Another Movie Guide

Everything You Need to Get in Touch

Knowing your camera extensively is your best and most important weapon when filming. Most modern high tech cameras have auto this and auto that, but a thorough understanding of these functions will enable you to create a professional project. Let’s briefly go over camera functions and their power. Your camera is smarter than ever and will automatically adjust to film the optimal picture. Sounds good, but in some cases this will produce an unwanted effect. In most situations it is best to manually control your camera functions.

The zoom is a straightforward function; yet the biggest difference you will notice between a seasoned professional and a novice camera operator is one will use the manual zoom. Manually controlling your zoom will give you full control, for example you may want to zoom in conjunction with your focus to control your depth of field (how much of the background you see). The speed of your zoom will be dictated by your scene needs just make sure it’s always smooth.

White balancing your camera is a must before every scene in order to capture footage with proper colors in your images. When you white balance your camera you tell the camera this color is white and your camera uses that to gauge all other colors. Without this your colors will most likely be distorted, which would be very depressing after all your hard work. Each location will have different lighting sources and temperatures; therefore to get the best picture you should white balance every time you change scenes.

Next up is, you guessed it focus, did you really guess it? Focus is an important function that will allow you to concentrate on the main subject and make sure it is clear and sharp. A camera automatic focus will always define the closer or most dominate subject in sight as the object to focus on, but what if you wanted to highlight the expression of a person that is in the background. You would have to manually force your camera’s perspective. When filming a scene with a lot of movement you will always want to manually control your camera’s focus.

Your iris controls how much light is let into the camera lens by adjusting its aperture. You can use this to brighten your shot, but after a certain point you will begin to trade quality for light. Thread lightly with your iris, but definitely use it to optimize your shot. Use your iris to make sure your subject is properly lit. Shutter speed is how long the light reaches your processing chips or film. Your shutter speed works hand and hand with your aperture to create your exposure.

Frame rate is the speed of capturing your video. When it comes to fps (frames per second) preferences will vary the most popular being 23.98 fps because of its resemblance to film. The golden rule is the faster your action the higher your frame rate (e.g. sports, cars driving); the slower the motion the lower your frame rate (e.g. time lapse, clouds moving).

Your chips are the technology that converts what is captured by the lens to the digital world. 3CCDs (charge couple devices) or CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) are the standards for a professional camera and it will designate the quality of your video by how many pixels it uses to capture, store and display its video. The bigger the chip the better the image!

Choosing formats will go hand and hand with your goals. Options from the old faithful DV to the trusted DVCPRO HD to the newly raved XDCAM HD can become a daunting task. Lets make it simple DV is fine and will give you good detail, but DVCPRO HD options will retain much more color and XDCAM HD almost doubles your pixel ratio. Keep your intended use in mind before you acquire your camera. If you are going to be the next big movie producer than a XDCAM HD may be the way to go, but if most of your videos will be used for a video sharing site then a DVCPRO HD format may suffice.

Audio inputs will always distinguish your professional cameras from your consumer cameras. Your camera microphone should not be used to capture important dialogue, instead use a boom or lapel mic. A boom mic is a directional mic held out of frame pointed in the direction of subjects talking, and will jack into one of the camera audio inputs. A lapel mic is a wireless mic clipped on your subject and is used with an antenna and receiver to jack into the camera. Always use headphones to monitor your audio.

Remember filming is an art the world is the canvas and your camera is a paintbrush that allows you to visually create any idea or concept you have. Now that you know what you have, why you have it, and how to use it experiment, create and experiment some more.

Aderemi Simmons, (Executive Producer) has a creative touch and his passion for film making is rivaled by few. For more information and a preview of future episodes and other projects please visit GreenHouse Films website at http://www.greenhousecinema.com