Hi, I’m Dave Kaminski of Web Video University, and Shama asked if I could share some web video tips with the viewers of Shama.tv and I was more than happy to help, so here we are. But before we can get into a lot of the tips, we have to make our videos first. So in this video, I’m going to cover some of the nuts and bolts behind making a video like this one.

Cameras are first, and what you need to know about cameras is that virtually any camera you buy these days will produce good enough video for the web. Now the more money you spend on a camera, the better image quality you’re going to get. For example, a $100 Flip camera will give you good enough video for the web, but a $1,000 camera will give you significantly better image quality, so with cameras, it’s really a matter of how important image quality is to you.

Now one of the choices you’ll have to make is Standard Definition or High Definition. This video here was shot in Standard Definition, but High Definition is becoming more common on the web and honestly, there’s not any real advantage or disadvantage between them. However, to work with High Definition video, you do need a lot of computer horsepower, and with High Definition, it can take up to five times longer to prepare a video for the web than the same video would take in Standard Definition.

Now quality is becoming more and more important with web video as the lines between TV and web video continue to blur and two ways that you can instantly improve the quality of any web video is through lighting and audio. With lighting, you want as much light as you can get in your videos. This will really help your camera do the job that it’s been designed to do and with web video, I recommend using soft light. Soft light is clean, even lighting that creates no shadows. An overcast day is soft light. A bright sunny day is hard light.

Now, a cheap way to get soft light for videos is to use party lanterns or China balls. If you’re shooting a lot of videos, it’s best to invest in a soft box light kit. These kits do cost several hundred dollars, but you’ll always have great portable lighting that you can rely on for years and years.

To improve audio, you’ll ideally have a camera with an external microphone jack. Then you’ll use that jack with a Lavalier microphone that clips to your shirt. This will give you significantly better audio than you’ll get from your camera’s built-in microphone. For example, I’m using a Lavalier microphone right now. Shama uses one in her videos, too. And this is what the audio sounds like using only my camera’s built-in microphone.

Finally, we have video editing software. This is the software that allows us to piece our videos together so we can put them on the web. Now if you’re a Windows user, I recommend you use a product called Sony Vegas, and if you’re a Mac user, I recommend a product called Final Cut Express. Why these two products in particular? Well, it’s because with both, you can start out with inexpensive versions and as your skills increase, you can upgrade to professional versions and when you do, you don’t have to relearn the software. Everything stays the same. With nearly all other packages out there, particularly the inexpensive ones, that’s not always the case, and what will happen is that sooner or later you’ll find yourself wanting to do something with web video that simply can’t be done with these inexpensive packages. Then there will be nothing you can upgrade to, and then you’ll be forced to buy software like Final Cut or Sony Vegas where you’ll have to relearn everything and do it all over again. And trust me; you don’t want to have that happen.

So that is going to wrap up this video on the nuts and bolts of web video. In the next lesson, I’m going to cover the Do’s and Don’ts of web video. I’ll talk to you then.