There are lots of way to get great video, and it's important to remember that what you collect is way more important than how you are collecting it. That said, post-production is a garbage-in/garbage-out process.” In this article I will be going over a few tips that can help turn your video trash into video treasure.
There are many techniques and tools you can add to your video arsenal, however these techniques are going to be done during the capture process. Using them will have consequences in your editing because these techniques will affect the raw footage. If done incorrectly they may render your footage unusable. So a word of warning: Don't try these techniques without experimenting with them and getting a good handle on them first.
Now you may be asking, with so many options in the post-production process, why would I want to apply effects “in-camera”? Some of these effects can't be replicated in post and some of them actually enhance your post-production process. However, the main reason you would want to do these “in-camera” is because if you do it correctly, you really will get the most out of your camera. I challenge you to learn more about your gear than the casual user and find ways to challenge yourself.
There are really two major ways you can affect the way you capture footage—you can affect time and affect color.
Time
Time is a wonderful tool; it's a tough one to master, but a powerful one to use. There are a couple of things you need to keep in mind when working with time; the first one is you can affect it in a few places: in shooting, editing, and playback. Time, for our purposes, is going to be measured in frame-rate, which is literally how many pictures there are per second in your video. Frame rate is measured in seconds and abbreviated FPS (frames per second). Usually 24 FPS is what people recognize as a cinematic look. This is one of the reasons over-the-air TV, at 60 FPS, looks so different from what you see in the theater. Literally there are 40% more pictures per second on TV than in the theater. This is one of the reasons your IMAG doesn't look anything like your favorite feature film, it's all about the speed.
Overcranking
The post-production process is a garbage-in-garbage-out process. That’s why camera technique is important.
So how is this information important to shooting? If you plan to use time to your advantage you need to know your playback rate. For example, if you know that you will be playing back a video at 30 FPS, if you shoot it and edit it at 60 FPS, the video is going to be playing back at half the speed for twice as long. This technique of shooting at one speed and playing back at another slower speed is referred to as overcranking. This comes from the early days of video when the cameras had a hand crank on them; in those days if you wanted to achieve this effect you actually cranked the handle faster.
You have probably seen a practical application of this before on music videos, though usually it's with a twist: the singers' movements seem slow and almost dreamy, like they are in slow motion, but the lip sync is fine. In that example you would achieve that look by playing the music back at two times faster and recording your talent lip-syncing to the faster music. Then in post you would stretch the footage over the actual audio track (by making the footage half as fast for twice as long) which will slow it down, but since it was shot twice as fast, the motions will be slow, but the lip-sync would be fine.
Slow motion
This is also a great way to get really smooth slow-motion effects. In most non-linear editors (NLE) it is possible to slow your footage down easily. But when done in an NLE it typically looks choppy because the NLE is artificially creating frames of video that don't exist. However, if you just shoot it at a higher frame rate than you edit at, your footage will automatically be slower.
Practical application for us in the church world would be a special effect, for example, at Easter this year our team made a video of the Easter bunny having a bad day. The whole video was shot and edited at 24 FPS; however, the last scene was the Easter bunny being chased by a dog, which was shot at 60 FPS. That one clip edited was edited to 24 FPS, so it was about one-third the speed of the rest of the footage, but very smooth looking, and since it's a “chase scene” the slow motion effect was appropriate and amazing.
Interval shooting
The last interesting thing you can do with time is interval recording. Some professional and prosumer video cameras have an interval record mode. Basically what interval record mode does is let you set up a shooting time and an interval between the shooting time. For example, you can set it to shoot one second at an interval of every 45 seconds; this allows you to shoot quick and easy time-lapse footage. Time lapse is one of those great styles that really enhances an overall production when done right, and there is not really a way to do it in post. This technique isn't exclusive to video cameras alone; it can also be accomplished on a DSLR, but it requires some specialty gear—mainly some type of control, called an intervalometer, tells the camera how long to open the shutter and how often. Once you have it programed it's just a matter of waiting. When you have enough pictures on your DSLR you can easily interpret each of them as one frame of video in your NLE, quick and easy time-lapse video. There are a lot of recipes for shooting time-lapse, different combinations of frame rates over time, and some basic Googling will get you the recipes so you can start cooking.
Deadlines are deadlines; if you don’t make them it doesn’t really matter how good it looks.
Color
One of the other things that you can dramatically affect in the capture process is color. Most cameras have some type of internal color correction, so it is usually not terribly difficult to go in and make the mid tones a little brighter and the blacks a little darker. There are a few reasons you may want your raw footage colored a certain way. The first is if you aren't going to have time to color grade it—let's face it, Sunday's coming and you may not have a day to spend color grading, so doing it in the camera can save a step in post. Although many people would argue the result, deadlines are deadlines. If you don't make them, it doesn't really matter how good it looks.
The second reason you may want to color your camera is if you know your camera well enough to compensate for how it shoots. It's not uncommon for video cameras to fail to capture dark enough shadows. If this is the case with your camera, there should be an easy way to change how your camera interprets black, and it should be a simple matter to go in and change it.
CineStyle
The last reason you would want to color in camera is to enhance how you color in post. Technicolor makes a great profile for the Canon EOS line called CinesStyle, which is a great reason to do in-camera color correcting. CineStyle is a color profile that increases the dynamic range of color captured. The footage itself ends up looking very drab, flat and just plain bad right out of the camera. Don't let that fool you, because it allows for a greater amount of information to be captured in the mid-tones and shadows. So once you get the footage into your NLE, you have a lot more freedom in how you want to grade your footage, because you have access to more color information. If you have a Canon DSLR, this is a great tool to spend some time experimenting with—once you get it figured out, you will be very pleased with the results.
These “in-camera” effects can be really powerful tools in your arsenal, but the real benefit comes from knowing your gear well enough to know how to implement these effects, and being creative enough to know why you would want to use them. That last part comes with experimentation, time, and a little common sense. Hopefully, these techniques will inspire you to find other ways you can affect the way you capture footage.
It's tough to get better at doing something if you aren't pushing yourself beyond what you think you are capable of. It's easy to always do something the same way and always get the same results, but it's awesome to be able to push the envelope. So I challenge you: learn the limits of what you know about capturing video, and then go beyond those, into uncharted waters of innovation.
