Do you record videos at home? Would you like to improve their quality?
The audiovisual world is becoming more and more comprehensive and accessible to people. The gear needed for recording videos were difficult to access up until recently. Now, recording videos at home is a reality and it’s much easier!.
There are countless possibilities for creating videos, they have become one of the most popular ways of creating a presence online, of promoting products and services and increasing brand awareness. Today, videos are a communication tool that is used as a solution for many areas of knowledge.
Even though there are people who are more used to being in front of a camera, there are a few things that you can do to record better videos at home and also to edit your videos aiming to achieve better results and that’s what we’ll cover in this post!
Let’s see how to create videos at home and edit them correctly.
How to record videos at home
If you record your videos alone, the pre-production phase (when you prepare your gear to record) is as important as the production phase (when you actually record the video).
Pre-production is everything you do to organize the room where your video will be shot and to prepare your recording devices for recordings. Let’s see what you can do to shoot videos at home the best way possible:
Write a video script
The writing can be done online too, on your phone, on a notepad file or something like that. But you must worry about the script, especially if you will be speaking in your video. A script is a summary of what will be said that can be made with simplified notes to help you remember all you have to say. If you won’t be speaking, writing a script is a way of planning in advance all the parts of a video. You can also write down the entire step by step of the important points that will become the sequence of the story of your video. Then, you simply follow the script!
Check up your recording gear
You can use your smartphone’s camera, a DSLR or a Mirrorless Camera. Either way, the camera batteries must be fully charged to avoid sudden stops when you’re shooting the video. Also, make sure that the storage space of your camera’s memory card or internal memory is enough to store your video because lack of storage space can cut your video in the middle too. Also, put your phone on silent mode and turn off its notifications even if you don’t use its camera to avoid being interrupted when you’re recording.
You can also get Camera Accessories to improve your videos even more.
Prepare the scene of your video
For videos created at home, the scene is the room of your home where you will record. In other words, it’s what the camera will “see” when you’re recording. So, choose a room with a lot of light because a video produced in low light has a very bad final result and it’s a lot harder to edit.
You can record in a room that has a big window to make use of the sunlight during the day. Choose a space that won’t be facing the window in the parts of the day where the sunlight is stronger to avoid too much lighting, which is also hard to edit later. Also, avoid putting too many objects in the background of your video scene to don’t confuse your audience.
See our post How to Record Videos in Low Light Places to discover ways of improving the lighting of videos.
Never use the automatic settings of your camera. Also, pay attention to the preview of your video in the camera screen to avoid yellowish or bluish images, those issues can be corrected in the editing phase but it’s good to check out if your camera has the White Balance feature to correct those issues before you start recording.
If you want to get a blurry background for your videos like in movies or series, use a camera with a lens that has a large aperture, which is a feature of DSLRs and Mirrorless Cameras. Blurring the background of your video in the editing phase is possible but it’s not so easy, it will require a masking effect which can be a little tricky to create.
Set up the room to capture good audio
It’s really important to prepare the room where your video will be shot for capturing good audio quality. So, try to record in a very quiet place because all the external sounds like dogs barking, birds singing and cars passing on the street will be your video! Prefer to record during the night because there is less noise. Also, be careful with the echo and reverb of your voice: if necessary, apply audio isolation to your room. You can record a few test videos to check their audio quality.
See our post How Your Videos Can Get Better With an External Microphone to discover why that device can improve the audio quality of your videos a lot.
How to edit videos recorded at home
After you finish recording your video, it’s time to edit it! Let’s see what you can do to highly improve the quality of your videos with editing techniques.
Choose your video editing software
Every video editing software has the basic features you need. But it’s good to test which program is best for you. Also, it’s highly recommended that you use a computer to edit your videos instead of your smartphone because that gives a lot more creativity possibilities.
In case you have a Windows 10 computer, check our buying guides of the best video editing software for Windows 10:
- Movie Studio for Video Editing: The Complete Advantages Guide (good for beginning)
- VEGAS Pro for Video and Audio Editing: The Complete Advantages Guide (good for intermediate and advanced editing)
- VEGAS Post for Full Stack Production: The Complete Advantages Guide (good for creating special effects on videos that you’ve already edited)
Sync files if you used multiple devices to record
Your video may have been shot with more than one camera, and you may have recorded the audio with an external microphone or other device. If that’s the case you will have to synchronize (sync) the files. This can be easily done with a video editing software, just put the video and audio on the timeline in the software dashboard, select both and search for the Audio Synchronization tool/feature to complete the syncing.
After the syncing is complete, it’s important to verify if the audio/video are perfectly synced because sometimes there is a distance between the audio and the images in the video and everything gets out of context. There’s a free software called HandBrake that solves this syncing issue.
Improve your video with editing techniques
The first technique you can apply to your video is cutting unnecessary parts, such as very long pauses, breaths, pronunciation errors and everything you think isn’t good. To do that, you have to watch the entire video that you recorded (after it’s synced if needed) to find out the points that contain errors. Remember that the editing has rhythm, so if you’re producing a video for the Internet, it’s better than cutting all that’s unnecessary in your video to make its dynamic faster.
Editing also helps to communicate the video message to your audience. To do that, you can add text, images, video templates, illustrative video clips and even special effects to your main video. See our posts that show you where to download free media to use as extra content you in video productions:
Another thing you can do is work on the coloring of your video with Color Correction and Color Grading, features that every video editing software has. You can also adjust its brightness and its contrast and add saturation to make the colors more intense and vivid the details of the scene more evident.
And last but not least: add music and sound effects to your videos. Choose them well because it will influence the dynamics of your video. See our posts that show you where to download free music, free audio samples and free sound effects for videos:
Conclusion
Great! Now you know how to record videos at home, why you need a video script, how to check up your recording gear, how to prepare the scene of your video, how to set up the room to capture good audio, how to sync files if you used multiple devices to record and how improve your video with editing techniques! So don’t hesitate to put what you’ve learned into practice in your next video production!
You can also share your thoughts in the comments below!
