We’ll get into some best practices for composition and framing in the next section, but for now let’s get the camera set up to give you the best possible results.

Your cell phone or iPad will provide a good quality image for this project. If you have other camera equipment available such as a camcorder or a DSLR and know how to use it, fantastic! As there are thousands of different cameras on the market we can’t possibly tell you the best settings or options for your particular camera. You’ll need to refer to your camera manual for specific information for your make and model. This guide will focus on cell phone cameras and tablets, as they are most accessible and easy for everyone to use. We’ll try and give you some practical tips that will be relevant for all cameras to help you get great video results.

“the best camera you have is the one you have on you.”

Technical Considerations

The Lens

The camera lens is one of the most important considerations when it comes to your camera. There are a few things you can do to ensure the lens is getting the best results for you.

1. Typically the rear facing camera lens produces a better quality image. Often it has a higher resolution sensor and can even be better quality glass than the front facing camera.
2. Clean your lens. This is an often overlooked tip that makes a world of difference. Give your lens a quick wipe with a lens cleaning cloth before you shoot to make sure all the smudges and finger prints are removed.
3. Focal Length. Some cameras have a wide, normal, and telephoto optical lens available. Choose the lens that best suits the environment you’re in, but it is NOT recommended to use any digital zoom as it crops in on your overall resolution and degrades the image quality.
4. Lens adapters. If your camera does not have multiple lenses and you need to get a little wider or a little closer, there are lens adapter kits available in the marketplace.

File Management

Your camera likely has a variety of video quality options to choose from in your Settings menu. Remember, the higher the quality, the more storage you’ll need. There are two settings that will determine your file size, FRAME RATE and RESOLUTION.

Frame Rate refers to how many frames per second your video will be shot. 30 frames per second (FPS) is a standard video frame rate. If you’re shooting in 120fps (or faster) you are shooting in slow motion. The more FPS you shoot, the larger your files will be.

Resolution refers to how many pixels wide by how many pixels high your camera is capturing. The more pixels (information) it captures the higher the quality of the image AND the larger the file size.

• A 1080p setting will give you a High Definition image at 1920×1080 pixels. This is suitable for most HiDef televisions and computer monitors to go full screen with good quality.
• A 4K setting will give you an Ultra-High Definition image at 3840×2160. This is only needed if you plan on distributing your video specifically for full screen display on 4K televisions.

High quality video resolutions can also be useful if you plan on cropping in on the image in post-production, but typically is not necessary for social media or web-based videos that will only be viewed in media players on part of a screen.

A recommended setting for most videos would be 1080p at 30 fps. If you plan on having a lot of fast action in your video, shooting at 60fps is also an acceptable standard.

Here is an example of file sizes for various video settings.

Be sure you have cleared enough space on your device’s internal storage to accommodate all the shooting you need to do that day.

Battery

Battery life can be an inhibiting factor as you can’t change out the battery easily on a phone half way through a shoot. Two solutions for this issue are as follows:

1. Ensure you have a full battery when you start shooting.
2. Carry a rechargeable external power pack that you can plug into while you shoot to increase the battery life of your device.

Other Settings

Notifications

Be sure to put your phone in Airplane Mode during filming to avoid getting a phone call, buzzes, or other notifications that will ruin your takes.

Exposure and White Balance

Some cameras will allow you manually set the exposure and colour balance. Manually setting these on your camera will ensure they don’t change throughout a shot. A wandering exposure due to the sun dipping behind a cloud can cause for distracting and undesirable adjustments while shooting. Check your camera manual or online support to see how to manually adjust these settings.

• Manual exposure will LOCK the exposure so that the camera does not try and adjust how bright things are during filming.
• Manual white balance will LOCK how the camera sees “white”. Lamp light tends to be more orange in tone than it’s blueish daylight counterpart. Finding the balance between these is important especially when editing to ensure one shot doesn’t look more orange than the next one.

If your camera does not allow you to make manual adjustments with the native camera app you may consider downloading a 3rd party app that allows you to make more adjustments to your camera settings. The Blackmagic Camera app from Blackmagic Design Inc. is an excellent manual camera app that allows you to take total control of your camera settings and it’s FREE, but only available for iPhone or iPad devices. Filmic Pro is another excellent manual camera app that is available for both Apple and Android products.