Especially if you are going to have people talking in your videos, it’s great to have a good portable microphone for taking videos with great audio.

Something even inexpensive like this little Rode Video Micro is simple enough to start with to have good audio for your videos.

You’ll get nice and crisp quality audio for all of your videography needs.

Starter Videography Tips #3: Pick a Picture Profile for Your Camera

Depending on your camera you will want to choose a specific profile for picture quality and settings.profiles in your camera settings are groups of settings that are adjusted for different image characteristics.

These grouped settings have adjustable parameters for selecting basic contrast and color tone, adjusting gradation (darkness-brightness tone), adjusting coloring, and emphasizing image edges.

For example, Kevin uses an SLog-3 with his Sony camera. This preset profile gives a good dynamic range of colors and allows for preferred color grading in post when editing the videos.

Because video is not like shooting raw photos in photography, it’s important to make sure you get the most range of color and light from your video setting.

Starter Videography Tips #4: Choose Your White Balance

Shooting video is a lot different than shooting photos, so you need to be aware of some settings for video. 

You will want to manually adjust the white balance instead of just using an auto white balance setting. This is because white balance is hard to fix or adjust in editing and most cameras don’t let you lock the setting for filming.

You don’t want this to keep changing throughout your video if auto is set. White balance especially affects skin tone, so set the right balance manually for that if there are people in your shots.

If you set the white balance manually for each setting you are in to take video, the content will look a lot more professional.

Getting into videography from photography takes some time to learn the differences.

But if you continue to practice and improve using tips like these, you will keep getting better. Especially if you want to get even more into videography these tips are a great place to start.

Looking for photography improvement tips? Read this comprehensive photography improvement guide!

Which of these beginner videography improvements will you try out THIS WEEK?

Comment below!