10 Simple Secrets to Make Your Videos Look Professional

1. Camera Settings: Thanks again for taking my class. I'm really happy to see you as much as I can see you through the lens right now. But I want to jump right into it and start with the first tip, which is basically understand the fundamentals of your camera settings. And some of you beginners might already think, Oh don't worry, Dennis, I got this. You don't need to teach me anything about this. I do want to encourage you to go through it even just as a refresher because I remember for myself, although I knew all of those things that I'm going to talk about in a minute already. Sometimes it's a different thing to know something and to properly executed as well. So I quickly want to go over the most important cameras settings in regards to improving your image quality from where it might be right now, the first thing in my opinion is to record in the correct frame rate. Now, you might have heard all kinds of stuff online about when to use which frame rate to use 24, 25, 30, 60, maybe even some crazy number like 120. But for the sake of keeping the short and to the point, I really recommend whenever you have some normal talking head video or you just want to make a normal video without some sort of slow motion effects or something crazy, then stick to 24 or 25 depending on where you live. But in the United States, for example, Twenty-four parts of Europe is 25. Stick to this number to keep it neutral, to keep a professional, 24 frames per second is always going to look good. That's number one. The next thing I want to talk about, which is related to frame rate is the shutter speed. One other common mistake that I see people make, and it might be because they have experienced with photography, is that they don't use the correct shutter speed in reference to the frame rate. So the rule of thumb is always, you want to have the shutter speed be one over double the frame rate. Alright, so in other terms, if you have 24 frames per second, the optimal shutter speed would be one over 48, or 48 of a second. Okay, so most cameras, especially the more affordable ones, don't offer 48. I just say one over 50. And we already know that shutter speed as well as aperture and ISO, which I'm going to go to in a second, are all tools of exposure, okay, So they changed the brightness of the picture. And whenever you want to quickly change the brightness of your picture, it's very common, I think in the very beginning, to just crank up the shutter speed and make the image a little darker. You really want to get that done either with a higher aperture number, a lower ISO number, or maybe even lowering your light source if you can. And if all that doesn't work, then I would really recommend using something called ND filters, which is basically in simple terms is just the sunglasses for your camera lens to make sure that even though something is really bright, it tones down everything a little bit and makes it a little darker. I put a link in the project description for you to check out if you're interested in that. And that's really the core of shutter speed, is keep it in reference one over half the frame rate. The next thing I already mentioned before is the aperture. And it's important to know what the aperture is doing to your picture. Now I already mentioned that a high aperture corresponds to a more dark image, right? And that in return means that a wide open aperture, which corresponds to a lower F-stop number, leads to a more bright picture. And that's only one of the influences that aperture has on your picture. And other one is shallow depth of field or it has an influence rather on the depth of field. And what that means is that if I put my hand right here, the camera focuses on the hand. And maybe here in the background you can see the planned and me, myself are very blurry, right? And that means that the shallow depth of field is an actual right there. My hand is in focus. Everything beyond that is already out of focus. By now. You can also see, I'm in focus, but the way the plant right there is already slightly out of focus. Right now I'm filming on an F35. This is actually considered not very shallow. And what that means is that a lot of the image is in-focus. My face is completely in focus. If I were to film, this may be an F1 0.8 could go to the extreme that for example, the tip of my nose might be in focus, but my years already not. I'm going to show on the screen a comparison of what an F1 0.8, which is very wide open, which leads a very shallow depth of field and very bright image might look like compared to an F, let's say 5.6. So you can really see the difference. And it's very popular these days to film with a very shallow depth of field, which looks amazing. But you have to make sure that if you don't use autofocus, for example, you have to make sure that your image is actually in critical, in perfect focus, which is increasingly difficult with the lower F-stop is the depth of focus becomes more shallow and more shallow. So you have to have your focus even more precise to really get your, your subject, yourself, myself in this case, in focus. And other than that, aperture is also just a tool to regulate the exposure and the brightness of your image and nonetheless of the bunch ISO, obviously most of you already know this. You want to keep ISO as low as possible or at the base ISO, your camera, every camera has an ISO setting at which it works supposedly the best. I personally just use the easier rule of thumb and just keep it as low as possible. Right now, I do think I'm filming on ice or 100, which most often, especially with the more beginner cameras, leads to the cleanest image and the least amount of image noise. Let's look at a comparison on the screen right now of what it looks like if I do a shot and I so 100 and the very same shot at something like ISO 1600 or 6400. And you will see the difference in image, image noise more specifically. And that's really why you want to make sure that your ISO is as low as possible. And now if you really want to make a good investment, I recommend that you get yourself a light way. You can change the intensity, we can dial it down, you can dial it up. And that way, That's really the best way to create the exposure that you want. Because then you can do to have to worry about ISO or aperture or even shutter speed, which you should let alone anyway, you can create the image that you want based off of the light that you have. You don't have to rely on the daylight being as bright as you need it or, you know, you use one of those fixed bulbs which you cannot change. Unfortunately, if you have the money and you do create a lot of videos, I think that's a great investment to make links, as always in the project description, if you want to check some examples out. 2. White Balance: All right, tip number 2 is white balance, and arguably that's also part of the basic settings of camera. But I did want to give it its own little less than because white balance sometimes can be a little bit more challenging. I didn't get white balance, right? And I didn't really understand it until way into my sort of semi-professional time where already had clients. But I made so many mistakes that now looking back, I'm like, oh no, How could I do this? And white balance is actually fairly simple if you know what to look for and what to do. White balance refers to a setting in the camera that basically tells the camera about the lighting conditions in the moment. So for example, if you're at home too dark winter night and you switch on this cozy land may be right next to your bed or something. And usually those kinds of lamps and in general, indoor lamps in normal apartments and houses are very often in this warm white. They have a very warm lighting, right? And makes you feel comfortable. It makes living spaces for your comfortable. And now in comparison, if you go maybe to a hospital or to a, to a car mechanic or to some sort of laboratory, then you often see this very cold and more white light feels much colder, it feels much more uncomfortable. And this difference between warm light and cold that is actually reflected in the term that we use to describe those slides, which is color temperature, but in color temperature and things are a little bit twisted around because a low color temperature refers to a warmer light, while a high color temperature refers to a colder light. So an example for typical home lighting, indoor lighting is something around between 2700 and 3200 Kelvin is what is called Kelvin. All right, That's the metric we use. And now in turn, normal daylight in the middle of the day, if you go outside and it's not specifically cloudy or anything, then you will have around 5600 Kelvin, which is a little bit higher and color temperature, but actually colder in reality and how it's looking at how it's perceived. And now for your camera to accurately portray all the colors and make everything look realistic, the camera needs to know what's the color temperature of the light. Because if you test it out, depending on what light you have, a white piece of paper will look totally different. Sometimes it might even look orange, sometimes it might look glue. It sort of takes in the color of the light that it's being lit by now. And that is what white balances. And now there's different settings in the camera to achieve the correct white balance. There's automatic white balance. You can set a custom white balance and all different kinds of settings. And the first thing I want to say right off the bat, automatic white balance is not okay. You should really not use automatic white balance except for when you might be vlogging, because if you're logging, environments change pretty fast. Usually vlogging, it's not the sort of high production quality type of video anyway. So you want to be rather fast and react to those routings and go inside and outside and all different kinds of places without having to adjust the white balance all the time. But if you have any sort of talking head video like I do right now, or you create the typical kind of YouTube video. Whereas the talking head together with some, with some B-roll or something like that, then you do want to control the white balance so everything looks accurate and also consistent from shot to shot because automatic white balance my change at any point and good luck color correcting each one of those shots whenever there is a slight change in, in the automatic white balance. So how can we set the white down? So can we determine the correct white balance? A couple of options. Number 1, again, if you know your light, you know your white balance. Whenever you purchase a light, you will have any sort of indication of what color temperature this slide is giving. And then you can really just go into your camera, set it into the correct color temperature and your white balance will be perfect. Now if you don't know the color temperature of your light, then you can also just guess because for example, if you film outside daylight will always be somewhere between 5000 and 6000 Kelvin, it might be a little bit more than that, a little bit less than that. This will be still in the realm of what you could correct afterwards in color correction very easily with a couple of sliders. And like I said, if you're indoor, the typical warm light is somewhere between 2700 and 3200 Kelvin. And that's really all you need to know, because if you get close enough to the correct setting, you can easily change that afterwards in the color correction and make it perfect. But oftentimes that's not even necessary because it's really, because it's really kind of easy to get it right. When you just look at the screen and look at the lights around you, you will do a good job. And now the last thing if you're ready to invest a little bit into getting perfect white balance anytime, there's a couple of tools that you can make use of to really get good and accurate white balance wherever you are in every lighting situation without having to know any of the lights that are available at the moment. And that is a gray card. Okay. And there's different versions of this gray card that can be very, very affordable and a little bit more pricey. The most basic version that you might have seen are those three little credit card sized cards that are actually rather made for getting the exposure correct with your highlights, your midtones and shadows. But especially the gray one here in the middle is a perfect choice to also get your white balance correctly. It's not as accurate as a proper white balance card because it's not really a gray card and that sense, but for all intents and purposes for YouTube and any sort of even professional work, you don't need to get it right to that sort of precision where you really, this one is not enough anymore. So those things are, I think like ten bucks again, I will link it down below. And really useful and the way you do it, you go into your camera settings and go to the place where you can manually set custom white balance. And then there will appear some sort of target or pointer where you have to point the camera at the surface that you want to use to white balanced the frame. And so you just pointed at this gray card or any other gray card that you have or frankly, even any gray surface that you have. If you don't have one of those cards and you will have custom white balance based. And that's important based on the light that this object that you pointed at that was lit by. So what you don't want to do, use this gray card, leave your set that you're going to fill them in, and then do some, do some white balance in a totally different direction. You wanna do it in the setting as much as you can in the setting that you're going to fill them in as well. So everything is obviously, you know, set to the settings of what you're going to film and not something else. The little more pricey option is something like this year. This is called a color checker. I think it's about a 100 bucks. It's pretty crazy, but it has a lot of functionality that's pretty useful, especially for color correction. You have all sorts of different color palettes right here. But what I want to show you is this part here, and this is an actual gray card. This thing is really perfectly accurate in order to get white balance. Frankly, I haven't used this as much as I have used this for white balancing because these days are ego off of my lights to set the white balance correctly and just use this thing here for color correction. But anyway, that's just another option. So in the end I want to say there's nothing more amateur looking or worse looking than the white balance being that off, that you cannot correct it afterwards because tried to fix a bad image in post-production is usually easy recipe for failure. It's not going to look as good. You know, most likely you might get away with it or something, but it's never going to be as good as it can be. And people will notice over time and you will not get that many calls back. Or your own YouTube videos maybe might not look as good as they could or should do just because of a little setting that you might have gotten wrong. So white balance is extremely important as well. 3. Shooting in Log: All right. Tip number 3, shooting in LOC or flat picture profiles. If you know how to do it. Now if you have been on YouTube and you follow like the filmmaking space, then you are probably aware that by now, many people will recommend that you should NSLog see log V log in all those log picture profiles to get the best dynamic range and the best image quality out of your camera. And in general, there's nothing wrong with that. Obviously, you should try to get the best image quality out of your camera that you can't. There's just a little problem with that, which is that most people who other people to shoot and lock cameras, they don't ask if those people even know how to properly do that because at the end of the day, if you shoot and flat picture profiles, but you don't know how to handle them. In the end, you might very well end up with the worst picture, worst image quality than you would have gotten if you just film without any picture profile and you just use the standard profile. So for example, right now for this class I'm shooting in the standard profile. And reason number one is I don't need all that dynamic range for this sort of seen. There is no crazy highlights of crazy darks in this frame. Everything is exposed properly and it looks good just right out of the box. And that way I can really save myself a couple of steps of work in the post-production process because I didn't have to convert my flat picture profile into proper looking image. So the first thing I would ask myself if I was you, do you really need flat picture profiles or do you just do it because your favorite YouTuber told you that that's what you should do. I would always encourage you to think for yourself and think about, is every advice out there really the one applying to myself or my situation. Now if you do want to shoot a flat picture profiles, maybe just for the fun of it. I totally understand. And I often do that myself. Then just make sure that you get everything right. I would recommend using technical lots to your advantage where, you know, most of the camera manufacturers actually give you official lots. For example, Sony for S lock to where you can shoot an S lock and you can just put the Latin and the image will be transformed from this S lock into a proper looking image without you having to do much. And then you can just adjust the details of your image, like contrast, the highlights, the shadows, saturation and stuff like that. But basically your image is done for you and you know that it's correctly converted because in reality it's not as easy as just putting a little bit of contrast and saturation. There's a lot of knowledge and skill that goes into correctly transforming the image from a lock picture profile into a standard picture profiles. So just make sure that you know what to do. Also consider that every different picture profile, depending on the camera manufacturer, has different optimal settings in which you want to film it. Sometimes you need to overexpose things. Sometimes you need to properly exposed to it. This is all a lot of specific knowledge that you might not have to learn or you might not want to learn if you just want to make some good-looking videos on YouTube or in any other place. 4. Framing and Composition: Tip number 4, framing and composition. So when it comes to framing, there's a lot of things you can do very wrong, and a lot of things you can easily do very right. And the good thing about framing is that there are a couple of rules that if you follow those, you will make sure that your image always looked professional, always looks proper, never looks awkward or weird. And that's the principle and videography or filmmaking That's very helpful in general is that before you start making things, really, really good, focus on not making big mistakes. And that will often lead you to a very good looking image. So first off, I want to show you a couple of examples of weird or bad framing, just so we know what we're talking about. Now, here are a couple of good examples of framing that look really proper. Look nice, look professional. And that's something that we can learn from. And so now the first tip, the first rule I want to talk about is the so-called rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is very simple. Basically just means is that we cut the frame, the image that we have into three parts vertically, and then again into three parts horizontally. So now look at your framing with this sort of grid overlay. And actually many cameras, you can even set the setting so that this overlays always portrayed on your camera monitor, which can be very helpful in the beginning. And the rule of thirds now basically says that whenever we put our subject onto one of those four cross-sections on the frame, it will look pleasing. Now assuming that you want to film yourself or you mostly want to film humans, we want to focus on the two top right and top-left cross-sections to put our subject, to put the head of the subject, and most importantly to put the eyes of the subject somewhere around that area. Now it depends a little bit on how far away you are from the subject or how close you are. But in general, you want to keep the head or the eyes. That top line on the right side, on the left side, that's the rule of thirds. And that's a very simple way to make good-looking images. And the rule of thirds is especially powerful if we combine that with a couple of other rules, because only rule of thirds sometimes leaves some questions open. For example, right now I'm filming myself, but I'm basically ignoring the rule of thirds. I'm on the right height in terms of my eyes and my head and everything. And I'm not on the left and I'm not on the right. So why am I doing this? In order to explain that the first additional rule that we wanna focus on is the headroom. And the headroom is basically this right here. The distance between my head and the end of the frame, That's the Hadoop. And headroom is very important because getting the headroom too big or too small will have strong effects on your image. So for example, if you have a headroom that is way too big, make your subject looks small and unimportant. But if you had to miss too small and your subject is too close to the end of the frame at the top, it might look very weird as well because your subject might have its head cut off. Now that's fairly obviously not a good idea. Most people understand that intuitively. But in general, you want to get it right. You don't only want to get it, not shut off, but you also don't want to have too much headroom. So the question becomes, what is a good headroom? And I think again, a good rule of thumb that you could use is to take your hand, put it like this anterior head and whatever the height of your hand, this is where the frame should end more or less. I think that keeps you from making really great mistakes. And on top of that, you can also just use your common sense and your sense of aesthetic as well. As long as you don't chop off your head and you don't have too much headspace that it makes you look insignificant, then I think you're gonna be well on your way. Now the next rule that we can use the symmetry, and now I'm coming back to the reason why I'm sitting in the middle and not on the left or on the right of the frame. Because I personally enjoy the look of symmetry. I'm sitting right in the middle of the frame. That means on the left side and on the right side is the exact equal amount of free space. I do have the planned and the background which kind of cuts through the cemetery a little bit. But in general, having your subject centered, always going to look good. And I do use the rule of thirds a little bit in the sense that my eyes are still on this top line where they should be. But I'm not sitting on the rider on the left, I'm sitting in the middle. And again, you can go rule of thirds, you can go centered. Both of those things most likely will always look somewhat professional and somewhat decent, and you cannot really go wrong with any of those. Now another little additional quick tip on this note is that your camera height, the height of your camera, how, how you position your camera is also pretty important to create the look that you want. Because oftentimes people might be tempted to put a little bit too high, a little bit too low. And again, another rule of thumb, just keep it roughly at eye level or if you have to slightly below, but not any sort of big deviations from what your eye level is on right now, my cameras exactly as high as my eye level is. So I look straight into the camera, the camera, so my level, it doesn't make me look huge, It doesn't make me look small. It's just on my level. And I think it's also just respectful to talk with your audience on one level, isn't it? 5. Focal Length: Tip number 5, choose the right focal length. Focal length is actually one of the most impactful things that influence how your image looks. I don't want to dive too much into the effects of every single focal length, but I want to give you a few ideas and few guidelines that you can use to properly shoot your videos and have them look good. Now if you have a talking head video like this one right now, where you just sit there and tell a story or something for any talking head video like that, I would recommend anything between 20 to 35 millimeters as a basic focal length for that type of video. And the reason is, the wider you get with your focal length, the closer you will feel to the viewer. Because obviously you are also quite a bit closer to the camera compared to more tight focal length. But this sense of proximity, I think, helps create a connection between the viewer and the person in front of the camera. And I think that's a really positive thing. That's why I like to fill my YouTube videos, my classes like this very close up so we can talk to each other and have some sort of connection. Although it's kind of a one-side of connection because I don't really see you. Now if you don't like this close look and you want to have a little bit more distance to your audience for some reason. I think going up to the 50 is actually a good option because 50 looks very pleasing. Between 50 and 85 millimeters makes the human face look the most pleasing. You will look the best gonna be a nice portrait shot of you. And I have shot tutorials and 50 millimeters before it looks amazing. So 50 is another great option, and 50 millimeters is often the most affordable prime lens for most cameras, which is a nice little add on. So you can actually get yourself a nice looking 50 millimeter prime lens. Amazing looking at YouTube videos on a budget and everything is good. Everything above 50 millimeters, in my opinion, is not really made for those kinds of videos. Of course you can, you can shoot your YouTube videos on 200 millimeters if you want to. But I don't think it's really practical to go about 50 because at some point is going to become too tight. You will need a really big space to still fit yourself into the frame at such high focal length. So I would recommend using those for detail shots for B-roll, but for yourself. And as the talking head video, I would personally stick between 20 to 50, with my personal preference being in the wider focal ranges, between 20 and maybe 35 millimeters. 6. Lighting: All right, next time let's talk about lighting. And this is not a lighting class. This is not going to go into humungous detail about how to make different lighting setups. What I wanna do is I want to give you the one lighting setup that always works and that you can adjust to whatever sort of look you want. And that's obviously the very well-known three-point lighting. And just the basic refresher on how three-point lighting works. You have a key light, a fill, and a backlight. And we start with the key light, which is usually a big soft light source. And you can get it soft by using a soft box or any sort of diffusion material, you want to have your key light, the big light source positioned obviously in front of your subject, but not right in front of it, because that will create a very flat looking image with very even lighting everywhere. But we want some shadows in the face. We want some structure, we want some shape, we want some depth. And so we put our key light a little bit at an angle, maybe 45 degrees to an angle on the left or on the right, doesn't really matter. And then also we don't want to have it come directly from the site. We want to have it come a little bit from above because that really creates the most flattering look, the most beautiful shadows. And it looks generally very good with human faces right now the key light is right here in front of me. Really not even an arm's-length away. Because also the closer you can get the light, the bigger the light sources and the softer the light would look, which is always a good thing. Now that's the key that you can position it on this side. On this side, depending on how sharp your gonna put the angle, That's going to determine how dramatic is it going to look, how how much shadow is going to be in the face if I were to put the light right next to meet at a 90 degree angle, my face would be split in the middle into light and darkness. And there will be obviously a much more dramatic look. Again, if I do it right from the front, then I'm going to have this sort of very even PUD lighting if you want. And that's how you can, although you are still a three-point lighting, can create all kinds of different lights scenarios. And I really recommend you just try it out for yourself. Change the angles of the light, put it in a slightly different position and see what it does to your image. But that's number one, the key light. Now the second in three-point lighting is the fill. And there was a reason I don't say fill light because the field doesn't actually need to be a light. The job of the fill is, as it says, to fill in the shadow side, which is obviously opposite the side of where the key light is. So let's say the key light is here. That means on this side here, That's the shadow side. And that's where we would usually position the film. The film really can be anything, can be a second lamp that fills in the shadows on this side and maybe even create almost an equal look just as the front lighting would do. It could also be a little bit less strong of a light source to create just a little bit of shadow on the side. It can be nothing like right now. So I don't have anything specifically positioned here to create a specific amount of fill that I want. I just used the room Exodus, which in this case means that there is a white wall, which already in this case bounces back, glide. In a sense I do have a fill. And in that sense you always have any sort of a fill because there's always going to be something on the side of the frame, right? That you don't see. It might be a white wall, might be a black wall, which then would work as a negative fill because it sucks up the light and create stronger shadows. But just in general, you can say that there's always fill. You just have to decide if the fill that's there is to your liking. And then you can manipulate it to fit your liking. You can make the image darker, you can make it brighter. You can do whatever you want, and that's the film. Oftentimes it's not really necessary to do anything. You can't do as much or as little as you want to manipulate the image from the side. As I said right now, I'm not doing anything because I like how it looks right now. So that's the field. The third part of three-point lighting is the backlight. And until right now, I actually didn't use any backlight in this frame and I'll explain you why in a second. But backlight is fairly simple. It's exactly what it says. It's a light that illuminates your back from behind. And you might ask yourself, why would any light do that? Like, what's the what's the point of having my back lit up when it's not actually in the frame. And the reason it's like a lot of things in order to create shape and to separate yourself from the background. Now if you look at the image right now, you will notice that although the light comes from here, the main light, the key light, I don't have any fill light and he had on this side here, if you look on this side of my of my arm or my shoulders, you can see a very clear and clear cut line between the background and the foreground. The reason it looks like that backlight, if I wouldn't have this backlight on right now, the shoulder part here would not look as defined and S almost like cut out from the background. I'll switch off the backlight right now. And you can see the difference, alright, that light is off and you can see it's just subtle difference, but you can definitely notice it. I'm not asked to find on the side and not as much popping out from the background. And in this case it's not even that strong of an effect because I'm already in a very high contrast sort of setting here where the color of my shirt is very contrast in comparison to the color of the backdrop. Backdrop is a very bright yellow, mature, it's more gray, so it pops off of a background anyway, very well. But in general, that's the effect you want to create with backlight. The separation from the background, which creates more depth to the image and just looks very pleasing. In general, I would say this is some sort of an additional light. You don't need to have it to start working with three-point lighting in a sense, honestly, to start with three-point lighting, if you really want to just record talking head videos and you don't need to have a look. Always perfect, then you don't even really need three-point lighting. You can just use your key light and a proper position way, and that will create a nice-looking image. But I really would say considering how little of an effort and makes to have backlight, it really makes a big difference and I will use it quite a bit more professional, quite a bit more pleasing to the eye. And so that's why we like my backlight. An official part 4 of the three-point lighting, which is not actually really part of the three-point lighting, is something that I'm using often, which is also very popular in general, is using a background light. Okay, so we had the backlight before that illuminates my back, but now we have something that illuminates the background behind me. And I don't know if you can see it in this image right now. But if you pay attention, there is some sort of a halo effect right around me in the backdrop where behind me, right behind me it looks kinda brighter than on the outside, right. And naturally that would be obviously not the case. So let me show you why that is the case. Where is it? All right. So this is what it would look like normally. And as you could hear, maybe I just switch off the light that was positioned right behind me. Where I have a little light panel standing here in order to eliminate the backdrop. And as you can see, the difference is quite significant. And I really like this kind of look. And in general, having a background light can be very, very helpful. Those slides that I just showed you there, even RGB, so I can have different colors of light and even give my backdrop but different color, which can be very fun to do. But in general, it just looks really good, has a nice little halo effect around you, which again helps pop you off of the screen even more compared to just using the backlight or not any backlight at all. So that's something you should consider using as well. 7. Background: Have a good-looking background. Now we've talked about the background of the video quite a bit in the last lesson. But having a good-looking background in general is obviously a humungous part of how your image looks, okay? Because you can always do so much with lighting, so much with framing and everything. If the background looks really awful, That's not going to do all that much because your background looks awful. So here are a couple of tips on how to get a good-looking, professional-looking background. Now it did, number one, obviously, no matter in front of what backed up you're filming, whether you're sitting on a desk, you're sitting on your couch, you have your shelf in the background. Whenever you wanna do keep things clean and tidy. Nobody likes a cluttered space. I'm just looking at my desk right now. It would not be a good backdrop because there's all kinds of stuff on their notes, on their pens on there, headphones, all kinds of stuff. Keep your space clean and don't have anything in the frame that doesn't really add to the picture, that doesn't really need to be there. Make sure the books are nicely put and look proper. If you have a plant in the background, make sure that the plant looks good. All kinds of general stuff that is hard to explain because it kind of comes with common sense, I would say. And a little bit of a sense of aesthetic that you might have to develop over time. But in general, just keep it clean and tidy. Less is more if you feel like it's not perfect yet tried to take things away and see if that changes the image to the better. Which brings me to my next point, which is used a backdrop. And what I mean by backdrop is use a specific backdrop that is created maybe for making videos. And in this case, that's exactly what I'm doing. I have a yellow backdrop. Behind the yellow backdrop, there's actually just a white wall. I can show you quickly. White wall behind it. Which also could look fine, obviously. Now I have this backdrop mounted to my wall because I film a lot of videos. And so for me the investment was worth it. You can put those backdrops on a normal light sand and they're not that expensive. I think I paid like €50 for this one, for one role on backdrop, which is extremely long. I think it's 11 meters long. And so that's a great option to create videos because it doesn't matter what my desk looks like. It doesn't matter what any of my apartment looks like because I'm filming in my apartment. And for me personally, I always I always struggled with finding good-looking scenes in my apartment. I'm not very unknown an interior designer. I'm not very talented in terms of creating spaces like that. That's not one of my talents. So I'm happy to have an option that always look professional. I don't really need to do anything. I just kinda just put a plant here and I think it looks pretty good. And that's just because it's a professional-looking backdrop. You can do the same thing in front of a white wall or any colored wall as well, which then will be a backdrop. You don't need to have this paper thing behind you. And as I mentioned earlier, if you have a backlight, if you have a background light that actually is RGB, meaning it can create colors, then what I would recommend that you use a gray backdrop and then you can shine the light if it's strong enough, you can shine the light against the backdrop and the gray backdrop will turn into any color you want. Just with this RGB lighting, which then gives you an infinite amount of possible backdrop colors that you can use and you will never get bored. So that's really my solution to the background issue. But in general, I would just say that go with your sense of aesthetic. Look at other YouTube channels or other creators or other sources of videos that you like. And ask yourself why maybe you can recreate things. Lights in the background obviously look really nice. Plants in the background always look really nice. But overall, this is actually one of the hardest things to teach in my opinion because it comes down to personal taste a lot. And at the end of the day, frankly, you need to like your videos. So go with what you think is right, and then maybe ask some friends for feedback and I'm sure you'll be on a good way. 8. Assignment: Now let's talk about the student's project for this class. And the project is to create your frame. And by that I mean set up your shot, set up your background, set up the lighting, setup everything, and make a screenshot and share it with all of us so we can see what you came up with and that everybody in the community can learn. And so that everybody can be inspired by maybe what someone else is doing that they wouldn't have thought about. And so altogether we can improve our shots. And I'm happy to comment on any image that you submit. 9. Shoot for the Edit: Tip number 8, shooting for the edit. So part of making a good video is also editing a good video. And editing can be a lot of fun, or it can be a lot of work. And the tip number eight is to shoot for the edit. Because whenever you think about your final result that you want to create while you're shooting, you save yourself a ton of time. I cannot stress that enough. When I was starting out making videos, started working professionally. I had no idea what that means. Shoot to edit. I was just shooting as much as I can because I was scared that I didn't have the shots that I need. So I just shot way too much. I can make sure that I have what I need. And that may be a good thing to do for the first couple of videos just to get over your fear of not having everything you need. But over time you will notice that, you know, 95 percent of that stuff you will never use because most of the time those shots are not always thought through and they're not planned in your mind in order to fit into a specific position in the final video. So as much as you can, I would recommend think about the final video that you want to create. Which scenes do you need? Which B-roll do you need? Which talking head section do you need to create the final video that you have in your mind and then create those shots specificly that will reduce the editing time immensely because you don't have to look for the shots that you know you had, but they're surrounded by nonsense shots that you don't even need. You will have much more structure in your clips and maybe you will even have clips that you otherwise wouldn't have even thought about if you just go out and wing it. But instead you maybe went out with a simple shortlist. Are you headed in your mind what you want to create? And so shooting for the edit is one of the best things you can do to create better videos. 10. Audio: Tip number nine. Good audio. And I want to tell you that in case you haven't heard it before, audio is arguably at least as important, in my opinion, maybe even more important than the image in your video. Let me explain the reason I say that is because whenever you have really, really bad audio, that tends to bother people more than having really, really bad image quality. It's very common to see decent image quality. It's not that common to see decent audio quality. And so that tells me that in general, audio is probably think that people should work more on then on image quality because most people are ready get the image quality right. So now they should work on the audio quality to match the level of inequality that they haven't. So the question becomes, how do we get good audio quality? Number one is obviously the choice of microphone. There's different kinds of microphones out there. There's shotgun microphones, broadcast microphones. There is a lavalier microphones and all those different tools are really for different occasions. And right now I'm shooting on a lavalier microphone as my secondary option and my shotgun microphone as my number one option. And you might hear that in my room there's a little bit of reverb and that is generally actually not that great of a thing. The reason for that is that this is my living room. It's not a perfectly prepared studio with all kinds of sound dampening and Sound panels everywhere is a hollow space. And I think for this very purpose right now, the audio quality is good enough. You tell me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't need to be perfect voice over quality without any rebirth. So for this case, I made the sacrifice of having the convenience of being able to film here like this right now and not having perfect audio. So now the first option level here, I think lovelier, first of all, should always be on there if you have one, just as a secondary option in case something goes wrong, people love level yours because they are so flexible, you can go everywhere, especially if it's a wireless one. Or you can go anywhere and the camera or it says perfect audio. Now, I would argue that for most beginners, a lavalier microphone like this one is the best option. Why? Because number one, it can be very cheap. You can plug it into your phone if you don't have a recorder and you don't need a wireless one or something like that and plug it into your phone. The audio quality is generally pretty decent if you get a good one. And it's the most simple because you don't need to worry so much about positioning, which is clip it onto your, onto your close right now, like this one here. And you will have decent audio quality right out of the box. Very simple. That's what I like about this. I think it's good for beginners. Now if you want to step up a little bit and increase the audio quality, you can go with this shotgun microphone, which I have actually right here out of frame, pointing generally at my at my upper chest area, which is where you wanna point it because that's where the voice comes from. Doesn't come only from the mouth that comes from the whole area right here. So for a full sound, you want to point it at the chest area and it's about I don't know that much away from me, something like that. Just out of frame. So I couldn't be let me see. Yeah, something like that. It's not very far away and it creates a nice sound every time you're endorsed. Depending on which one you use. You can also use those outdoors, but then you go into some sort of more professional sort of realm where you have to use a boom pole and a person holds that boom pole to get the sound. But in general, if you feel for yourself, you can set this up in your home studio and your bedroom wherever and create great audio like this. This one here costs about, I don't know, 300 bucks or something like that. And you will need an XLR audio recorder, which most beginner cameras are not going to be capable of doing. So that's a little bit of a step up. Now, the microphone type number 3 that I want to talk about are those kinds of podcasts, microphones at you as you might know them. This one here is the one that I'm using. Really loved, I think I love how it looks, which is the road. The road part Mike. Great name. Oftentimes those microphones are in the frame. Oftentimes you use them when you sit at a desk maybe, or for, you know, for podcasts recordings, you can also put them onto like a swivel arm up just like this one. And those are also working with XLR. Now there are options that work directly with USB, so you can plug them into your computer and record the audio directly in the computer. I like those because they have really great image quality and they have this sort of radio sounds, especially if you go closer and you have this proximity effect. Not everybody likes that. I really like it. It's this podcast radio sound, also fairly affordable. This whole microphone setup costs probably around 150 bucks, which if you think about it, if you spend a 1000 bucks, let's say for your camera, you should be willing to spend that comparatively little amount of money for your microphone to have a proper audio to go along with your beautiful image quality. Those are different options for microphones. Let me know in the comments if you want to have a more dedicated class just on audio and microphones to really go deeper into the topic because it is quite deep topic. But for now that should be it. Those are the microphones you can use. And the key is use microphone don't rely on in camera audio. Don't rely on the microphone, off your phone or something like that. Use a proper microphone and tried to get really good audio quality. 11. Clean Edits: Tip number ten and the final tip to really get professional looking videos with a simple change is to have a clean edit. And what do I mean by clean edit is that I remember from myself and I see it's filled with lots of beginners, is that whenever they edit a video, the reason it doesn't look as professional and good as it could. The problem is often not with the filming or even the audio. The problem is how they edited, because oftentimes beginners fail to cut out the bad stuff from a clip. They might start the clip when the cameras still a little bit shaky and there might be too much of a past before the talking starts. Simple things like that. Little bit of camera shake, little bit of a overall underexposure or maybe something that's also very communist, that change of exposure while it's recording, recording in the universe or no, it's too bright. So you put it down a little bit and those kinds of changes being visible on camera, you do not want to have any of those. We want to have a stable image, whether you're moving, are on a tripod. Always keep it stable. You want to have correct exposure. You want have a good timing. You don't want to have too many DO moments. You don't want to have too many like breaks, like you don't want to hear too many weird noises that it shouldn't be part of the image. And in general, just think about it. Keep it clean. Keep it clean. Only use the good charts, only use the texts that are worth being taken. And if you mess up a shot, if you can shoot it again, it's all about raising the threshold of when you feel too uncomfortable of using the clip because you know, something's off. Oftentimes that takes a little while to get to the point where like, you know, I don't want to use that chart because it's not up to par for me. It doesn't fit to the quality of the videos I want to produce. And I think that's oftentimes one of the main reasons why videos are not as good as they very well could be if you just make this little tiny change and raise your own expectations for your edit according to what video quality one at the end. 12. Outro: All right guys. So there you go. There the 10 tips that I would give you to boost your image quality, to boost your video quality, especially as a beginner. And before you head off, I want to leave you guys with a few things. And that is that it's really about getting the basics right instead of trying to be specificly good. Any other specialty things that you might see someone on YouTube or something, get the basics right. And notice that I didn't mention things like high resolution, like even for k, let alone 8 K or something like that. This is all nice and cool, but oftentimes features and crazy features like AK video, distract from the basics, distract from the fundamentals, are much more important to create a video that looks good, feels good, is impressive and has an effect on the viewer. Having a video of AK doesn't do anything to a video that you couldn't also do with four K or even full HD. You don't need a video. What do you need to do is focused on audio quality, on image quality, get your exposure correct. The white balance, color correction, editing. There's a thousand things that you should worry about before you worry about having an 8 K camera because that's just distracting. We all understand how tempting it is. We are secretly 1.5 those eight k cameras. But at the end of the day, if we're honest with ourselves, we don't really need them. We just want them because they're nice distraction. Everybody likes that stuff, material things way more than we know we should. And so that's really what I want to leave you with. No need for 8 K, no need for expensive cinema cameras or a big lenses or anything like that. A basic good-looking video is not a question of budget. It's not a question of gear, It's not a question of resolution. It's a question of resourcefulness and understanding the basic knowledge that you need to create a good-looking image.