This advice from JISC Digital Media about ways to improve your videos is so useful that we decided to post it on our blog. For more information about the advice, guidance and services that they provide please visit http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/

Improve your Videos in 4 Easy Steps

Often the difference between’ acceptable’ and ‘rather good’ is quite small. This, in my experience is certainly the case with amateur videos. I’ve seen a lot of self-made videos, particularly in the world of education, and again and again the same problems keep cropping up, problems which are actually very easy to rectify.

Here are my top 4. Pay attention to these and you will immediately see an improvement in the materials you produce on video.

1) Bad Lighting

The advent of autoexposure systems on camera and camcorders may have simplified the process of getting a properly exposed image but it hasn’t eliminated the need for user involvement. If you still believe that you can simply point your camcorder at a subject and it will produce lovely videos, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise.

The problem is simply this: the camera doesn’t know what the subject of your video is: is it the tree on the right? The picture hanging on the wall in the top of frame? Or perhaps the person standing slightly left of centre. The camcorder will use some sort of algorithm to come up with an exposure that will work in many circumstances, but it will rarely be perfect and will often be awful.

So how can you help your camcorder to calculate better exposures? Here are a few tips.

· Make sure there’s some light falling on your subject, preferably from the front (i.e. from your side of the subject) and a bit to one side. If the illumination comes from a ceiling light, it should be behind you and to one side. This applies to sunlight as well – but beware of squinting subjects.

· If you can’t get good lighting of your subject in the current location, move to a new one! Even if you can get good lighting in your location, be prepared to move both yourself and your subject around to find the best light.

· People tend to have their desks next to the window whenever possible. Unfortunately, this means that when you shoot someone at your desk it’s very likely that there’ll be a window behind them. If this is the case, do not shoot them at their desk – or at least try to find an angle where the window isn’t behind them, because otherwise you are guaranteed to have a bad image.

2) Shaky camera

This is perhaps the most common problem with amateur videos. Oddly, it is also the most easily corrected. How? Simple: get a tripod and use it religiously. It is not possible to hand-hold a camcorder of any size for a significant length of time without introducing some sort of shake or wobble into the image. This applies to pocket camcorders as well, because it is not the weight of the camcorder that’s the problem but rather the length of time you have to hold it still.

When you get a tripod, make sure it is a video tripod, not one for a stills camera. The difference is in the tripod head: a proper video head will permit smooth camera motion (panning left and right and tilting up and down), something which is not possible on a stills tripod.

There’s really no excuse for not using a tripod, not even expense. It is possible to get little desktop tripods (not the best solution but still better than hand-holding) for as little as £3.

3) Bad sound

In order to get a good picture we want to have the camera far enough away from the subject to see them. In order to get good sound we want to have the microphone very close to the subject’s mouth. So what do we do if the microphone is built into the camcorder? Simple: we get either bad sound or a bad picture – and picture unfortunately tends to trump sound.

This is unfortunate because the sound quality of the video is usually more important than picture quality, particularly when making educational resources. Is there a solution to this seemingly intractable problem?

The best solution is to use an external microphone such as a lapel mic. Even the cheapest such mic will give results significantly better than a built-in mic. We can then get excellent sound without compromising on picture quality. There are camcorders available at all price ranges which take external mics: make this a requirement when purchasing one.

Failing this, it is necessary to find a location which can at least partially make up for the shortcomings of the built-in mic. Try to shoot your video in a room which is not only quiet but also not too bright acoustically. The less noise there is on the audio part of your recording, the better the sounds you want will come out.

4) No editing

Even a tiny amount of editing can improve the look of your video immensely. There are numerous free editing systems available nowadays which can provide you the tools to perform basic editing, and even more sophisticated free systems are beginning to appear.

The most basic type of editing is called topping and tailing. Not surprisingly, this consists of removing the bits and the beginning and the end which you don’t need.

If you want to get a bit more sophisticated than that you might edit further to ’clean up’ the video: to remove mistakes, pauses and sections irrelevant to the intended purpose of the video. In addition it is possible to import slides into much simple editing software. These can then be inserted where appropriate in the video. Not only will the quality of the slides be better than if the projected slides were shot with the camcorder, they can also be used to hide edits made during the clean up.

JISC Digital Media is a JISC Advance service which provides advice about anything having to do with digital media. All of our advice including the helpdesk, our extensive library of documents and more is completely free to any FE or HE institution in the UK.

Many educators believe that the use of moving images can enrich the learning experience, and back in 2003 Becta published a report analysing research findings from the use of digital video in teaching and learning which indicated major benefits. I’d be interested to learn about any similar evidence that you have come across!

 Those who use video in education, or are thinking of doing so, will be interested in the recently launched service Newsfilm Online which provides a wealth of digital video clips, mainly from ITN and Reuters, covering a range of topics including History, Politics, the arts, the environment, law. It is a great addition to existing moving image resources such as Film and Sound Online. Both these resources are freely available to subscribing FE and HE institutions.

It is often useful to be able to modify a downloaded video – for example, embed into a Power-point presentation, add or remove audio, or split or join to other video-clips. A good source of support for this sort of editing can be found at: http://hullnewsfilm.wikispaces.com/, and this wiki from the University of Hull also gives some suggestions for how specific clips from Newsfilm Online might be used in teaching and learning.