Film Techniques and skills-- camera settings

As a filmmaker, especially at the university study stage, it's necessary to grasp of basic filming making techniques and skills to produce a piece of work with low budget and limited crew . Here are some sum ups of my reading this week.

1. About frame rate: Although the difference can hardly be observed by eyes when broadcasting in defferent video format, frame rate is considered as a important figue to produce a ' professional' video footage. Nowadays most video recorders and DSLRs offer us choices of frame rates in different filmming conditions, 24p, is normally the best for films. Compare to the PAL( 25fps--TV programme standards for most of the countries), this rate gives a relatively ' slow ', story telling atmosphere. To film sports games or other scenarios with fast moving items, high frame rate is needed to aviod motion blur or stroboflash.

2.About light: a good lighting set can make a distinct improvement in regard of picture quality, color, contrast and saturation . Last 3 weeks we took lighting tutorial sessions in Brodway cinema about indoor lighting set thory and practice of portrait and environments. With the right direction and color temperature of the lights ( 5500k for daylight and 3100k for artificial light) we can produce video footages which match the condition we need.

If film in outdoor environment, camera setting can be the key of success. ND filter must be shut down, turn the F stops in the scale of F1.2--F5.6， Shutter speed 1/30s--1/50s, turn picture style to no contrast and turn up the ISO ( normally not higher than 1600 otherwise the picture quality will be low and full of noises). Proper filmming locations  with streetlights or billboard light can benefit to it as well. If nessecary, Turn up the 'Gain' figure on video camera. The color and lighting can be modified via 'color correction' and 'color granted' funtion of editing softwares to suit the needs.

3. About microphones when filming: Different types of microphones is required in different filming situation. The internal mic in cameras is handy but not ideal for quality because the noise of camera will be recorded at the same time. Thus, we need external mics or seperate sound recorder when filming.