How To Beef Up Your Camcorder To Get Professional Result

[Frankli0015]

You might own a camcorder, and started dabbling with home movies or perhaps your own short movies. If you are at that point, you might have started to notice your camcorder has some limitations. This is normal, since most people don't have a lot of experience with camcorders as much as say, digital cameras. You want to keep making video, but you don't want to spend thousands on a professional camcorder.

Some common improvements you can make with most off the shelf consumer camcorders are:

1. Improve Bad Audio- This is a number one complaint, probably because most camcorders just have a built-in microphone, this is a problem because people viewing your video expect good audio. They might tolerate bad video, but most people cannot stand poor audio quality.

This is tricky to improve, unless you have a camcorder with an external microphone input. The problem is most camcorders you buy (at a reasonable cost) do not have this feature anymore. If your camcorder does have a microphone input, you can simply plug in a microphone to do a better job of capturing the audio.

Most camcorder microphone inputs are 1/8 inch jacks. If you want to beef your audio up even more, you can add an adapter that plugs into the jack, to allow the use of 2 or more XLR microphones. These microphones are higher quality and offer a broad range of choices to use. You could capture more sound from two sources- or more.

If your camcorder does not have a microphone input jack, make sure your video is recorded with a minimum of background noise, and try to avoid capturing voice audio from a distance if you are using the zoom feature on your camcorder.

2. Improve Stability- A true sign of an amateur video is a shaky picture. Luckily, there are a great number of options you can use to improve this problem. A good tripod is the obvious choice. My recommendation is if you know you are going to use a tripod a lot, purchase a quality one. This can eliminate jerky, even shaky panning on your video. You want smooth, even motion.

A favorite of mine is the monopod. You can hold a monopod in many positions, and hold it very steady, you can also pan easily and smoothly.

If you are on the move and cannot use either the tripod or the monopod, you can attach hand brackets to your camcorder to stabilize your videos as well as use the bracket to mount audio and lighting.

3. Improve Lighting- This is another area you can beef up easily, there are a good number of low cost lights you can mount on your camcorder shoe, or below the camera, or on a hand bracket I described above. When you light up your subject matter, you can improve the quality of your videos very easily. You could also purchase some inexpensive back lights to eliminate shadows or create a different atmosphere to your video.

Is this helpful for you?

[pippas]

This is the latest in a selection of posts from you, which appear to be aimed primarily at 'beginners'- new to the world of consumer camcorders?.....
I wonder if you realise that many, many of the members of this forum are highly experienced in the various aspects of videography - indeed in some areas they might even be considered among the most experienced anywhere in the world. They are more used to answering questions on specific video problems, rather than reading posts which offer 'advice' on elementary video procedures, already widely available elsewhere on the internet...

I'm sure you mean well, but you must realise that this forum is not really aimed at 'beginner' camcorder use. And if you are intending to offer advice on things like audio quality, it's probably more useful to offer advice on using external audio recorders - and the process of 'syncing' audio recorded using those devices. - than it is to describe the 'best way' of improving the use of (mostly) non existent mic sockets

[redwudz]

https://sites.google.com/a/artsentertainmentmore.com/www/filmmaking-and-film-editing/h...sional-results

All of Frankli0015's posts to date are copies of other authors posts from various sites.

[ron spencer]

HAHA!!! Pre-school's out....for the summer!

[usually_quiet]

Frankli0015 is using a tactic I have seen spammers use in the past. The spam will eventually appear.

[ron spencer]

Frankli0015 is using a tactic I have seen spammers use in the past. The spam will eventually appear.

But what's the point really? No links, nothing being sold...just stupidity?

[usually_quiet]

Frankli0015 is using a tactic I have seen spammers use in the past. The spam will eventually appear.

But what's the point really? No links, nothing being sold...just stupidity?

I don't know why they think it makes them look like a normal member, but this is at least the third time I've seen something similar. The spamming/shilling starts later.