What is the secret to good videos?

[roknjohn]

I thought that I read a post on here somewhere about how to best video your light show, but I can't seem to find it. What the secret.

It is hard to see the colors on mine,and very grainy. Can Holdman send his video crew to my house?

[Grant_VK5GR]

roknjohn wrote:

I thought that I read a post on here somewhere about how to best video your light show, but I can't seem to find it. What's the secret?

What I have found is that you need to put the camera into full manual as much as you can. Manual focus, manual exposure, manual white balance, manual shutter speed etc. Then, set the focus and exposure with your lights full on - doing so you should be aiming to reduce the exposure until the colours come through - this should also reduce the amount of grain in the picture. Then lock the camera on a tripod and go and run the show.

I did this for my films using both a Sony HDV Handycam and also my DSLR. It was the only way I found to get the handycam to produce good results, and repeating all of these tricks made the DSLR produce really great quality pictures (you can see an example here:

The cameras when using their automatic modes don't seem to understand that they should just wait for the light - instead they go hunting for it - and hence automatically put in too much gain and focus hunt on darker parts of the sequence.

Hope that helps. Others may have further tips and ultimately every camera is slightly different, however this is what I have found to work on a couple of my cameras now.

[wallleyes]

Here`s some tips from the photo forums of fishing minnesota.com

http://www.hotspotoutdoors.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/2100787/Shooting_Holiday_Lights_resurr#Post2100787