How To Beef Up Your Camcorder To Get Professional Results

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.

These are a few ideas you can use with your existing camcorder or a low cost camcorder. You don't have to spend a fortune to get quality video results.

For our low cost camcorder recommendation as well as more information on improving your videos, visit our site at: Camcorder With External Mic Jack


Original article

No comments: