diy lighting?

metalboy458

New member
im new to do videos, and just wanted to know if there was a way i could make somting for lighting? its not going to be for anything big. just some videos to be put on youtube for this new band im putting together. just seems to be the thing to do these days. so the videos are mostly going to be for updates and my singer and my playing some of our songs and doing covers on acoustics. so super simple stuff, i just want them to look as good as i can get.

as far as video goes, for now we are just going to use cameras from either one of our macbooks and/or ipad/iphone. but we are looking into buying a camera so any suggestions would be great. i was looking into the zoom q2hd hand held camera/audio recorder. it seems cool and perfect to just set up on my desk.

any suggestions or links or anything would be very much appreciated.
thanks in advance.
 
Honestly, saying, "I want to get into video using webcams and cellphones," is a bit like saying, "I want to score a symphony using kazoos and, BTW, I don't know anything about symphonies, scoring or kazoos." As with home recording, there are plenty of good tools available that will let you approach professional quality, but they tend to be on the expensive side and, more to the point, require extensive knowledge and experience to produce a good result. You need to understand technical concepts like depth-of-field, focal length, composition, color temperature, gamma, black-level and a host of other things. You won't produce anything remotely decent with an iPhone or Macbook camera, nor will you get anything good from a Zoom q2h. For starters, Google the difference between cmos and ccd sensors and, while you're at it, Google sensor size, density and video compression artifacts. As for DIY lighting, halogen work lights of the sort you can get a home improvement stores can work well, but only if you understand color temperature, light placement and color timing.

I'm sorry, but it's impossible to give a tutorial on video production in response to a single post. I suggest you do what many of us have done here on HR for audio production: find a good video website (I'd recommend dvinfo) spend a lot of time reading it, ask pertinent, specific questions, and only THEN, once you've got an idea of the lay of the land, start shooting video.
 
If you're going for staged, semi-professional-looking videos, PT is right that you'll get much better mileage out of better equipment.

If you're going for passable, home bootleg-looking video, then the important thing to remember is that you need a lot more light for the camera than you do to see. Also, the more diffuse, the better it will generally be. (Although, big, bright spots pointing from the same direction as the camera will get you decent results too)
 
cool thanks guys. lol i like that analogy PT. but yeah ill probably end up spending a couple weeks researching all thte stuff you listed PT.
 
There are tons of DIY video project boards out there. Go looking.

For cheap DIY video lights you can use $10 clamp lights from DIY stores with 5000k daylight CFL bulbs (I use 3 of them in my setup).

Guerrilla video is another whole education like learning recording.
You need to find solutions for common filming problems but there are tons of people doing basement film projects out there.
iPhones can do quite well if you work with them.

Go have fun.
 
Personally, I say for low-budget go with fluorescent lighting. Halogens are good, fairly cheap, but 48" fluorescents can do a better job flooding with 4 double units. You'll have to spend SOME money. And you'll have to learn how to white balance your cameras. May not be able to do that with your iPhone.

If you want even cheaper, go with sunlight. It's still free; for the next few years at least. I'm sure someone will figure out how to tax the sun and the wind.

All the other things everyone mentioned are great tips. But the one big necessary item left out is your imagination. If you don't have the right equipment then use your imagination to create video that takes advantage of your lack of resources. A few years ago, somebody through up a video of his kids jumping on a trampoline. Weird and different angles and it worked.
 
You could go for Studio lights to any website like cinecity....I have purchased 2000 studio lights from there.....They work good...
 
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