Choosing your equipment

Digital Cameras

There are a variety of beginner digital camera without external microphone input ports on the market. All on offer will help you record great video.

Recording Video with a Smartphone

If you don’t have a digital camera, can you use your smartphone? Most smartphones offer high-quality video recording capabilities. If you plan to use your smartphone, here are a few tips to help you produce great videos:

Set your focus manually

Smartphones allow you to set the lens focus by touching your screen. While this works for hand-held videos, it won’t suffice for eLearning videos. You’ll need to keep your shots consistent and therefore change your focus option to manual.

Use a tripod

Tripods help level your camera or smartphone. There are tons of tripod options available on the market and most will work with almost every camera. You could buy an attachment that connects to a standard camera tripod or you purchase a stand built for supporting smartphones. Shoot in landscape (horizontally) when using your smartphone.

Audio can be tricky

Videos recorded on smartphones don’t produce high-quality audio. This is because the speakers on smartphones aren’t designed with sophisticated noise-canceling capabilities. Solve this problem by investing in an external microphone.

Microphone

Audio is just as important as the quality of your video. In fact, professional videographers argue that you could get away with poor video quality, but bad audio quality can ruin great videos.

Whether you’re using a digital camera or smartphone, investing in an external microphone will be worthwhile.

Use a portable audio recording device

Recording audio for digital camera video can be handled in various ways. But if your environment is prone to noise disruptions, an external microphone attachment may not cancel out all the noise. In this case, you could use a portable audio recorder.

This approach is referred to as “dual-system sound” recording. Your video and audio are synced in the editing phase. Portable audio recorders will connect to a digital camera. They are somewhat advanced pieces of hardware and don’t do the job on their own. You will need a portable audio recorder, a cable from the mic to the portable recorder, and your mic.

Set your lighting

The right lighting is crucial. It elevates the overall look of a video and can be used to it set the scene for whatever subject matter you’re covering and produce the effect you want to create for your audience.

The good news is that creating the perfect lighting for your video isn’t as hard as you might think.

Here are 3 tips on how to set up your lighting for the best results:

Focus on the subject first

The subject of any video is what you want your audience to pay attention to. But if your subject doesn’t get enough lighting, it makes for dull and disengaging viewer experience.

Natural light works

Natural light works excellently for video recording. All you need to do is position your subject in front of a window with your camera facing the subject. The idea is to have as much light reflecting off of the subject.

Use what you can

While using natural lighting or artificial LED lighting would be ideal, you can get away with a lamp pointed in the right direction. The most important rule to stick to is that your subject must receive light first.

Recording video and audio often involves more than one take. And when you’re recording a complete course, you need to be able to save as much video and audio to put together a perfect product in when editing. Access to data storage is therefore important. Here is a list of data storage options along with

Storage in the Cloud

Google Drive Your standard free Google Account will give you up to 15GB of free space. Additional space is available at a fee and will require upgrading your GDrive account to a Google One account.

Dropbox Dropbox offers a free 2GB storage account. There’s a good chance that you’ll need more storage and can upgrade to a 2 terabyte account for $9.99/mo.