You Need a Steady Hand
These days it would be pretty safe to assume that the vast majority of people are shooting their video in at least some kind of high definition format.
With the introduction of high definition one of the major problems that we all inherited was that of maintaining a reasonable stable image so that anyone watching our projects didn’t immediately suffer from motion sickness nausea!
Yes high definition is great because it captures incredible quality and detail but at the same time it is also capturing every little camera shake and wobble we inject into it and magnifies it.
Of course the answer to this is to always use a tripod… right?
Well let’s be honest, most of us are not dragging a tripod around with us all the time just in case the kids start doing something interesting or the dog ate something it shouldn’t have.
As the technology in all aspects of high definition and high definition cameras evolves so is the ability of the cameras themselves to internally stabilize images as they are being shot.
At the moment there are two types of stabilization available.
The first is mechanical stabilization occurring inside the camera and the second is stabilization applied at a software level in the editing stage.
Software stabilization has also come a long way over the past few years but still leaves a lot to be desired at the consumer level due to the enormous amount of computing power needed to achieve a good result.
The result at the moment could be described as acceptable but there is still a loss of quality which inevitably occurs.
Mechanical stabilization is one area in which camera makers have their attention firmly fixed because they know this is an area that if they can gain an advantage it can be translated into sales.
Check out the article below for a great post on lens and sensor stabilization in cameras today.
Learn From the Pro’s
Wistia is essentially a website offering advice and services to businesses in the area of video marketing.
It’s one of those sites that I track constantly in case they post some content that would be relevant or useful to the average amateur editor.
More often than not their content is a little too commercial based to be of much use to anyone other then their chosen audience which is perfectly OK.
However the bottom line is that video techniques for commercial purposes can still be relevant to everyday use by you or me.
This week they posted a great example of how you can learn something from the commercial end of town by inspecting the underlying concepts they are conveying.
In the post below they cover a few common types of video that have been created with a specific purpose in mind.
Now for them that purpose may be to get the customer to follow them, buy from them or come back for more.
In the case of the average person making a video there still needs to be at least some purpose for the video in mind. It may be to inform, to record an event or whatever but often, the techniques remain the same.
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