Video Recording novice seeking improvement!

[beko1987]

I've never been in this sub forum before... Hello!

I create videos for my little Youtube channel. Been doing it for about 10 years now, usually with little or no effort, using my mobile phone camera and it's inbuilt LED flashlight. This has gone from a HTC One M7, M8 and lastly a Nexus 6P. The video always looked OK, although quite ameraturish.

I hit 600 subscribers recently, and make a few quid every month with ad revenue, so thought I should step it up a notch. Using the last round of free cash from google, I bought a 'proper' video camera, a Panasonic HDC-SD10, and a cheap tall tripod from ebay.

I did my first filming with it yesterday, handheld as my tripod didn't turn up until this morning, and tbh I wasn't impressed... I think my main issue is lighting, I was just using both front room lights. I can't afford, nor have space and time for proper lighting rigs, but would anyone be able to offer pointers on how to improve the quality? It's very grainy. I uploaded it to YT anyway as my regular viewers won't care, and it gives me something to show...

First try

Would something like this with another cheap tripod work?

Amazon LED Panel

or even these

Cheap ebay LED Floodlights

I just want clearer, HD images. TBH the Miele one was worse quality than my phone, but I don't want to write off the new camera just yet, I imagine it's how I'm using it. I filmed something else today using the tripod and lots of natural light and it's much better, although still not perfect... Must have a good play with the settings, I left the camera in auto.

Any hints and ideas would be hugely appreciated!

Thanks

[MURRAY007]

you need to learn the settings on the camera before buying extra equipment,
go in to manual mode and change the aperture, and shutter Speed, also adjust your white balance.
I don't think that camcorder has adjustable IOS settings.

[singlecoil]

I had a quick look, your videos are hard to watch, you're in too close most of the time, with too much camera movement.

[StevieBee]

That's a half decent camera with reasonable low-light capability so you should be getting a much crisper image than you are.

It looks to me like it's down to one of two things: Either the auto setting on the camera is defaulting to a lower quality setting or the editing software you're using is set to a lower setting when processing the final edit.

Good lighting will help a bit.....but I don't think that is your problem.

As above, keep the camera static and pull out more.

[TheRainMaker]

As with any camera work, light is your friend.

Have you set it to the highest quilty setting? looks like a very low bit rate to me.

[beko1987]

SingleCoil - your response right there is what's prompted me to invest a bit, all my videos are done on my phone, with a small tripod thing, or handheld, and it's getting a bit tiresome now. Proper camera and a large full size tripod is much better, and steadier!

RE the quality, rather embarrassingly I found the answer out the other day...

My new camera outputs AVCHD files... and apparently you aren't supposed to just browse the SD card and find the video files and pluck them out... big no no...

What works better is using something like Sony Vegas to ingest the whole data stream, and then process it! Looks flipping much better! Still a bit dark in places, but crisp and clear! I did install the software that came with the camera but it's very old now (and the more up to date software requires the camera serial number, for a different camera generation than mine). It ingests the footage well, but will either burn the 1080p files to a blu-ray, or output them as 720i mp4 files... Plus it didn't play nicely with windows 10 64bit, so I sacked that off.

So now I've got the fundamentals of how to actually use the camera sorted, I'm going to do more filming as is, and see what I get. Have been looking at cheap lighting kits on amazon though just to get started...