What Goes Into Your Video Production?

Experience, talent and of course the right equipment. But behind the scenes, you may not realize how many different skills a video professional or production company needs to be able to produce a quality video. It's important to be aware of these aspects. They are: Shooting with the correct framing and technical skills, lighting (often for interviews and other indoor scenes but not limited to outdoor scenes), capturing audio during the shoot, post production (putting video and sound together to tell a story, includes sound design, which is not limited to color correction, filters, effects, graphic design and motion graphics) and final delivery (DVD authoring or internet video). This is just a brief look at a typical video production, but should give you some insight to what goes into your video production.

1-chip cameras VS 3-chip

One measure of the video quality of different cameras is whether the camera is 1-chip or 3-chip.

The 1-chip camera uses a single computer chip to process the colors the camera sees. The more expensive professional 3-chip camera has three separate computer chips. Each chip processes a separate primary color - red, green or blue. Because of this, the video quality is much better.

Professioinal cameras are often labeled as 3-CCD or 3-CMOS (CCD stands for "Charge Coupled Device, and CMOS stands for "complementary metal oxide semiconductor."

Great Sound is not an Accident

Good sound design is as important to video production as good camera work. It brings texture to a video production, a richness that music alone can't provide. Sound design begins with the assumption that what we hear enhances our appreciation of what we see. Like poetry, sound design is evocative: we may not actually see the source of a sound, but the presence of the sound evokes strong memories and images. Clever mic placement and solid audio editing skills can dramatically enhance a production.

Today's Wedding Videographer

Is your idea of a videographer someone running around with big clunky cameras and blinding bright lights? Like sequins, ruffles, and big hair, this wedding service has also evolved.

Today's wedding videos are shot with smaller, high-tech digital cameras that require less lighting, making the whole process less obtrusive. The video captured by these cameras is a higher resolution, resulting in clearer more vibrant images. Audio equipment has also become smaller, and capable of recording clearer audio signals. Editing techniques have also advanced, allowing videographers to turn out a wedding video that flows more like a feature film.

Today more than ever, through online content and social media, videographers and video producers like Treasured Moments have access to a wealth of information to stay current on video trends, techniques and new equipment. We can also see what other company's are creating. It pushes us to produce higher quality videos to stay competitive, which ultimately benefits you.

New Blog from Evolved Studio

http://www.evolvedstudio.com/blog/

Life of a MacBook Pro Battery

I do most of my computing on my trusty MacBook Pro. It's a power house fast enough to replace my old G5 powerPC, and it gives me the flexibility to take my work with me when I travel to a production location. It also acts as an external monitor when I have Adobe's On Location running. However, I've kept it plugged in most of the time. I'm not good at, and don't want to worry about checking the battery levels throughout the day. A year has gone by, and now my laptop just shuts down after a few minutes of use when it's not plugged in. It turns out it's a good idea to routinely "exercise" your battery, draining & charging it, so that this doesn't happen to you. Hopefully I can get my battery back into shape.

Need An Animated Bar Graph?

I recently produced some graphics for an annual report video. I needed to produce 3 bar graphs. I found keynote from Apple's iWork suite very helpful. I was able to quickly produce a 3-D bar graph, that grew and rotated. I then imported a quicktime of the animation into After Effects and used expressions to add a running numbers effect to complement the graph. A great solution to add interest to any chart or bar graph.