In this article, we talked about some tips and tricks to record better videos with your smartphone. By applying these tricks, you can shoot better videos on your smartphone. Read the article now to learn how to do it
It is a popular saying that best camera is the camera you own, and foremost offers it is the smartphone camera that is always there in our pockets.
And most of us underestimate its capabilities.
Today, in this article we are going to talk about how you can use your smartphone camera to take better videos.
There are hundreds of videos that were shot on mobile phones and they have gained millions of views on YouTube. While it is said that the camera gear can only improve the production quality, not the story.
You can still work on some tips and tricks to get the best production quality even with your smartphone camera, and this is what we are going to talk about in this article.
Always record in a landscape mode
Just because it is easier to hold a lot of people record videos in vertical form without realizing that if they ever have to play the video on, TV or anything that is not a smartphone, then you will have to bear those thick bars on both sides of the video.
So, always try to capture videos in landscape mode, all you need to do is hold your camera horizontally, this way you will able to cover a wider area, which is Pleasure to watch when you play on a big screen.
Lock the exposure
When you recording in auto mode, the exposure will also be selected auto, which means it will try to lighten or dim the video depending on how old it the scene you are recording is.
If you are recording a video where a lot of camera movement is involved then you will end up having a video that will sometimes be too dark, or too light.
To overcome this, you can lock the exposure, the option to lock exposure depends on the smartphone you use and the UI of the camera app, but it’s quite easy to find.
You can also use a third party app called Open Camera which gives you a bit of manual control for recording videos, it is available for free from Playstore you can install on your phone and play with it to know how it works.
Try not using the Zoom feature
Smartphones have digital zones, at least the ones which have single camera setup if this is the case with your smartphone, try capturing the video without using the digital zone because it will result in loss of quality of the video.
You can try capturing the video close to the subject, this way you will be able to retain the quality.
Shooting in proper light conditions
Even though smartphones have come a long way in providing good photography low light conditions, the same cannot be said for videos.
If you are shooting indoors make sure you have proper lighting, in the lighting should always fall on the subject rather than falling on the camera.
And it is better to shoot videos in natural light, which will help you get the best quality video.
Proper framing of the video
This one is a bit tricky but you will get a hold of it by practice, proper framing means, making the subject up here within the frame throughout the video. Small things like proper alignment of the scene, placing the subject in the camera can improve the quality of video drastically.
Give your videos a bit of motion
You may have noticed how the camera moves in the movies if you haven’t, you will now after reading this article. Notice how the scene becomes interesting when the camera keeps moving.
You can do a similar thing while shooting videos from your mobile if there is no particular action going on anywhere recording seems like market mountains etc, you can Pan your camera from bottom to, top, or from right to left, just give it a simple smooth pan.
Shoot stabilized videos from your smartphone
If you want a flagship smartphone, chances are that your smartphone has got optical image stabilization (OIS) which means there are tiny Motors installed in the camera that helps it take smoother videos by eliminating small jerks and shocks.
Even if the optical image stabilization is not available on your phone, few Smartphone manufacturers have something called electronic image stabilization (EIS) which can also be useful in taking stable shots.
The way IAS works is, it evaluates the entire frame and then cuts the corners of the frame to give a video that is a little bit stabilized, though you get a bit of zoomed video because of the corners getting cropped out.
If OIS or EIS is available in the or smartphone, and you know how to hold your smartphone sturdy, you can take some amazing shots from your mobile phone.
There are few smartphone gimbals also available in the market which or also helpful in recording stabilized videos.
One of such Gimble is, Smooth Q from Zhiyun, which is available for just about $100, but totally worth the investment.
Use an external microphone for high-quality audio
If you are shooting a video which also involves dialogues are subject to talk, make sure you use an external microphone to get Chrisp audio.
The funda is to make the microphone available as near as possible to the subject, the selection of a microphone will depend on the type of video you are trying to shoot.
The best microphone that might work in several conditions would be a Lapel Mic or collar mic.
The Boya M1 microphone is the one I use all the time, it’s cable is 20ft long which is quite enough if you want to record far away from the subject and still want his/her voice to be recorded in the video.
I’ve done a separate article talking about this Boya M1 Mic you can check it out here.
Lastly, keep a lot of patience
If you want to get out the best quality video then you should keep a lot of patience as well, if you want to record something in hurry you will always end up making mistakes.
So, in the end, my advice would be to plan everything ahead of shooting the video if you can. Your first video is definitely not going to be a Masterpiece, but I can assure that it will improve over time as you make more videos more often.
My YouTube channel plug in the end
I do have been making videos from last few years, and we have a tech YouTube channel, I tried to keep it alive by posting videos every now and then. I would recommend that you subscribe my channel. I shared quite a lot of useful stuff about the technology.
