#107 - Higher Ed Videography 101 for In-House Teams: A Crash Course in Elevating Your Videos
With John Azoni, Podcast Host
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SHOW NOTES
In this solo episode, John breaks down the fundamental camera settings and workflow decisions that can immediately elevate your video quality—whether you're brand new to video or looking to refine your technical foundation as an in-house higher ed videographer.
Key takeaways:
The four critical camera settings: frame rate (shoot 24fps for cinematic look), aperture (lowest f-stop for background blur), shutter speed (set to 2x your frame rate), and ISO (keep as low as possible to avoid grain)
Why shooting in 4K but editing in 1080p gives you flexibility without unnecessary file sizes
The case for auto white balance in run-and-gun scenarios to avoid color correction nightmares
Why shooting in LOG color profiles often creates more problems than it solves for in-house teams
How to avoid the two biggest stabilization mistakes: micro-jitter from handheld shooting and overusing gimbal shots
Audio quality matters more than video quality—record directly into your camera and hide those lav mics
Think about workflow and asset management, not just the single video you're making right now
Connect with John:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnazoni
Email: john@unveild.tv
Website: https://unveild.tv
Newsletter: https://unveild.tv/newsletter
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(Done with AI so only about 95% accurate)
00;00;00;14 - 00;00;29;05
John Azoni
Well, this episode is really geared toward higher ed videographers. So if you're a marketing director, Mark, I'm leader of some sort. Feel free to keep listening. Might be interesting to you, especially in knowing how to lead decisions that affect the creative output anyway. But this episode is really geared towards in-house video teams that colleges and specifically videographers that weren't formally trained or haven't been in this industry for a long time.
00;00;29;05 - 00;00;50;29
John Azoni
They don't know the formal basics. Maybe you just picked up a camera or you're just kind of dabbling in it, or maybe, you know, a thing or two about video, but you're not really sure how to get that more cinematic look. This episode is for you. If you are a seasoned cinematographer, you've been doing this for a long time and you know the basics of camera settings and lighting and all that stuff.
00;00;51;02 - 00;01;08;11
John Azoni
You can probably skip this episode. We're not really going to tell you anything that you don't already know, but a lot of the videographers that I interact with have some room to grow in terms of those basics. And so this is for you, if that's you. All right. So let's start from the top. And so the first thing we want to address is camera settings.
00;01;08;11 - 00;01;27;08
John Azoni
So these are just fundamental things you have to know. Camera settings are one of your biggest levers. So probably the most impactful thing that you can change today to make your footage look more professional. And I'm going to walk you through the four settings that matter the most. They are frame rate, aperture, shutter speed and ISO, or some people say ISO.
00;01;27;20 - 00;01;52;01
John Azoni
So frame rate. So frame rate is how many individual images your camera captures per second. And it has a really massive effect on the overall feel of your footage. So not just the technical quality, but like the emotional quality too. So if you've ever watched a video and you thought this feels video like it feels like a news broadcast, or maybe like a soap opera or something, it just doesn't feel very cinematic.
00;01;52;08 - 00;02;23;03
John Azoni
It's most likely because it was filmed at 30 or 60 frames per second. There's nothing technically wrong with, say, 30 frames per second. It's clean, it's nice, but it has this hyper real quality that feels a little more like news broadcast footage than cinema. So if you're looking for that sort of more artsy look, you know that you see a lot of in longform videos on YouTube and things like that, then you're going to want to switch that down to 24 frames per second.
00;02;23;03 - 00;02;45;28
John Azoni
That's the standard for film and most high end television shows. So your I don't know, I'm just going to name some shows the Breaking Bad, Yellowstone, the Pit, all of that stuff that's filmed in 24. It's not filmed in 30. And that's the major reason outside of the lenses and the cameras and stuff that they use. But that's a big part of the reason why it looks the way it does.
00;02;46;13 - 00;03;08;10
John Azoni
So at 24 frames per second, each frame captures just the right amount of natural blur. As subjects move through the frame and your brain somehow interprets that as movie. I don't really know the science of it any deeper than that. And let me also preface the rest of this episode by saying I am really not a technical guy.
00;03;08;21 - 00;03;30;23
John Azoni
I don't know why stuff necessarily works the way it works. I don't know how it works. I don't know much about Bitrates bytes and, you know, individual pixel, this and that, but I can tell you what I do. The buttons that I press to get, the look that we get at unveils and to get that cinematic look that other, you know, DP's or cinematographers will get.
00;03;31;06 - 00;03;56;18
John Azoni
So don't expect a science lesson here. So some cameras will show you 23.98 or 23.976. That's fine. Just pick whatever's closest to 24 on your camera and most cameras. These days allow you to adjust the frame or even your iPhone. You can go in and adjust the frame rate to 24. Now there is a use case for 60 frames per second, and that's slow motion.
00;03;56;18 - 00;04;19;26
John Azoni
So if you're filming something, you know you're going to slow down in the edit. You know, like an athlete, like crossing the finish line or like confetti falling or a crowd like bursting into applause or something like that. You know, 60 frames per second is a good setting to switch over to because then when you slow it down in post, it's going to look smooth.
00;04;20;06 - 00;04;51;12
John Azoni
It's going to look really pretty. The difference is if you took 24 frames per second footage and then tried to slow that down, it's going to look real choppy. There's not enough frames for it to work with to stretch out. It's taking 24 frames and then having to stretch that out. And that's why you get that choppiness. But when it has more frames per second to work with, you get a smoother slow motion because it has more frames to, I don't know, latch on to or whatever.
00;04;52;03 - 00;05;14;24
John Azoni
So if you're shooting a standard interview or campus B-roll or, you know, that kind of thing, 24 frames per second, that's your target. So seriously, make that one change. Go check your camera settings after this episode. If you've been shooting in 30 frames per second without thinking about it, this one change alone will noticeably elevate your footage. Okay, let's talk about aperture.
00;05;15;04 - 00;05;33;07
John Azoni
Aperture controls. How wide open your lens is that little eye thing that kind of opens and closes. If you look down the lens of your camera and you turn the dial or whatever, and it kind of opens and closes, that's your aperture. It's how much light is being let in and it's measured in what are called f stops.
00;05;33;19 - 00;06;05;12
John Azoni
I've no idea what that means or how it works. That's just what they're called. And if you say f stops, you'll look really smart. And so it works like the pupil in your eye if you think about it. So if you walk into a dark room and your pupil dilates, it gets bigger too, let in more light. And then if you were to go straight from that and you like, crank open the shades in the room and let a bunch of sunlight in, or if you were to walk outside, your pupils are going to get smaller to let less light in so we don't overpower our brains with too much light.
00;06;05;20 - 00;06;43;00
John Azoni
So the aperture controls what's called your depth of field. So specifically, how much of your image is in focus? And here's the thing that trips people up is the lower the stop number, the wider open, that circle that's getting bigger and smaller, letting light in so the wider it is, the more light is being let in, the more blur you're going to get in the background and the brighter your image is going to look when you close the aperture down and go toward a higher number, you're letting less light in and you are getting more things in focus.
00;06;43;00 - 00;07;14;16
John Azoni
So there's going to be less of that background blur, a wide open aperture like F 1.8 or F 2.8 is what creates that really beautiful blurred background effect that you see in portrait photography or narrative film, or even if you go set your iPhone to portrait mode. I don't know anything about Android's equivalent settings, but if you set your iPhone to portrait mode, that's what it's trying to replicate, is that sort of blurred portrait background that happens when your aperture is set to the lowest possible number.
00;07;15;00 - 00;07;43;16
John Azoni
Your subject is sharp, but the background falls into this soft blur because you're narrowing the field of focus, you're narrowing how far behind or in front of your subject. Things are in focus and the whole thing has a sort of three dimensional cinematic quality for cheapest lenses, your widest aperture is usually around 3.5 or F four. For better lenses you're looking at F 2.8 or faster, whatever the lowest number that your lens allows.
00;07;43;16 - 00;08;08;13
John Azoni
That's where you want to be for interview style shooting to get that blur in the background. One thing to watch though, the wider your aperture. In other words, the smaller the number, the shallower your focus range, which means if your subject leans significantly forward or backward, away from the camera, they can drift out of focus. If you have your aperture set to a higher number, more stuff is going to be in focus.
00;08;08;26 - 00;08;35;10
John Azoni
So you have more room to play with there. They can, you know, go kind of lean forward, lean backwards and probably still maintain focus. The tradeoff is you're going to get less blur in the background. So if you were to film something like maybe like a dance performance where you don't really need the background to be out of focus necessarily, you're just trying to capture the action and you don't want to have to be adjusting focus constantly to follow the dancer.
00;08;35;10 - 00;08;58;09
John Azoni
That's like going forward and backward and changing their distance from the camera constantly. Then you're going to want to stop down, which is to a higher F stop. That's going to widen the field where things will stay in focus. And that's just a better option for you. That's just one lever that you can control to not be losing focus constantly.
00;08;59;03 - 00;09;22;00
John Azoni
Okay, let's talk about shutter speed. This one simple once you know the rule, it's just set your shutter speed to twice your frame rate. That's it. If you're shooting at 24 frames per second, set your shutter to 48 or 50. It might look like on your camera one slash 48 or one slash 50, whatever your camera offers closest to double your frame rate.
00;09;22;07 - 00;09;44;15
John Azoni
So if you're shooting at 60 frames per second, you would set your shutter to 120. Deviating from this in either direction creates problems too fast, too shutter speed in your footage looks kind of choppy and harsh, like a war movie or something too slow and you get unnatural motion blur. But where this gets tricky is outdoors in bright sunlight.
00;09;44;15 - 00;10;03;04
John Azoni
If you are keeping your aperture wide open for that blurred background look, then you're going to have to probably adjust your shutter speed and or your ISO, which we'll get to in a second because all that light has to go somewhere. And if you don't adjust your camera settings correctly, your image is going to be blown out to overexposed.
00;10;03;17 - 00;10;31;07
John Azoni
So you have to control those. It's called the exposure triangle, shutter speed, aperture and ISO. So those are the three levers that control exposure. So the professional solution when going outdoors is what's called a D filter or a neutral density filter, which is essentially like sunglasses for your lens. It cuts the amount of light coming in without affecting your aperture or shutter speed, and you can get any filters that fit your lens and you can screw them on.
00;10;31;07 - 00;10;51;01
John Azoni
Some cameras have built in and these, which is great. And so when you add those sunglasses now you can have your aperture wider, open, your shutter speed correctly set and your iso set accordingly to where you don't have to make big compromises by like cranking up your shutter speed and getting this really choppy look outdoors in order to have a blurry background.
00;10;51;17 - 00;11;13;11
John Azoni
If your camera does what's called shutter angle, worth typing into Google to see if your specific camera can accommodate shutter angle. That's the easiest way to do it because you set your shutter angle to 180 degrees and then it's just no matter what you set your frame rate to, it's always going to set your shutter speed to twice the frame rate and you don't have to think about it.
00;11;13;11 - 00;11;37;22
John Azoni
So that's how we have our camera set, just 180 shutter angle and then we don't have to think about it. All right, ISO ISO controls your camera sensor sensitivity to light, so a higher ISO means a brighter image, but it also introduces grain and noise. That sort of grainy, degraded look you see in low light footage. Your goal is to keep your ISO as low as possible while still getting a properly exposed image.
00;11;38;03 - 00;12;02;20
John Azoni
Every camera has what's called a native ISO, typically around 400 or 800 where it produces the cleanest image. Use that as your baseline research. You know, again, type it into Google to tell you the right settings, whatever for your specific camera and then only push the iso higher when you don't have enough light and know that you're making a tradeoff in image quality when you do that.
00;12;02;28 - 00;12;25;29
John Azoni
But it's to a point if you have a cheap camera, your ISO is probably more sensitive to being increased before it starts introducing grain. For most cameras, you can push it to probably like 3200 ISO and you'll be right. You know, you might have to add some like D noise annoying filter or something in the edit to accommodate to get some of that grain out of there.
00;12;25;29 - 00;12;40;19
John Azoni
But I wouldn't worry too much about just try not to shoot in the dark. Try to go into areas where you can turn the lights on and then you can have your ISO set properly. If you're indoors in a classroom, you're probably going to have your ISO at like 1200 or 1250 or something and you're probably going to be fine.
00;12;40;24 - 00;13;06;27
John Azoni
You're probably not going to have too much green, so you got some room. But the further you push that ISO generally up is where you're going to start to see green noticeable worth doing it test, you know, go into a dimly lit room or something and just record and just bump your ISO settings up, up, up, up, up and see what number you get to before you start seeing little grains.
00;13;07;06 - 00;13;30;04
John Azoni
Grainy little dots popping around. Okay, So together aperture, shutter speed and ISO form, what I mentioned is called the exposure triangle. They all interact with each other and learning to balance them is a skill that takes practice. Once you get it, it's just going to make sense. It's going to be muscle memory. But if you don't, if this is the first time you're hearing about the exposure triangle, go on YouTube and learn about it.
00;13;30;04 - 00;13;52;25
John Azoni
I've taught you a little bit about it in a super unscientific way, but I'm sure there are better teachers out there for you. But it's worth taking, you know, 30 minutes to an hour to really understand how they work together so that you know, how to control them properly. Okay, let's talk about resolution so quick note on resolution, shoot 4K if your camera supports it, but edit in a 1080p timeline.
00;13;52;25 - 00;14;19;11
John Azoni
So here's why that matters. When you shoot 4K and edit in 1080p, you've got extra room, you can zoom in, you can reframe your shots or stabilize some slightly shaky movement, you know, in post without losing image quality. It gives you flexibility going the other direction, shooting, say, in 720p or 1080 and trying to stretch that image into a 4K timeline causes pixelation.
00;14;19;11 - 00;14;45;10
John Azoni
It's like you're taking a smaller image and blowing it up just like in a photograph. Like if you took a really low res photograph and then tried to stretch it to be bigger, you're just going to lose quality. But if you took a big photograph and shrunk it down, you're increasing quality. You're condensing those pixels into a smaller space, providing more clarity and the eye, your eyes read that as higher resolution, higher quality so works the same way.
00;14;45;12 - 00;15;18;12
John Azoni
4K nice big image, shrink that down into a 1080p timeline because 1080p is still the standard. I mean, there's really not a whole lot of reasons to be exporting a video at 4K for most of what you're putting on YouTube and Instagram or your admissions website. The final deliverable doesn't need to be 4K. Those platforms compress the video anyways, so shooting 4K really is more about what you're giving yourself in the edit or what you're giving to the editor you're giving them room to play with.
00;15;18;18 - 00;15;45;09
John Azoni
They can adjust that image further, zooming in or out, or moving the image around within the frame without losing quality. It's really more like an input quality decision, not so much an output one. And then next, let's talk about white balance. So here's where I get some pushback from. You know, there's a lot of purists in the video crowd, especially the ones that kind of cut their teeth on traditional film sets.
00;15;45;18 - 00;16;21;03
John Azoni
Maybe you've gone to film school, learned the proper way to do everything manually, no shade to them. But I do a lot of things that traditional DPS stands for director of Photography. It's the same word as cinematographer. It's the same thing as a cinematographer. The person that's in charge of getting a quality image. A lot of DPS would scoff at the way I use video, but I do my settings in a way that that works for me and my team and keeps an image looking good in what's called running gun situations where you're moving fast.
00;16;21;16 - 00;16;42;14
John Azoni
Sometimes you could forget to change your white balance if you're on. Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is just set your white balance to auto the traditional purists. DPS would scoff at that. They would never be caught dead setting their white balance to auto and God bless them. I know a lot of dps tend to make things very complicated and it just doesn't need to be that way.
00;16;42;22 - 00;17;03;15
John Azoni
So your auto white balance will do a pretty good job in general. So if you have a camera, that will shift the white balance according to the environment that you're in and continually shift it as the lighting changes and it looks good to you when you look at it on your computer, then just use that, let it adjust for you, because what you don't want to do is go film outside.
00;17;03;24 - 00;17;28;24
John Azoni
That's one drastically different white balance setting, then going indoors where the orange is, where the light is maybe more orange. And if you forget to change your white balance going outdoors to indoors, then you're going to end up with super orange footage. That's very hard to correct. And then if you had just let the camera correct it for you and set your pride aside, then you would have a white balance.
00;17;28;24 - 00;17;49;19
John Azoni
That's pretty close. I think a lot of people like to do that in that setting manually because they have more control over the image and things like that. But you know, then you're fighting against your ADHD, forgetting to actually control the image. At least that would be me fighting against my legitimate ADHD. So set it to auto. That's fine, don't worry about it.
00;17;50;02 - 00;18;19;05
John Azoni
So anyways, white balance is how your camera interprets the color of light in your scene. Daylight is cool and more blue. Tungsten like indoor light is more orange like flights in the classroom. So like I said, for an in-house team that's maybe moving between environments or it's just you want one less thing to think about. Auto white balance is going to keep you out of trouble more than manual will if you're going to be in a really controlled environment and you really want to dial in your white balance, that's great.
00;18;19;16 - 00;18;41;03
John Azoni
That's a great decision. But one important note, keep everything else in manual aperture shutter speed ISO. You don't want the camera picking those for you because the camera doesn't know the look that you're going for. If you put your camera in full auto mode, it's going to make creative decisions that you don't want. It'll crank you shutter, speed up in bright light and ruin your sort of cinematic, blurry background Look.
00;18;41;03 - 00;19;04;08
John Azoni
It'll jack your iso up in the dark room to a point where it's properly exposed, but it's going to be introducing a ton of noise that you don't want. Auto mode really just kind of treats your camera like a point and shoot camera sort of thing. Manual mode is more what professional videographers or filmmakers are doing and using For those reasons that I mentioned, White Balance is the one exception.
00;19;04;17 - 00;19;20;16
John Azoni
As long as you get an image that you're happy with in auto white balance, there are some cameras that where it's like you put it in the auto white balance and it comes out really pink or like too blue or something like that. And if that's the case, then, you know, use your judgment. But I'm just giving you permission to use auto white balance as all I'm trying to say.
00;19;21;23 - 00;20;04;29
John Azoni
All right. And so here we get into some more opinionated stuff. This next section I want to talk about the log debate and why I come down where I do. So setting your camera's color profile to log versus just picking a color profile that looks ready to go is properly saturated, properly contrast. Okay. So if you have a professional level mirrorless camera or not mirrorless camera or whatever, just a professional level video camera, like a Sony A7 or a canon, our series or a Blackmagic or a Fujifilm or something, something whatever, chances are it has the ability to shoot in what's called a log color profile.
00;20;04;29 - 00;20;38;06
John Azoni
Log footage is intentionally flat and desaturated. It looks washed out, it looks really lifeless straight out of the camera. And the idea there is that by capturing a flatter image, you're retaining more information in the highlights and shadows, which is called dynamic range, you retaining more dynamic range so that when you go to correct the color of your and the exposure in post-production, you have more room to play with before the image just kind of starts breaking down by because you're pushing it too far.
00;20;38;06 - 00;21;01;21
John Azoni
The filmmaking world will tell you always shooting lag and it's the professional way. It gives you maximum flexibility. It's just the default thing that any outsourced video partner is going to shoot in. They would be surprised for you to say, Don't shoot in log. But here's my take For most in-house higher ed teams, shooting log creates more problems than it solves.
00;21;01;21 - 00;21;23;24
John Azoni
And first is the workflow problem. So log footage needs to be color graded before it looks usable. And that's a specialized skill. It takes time. If you're a one person team or a two person team managing a high volume of content, adding in a detailed color grading step to every single video that you have to output is a real time suck.
00;21;24;05 - 00;21;51;13
John Azoni
And maybe you're not very comfortable as a colorist. Second, the asset library problem and this connects to something I talk about a lot in the show, is making sure your content is actually usable by everyone who might need it. So if you're admissions counselor or your social media team goes into your shared drive and downloads a clip to use, they're going to download a flat gray washed out footage that looks like that doesn't look finished.
00;21;51;25 - 00;22;20;14
John Azoni
It's not usable If you shot it in logs, they're especially not going to know how to fix it. You've created a file now that's only half usable. And then third, I'll just say this plainly that if you're lighting things correctly and exposing correctly, you don't need log to get great results. I've shot entire documentary projects with a color profile that has the correct color settings all baked in already to the clip without having to mess with them in post and had people go, Wow, like who did the colored rating on that?
00;22;20;14 - 00;22;39;08
John Azoni
That's amazing. And, you know, it's like the answer is nobody. That's just how it came out of the camera because I just, you know, I didn't do anything fancy. It's just when you expose the camera correctly and you have the right lighting in the right white balance and stuff like that, the advantages that logging gives you are kind of out the window.
00;22;39;21 - 00;23;07;07
John Azoni
So if your fundamentals are solid, you can stand to just set your camera to a color profile that looks good to your eye and looks finished. If you set it to log, that's fine too. You're just going to add a major step in your workflow because you have to process that. And then that footage is not really usable across campus to other people who don't know what to do with log footage like that, or worse, they're going to just think it's finished and publish that to Instagram.
00;23;07;07 - 00;23;46;25
John Azoni
I've seen that happen before where people that you see, you know, you see marketing teams posting videos with log footage not processed and it's like this really washed out. It doesn't look right. And it's because they probably just thought that's how it's supposed to look. It's not supposed to look like that. So my recommendation in favor of keeping things simple for your in-house team and creating a workflow that works easily and seamlessly with other departments, my recommendation is just pick a color profile that looks good to you, bake it in focus your energy on getting the lighting and exposure right in camera rather than trying to optimize for the most dynamic range and the most
00;23;46;25 - 00;24;08;22
John Azoni
ability to mess with the color in the editing process. Just save the log workflow for when maybe you're doing a high end production like a commercial or something that really genuinely warrants the extra process. Like the stakes are higher than logs. Probably good solution then. Okay, this next segment I want to talk about stabilization, what it should and shouldn't look like.
00;24;08;22 - 00;24;32;28
John Azoni
So I see two opposite mistakes being made here. The first mistake is unstable, ized handheld footage. Specifically, it's footage that has what's called micro jitter. It's what happens when you're zoomed in and you're trying to handhold the camera without any, you know, internal stabilization or without a tripod or something like that. And the zoom just amplifies every tiny tremor in your hands.
00;24;33;07 - 00;25;12;20
John Azoni
And what you get is this nasty, like high frequency jittering that doesn't look artsy, It doesn't look like that handheld sort of filmmaking. Look, it looks like you just had too much coffee or something. It's distracting. It's not a good look. So if your camera doesn't have internal optical stabilization, every camera manufacturer calls it something different. So again, hey, I that stuff and put in your camera model and ask if it will do internal stabilization and how to access those settings or if you're on a lens that doesn't have stabilization, get on a tripod or a monopod If you need a little more quick mobility, the footage is just going to be a lot more
00;25;12;20 - 00;25;31;22
John Azoni
watchable. But if you have an iPhone, for instance, and you can film someone like you can walk around and film someone walking or whatever, that's because the iPhone has really good internal stabilization. It's processing that footage to get all that shake out of there. You can't just do that on a normal camera that doesn't have stabilization. And then here's the second mistake.
00;25;32;03 - 00;25;58;11
John Azoni
This one's more of a style problem than a technical problem. Once people get their hands on a gimbal, which is like electronic, you know, you see those, it's like a stick. And then there's the camera sitting on top. It's electronically stabilized. So the electronics are optimized to compensate for any shakes. And you get this super smooth look. Once people get their hands on a gimbal for the first time, everything becomes akimbo footage.
00;25;58;11 - 00;26;32;25
John Azoni
And that is annoying. I think the gimbal for everything approach where every single shot is floating around through space and you're circling around people and every shot is trying to be this really like Michael Bay, you know, choreographed thing. It just gets to be too much. And it just one of those things that screams like, we just bought a new toy and for the kind of content that in-house higher ed teams are typically producing, like student stories like campus culture content admissions, focused content, internal content, it's just not really necessary.
00;26;33;04 - 00;27;02;23
John Azoni
The camera should serve the story most of the time for this kind of content. That means a clean, locked off or maybe subtly handheld shot that keeps the viewer's attention on the person talking and not tries to spice things up with unnecessary production. Sometimes you want a good, sweeping gimbal shot. You know, I'm not anti gimbal, You know, if you're filming as a student event or something, you want a wide shot and you want to just like walk through the crowd or like, you know, pan around, you know, a group of people or something like that.
00;27;02;28 - 00;27;21;03
John Azoni
Yeah, like in moderation. Cool. But like, not everything needs to having gimbal. Okay, next, I want to talk about lighting. I'm not really going to go into too deep into lighting theory here. It can be its own episode if you're interested. Go look it up on YouTube. How to light an interview or how to light a B-roll scene or something like that.
00;27;21;13 - 00;27;58;23
John Azoni
But I want to give you one actionable recommendation, one conceptual principle. So the principle you want soft light. You don't want hard light. In most cases, hard light comes from a small, bare direct source, like a bare bulb or direct sunlight that doesn't have any softener material modifying the light and it creates harsh shadows, it creates unflattering textures and generally just like a clinical sort of aggressive look, soft light is diffused, it's more spread out and it wraps around your subject, softening those shadows.
00;27;58;23 - 00;28;38;07
John Azoni
Think of it as the difference between like harsh noon sunlight and an overcast light on a cloudy day. So soft light is flattering, it's cinematic. It just looks better on people. Window Light is the most accessible source of beautiful soft light. Assuming you don't have direct sunlight blast thing through the window. So for most teams, if you don't have a bunch of external lights just by a window, have the window be off to the side so that it's lighting the face a little more from the side, not completely straight on, you know, if the windows behind the camera and it's just casting light all on the front of people's face, that's going to create really
00;28;38;07 - 00;28;57;26
John Azoni
flat lighting. It's very uninteresting. So just angle them a little bit so that the window light's coming from the side a little bit or at an angle and you'll have natural soft light that looks good when you're ready to invest in a dedicated light. The aperture 300 x with a large soft box like an umbrella soft box is a great choice.
00;28;57;26 - 00;29;20;06
John Azoni
The great workhorse 300 X is a LED light that lets you shift the color temperature to match whatever ambient light you're working with, which is incredibly practical in mixed lighting environments like a college. So pair it with a soft box to diffuse the output and it will be a workhorse for years. It's not cheap, but it's lasting, you know, compared to the value you'll get from it.
00;29;20;06 - 00;29;41;18
John Azoni
It's not that expensive. It's worth every dollar in your budget. So don't cheap out on the lights because, you know, investing in good quality lights is going to serve you for years to come. Next segment I want to talk about is audio. So if I had to rank the things that make the biggest difference between amateur and professional looking content, audio might actually be first, not even video quality.
00;29;41;18 - 00;30;10;26
John Azoni
Audio quality bad audio makes people stop watching like full stop. Let's assume you have a good microphone and you are using external audio tools like a microphone. You should always never just rely on the built in camera audio. It's going to sound like garbage. Just don't do it. So getting into a few opinions of mine that I think are geared towards a higher ed workflow, number one would be record audio directly into your camera.
00;30;10;26 - 00;30;31;25
John Azoni
And I know there's a school of thought here that says you should record to a separate audio recorder for better quality and technically in a controlled professional production. That is mostly true, but for in-house teams, you know, recording to a separate device creates a sinking problem in post. It creates now an asset management problem when others need to access the footage.
00;30;32;07 - 00;30;52;24
John Azoni
And it creates a workflow complication that a lot of in-house teams just don't have the bandwidth or the knowledge to manage consistently. When you separate the video from the audio, you have to sync that up in post. So any time you're setting yourself up to have a clip that's only half ready to be used, that's trouble. It's more work for you in post.
00;30;52;24 - 00;31;12;21
John Azoni
Unless you're doing lower volume of stuff, but it's also creating problems for anyone else that wants to access that footage unless you're processing it first to sync up the audio before anyone else gets access to it. Because normal people do not understand the concept of syncing audio to video, they won't know what to do with it. So grab a video clip.
00;31;12;22 - 00;31;37;15
John Azoni
The good audio is somewhere on a hard drive. Somewhere. They'll just grab the video clip thinking it's a complete clip and they'll run with it and it's got crappy audio. So keep it simple. Try to bake the audio into the file by plugging it directly into your camera and then managing your audio level. So clipping, that's where audio peaks and where it gets that distortion that it's a really common and fixable audio problem.
00;31;37;15 - 00;32;10;24
John Azoni
So most cameras show you an audio meter, keep your levels in the safe zone. Green If you're getting into the red zone or completely topping out that meter, that's bad. You're going to get clipped audio. It's going to sound like crap and it's going to be impossible to fix. So don't just set it and forget it. Glance at that audio meter periodically, especially if your subject is a loud talker or if they're prone to laughing because that's when your audio if someone laughs, all of a sudden, you know your audio is going to peak, it's going to clip, it's going to be distorted if you don't have your audio settings to a point that can
00;32;10;24 - 00;32;34;03
John Azoni
absorb that peak in volume. And then another thing that I see a lot from in-house teams, if you have this road microphone, like for social media or whatever, the big black boxes and they put the black box on people's shirt and show it on the camera, like no attempt to hide it, I can't stand that. It's usually a road mic or a DJI or something like that.
00;32;34;03 - 00;32;56;24
John Azoni
It's like a black box clipped to the collar or a lapel. It's so distracting the whole time. It looks so unnatural, unprofessional. It makes the video just not feel right. It just doesn't look right. So if you're doing like a man on the street video where someone's like holding up a small, you know, microphone up to the subject or something and has that sort of intentionally janky look, that's fine.
00;32;56;24 - 00;33;16;11
John Azoni
That's a stylistic choice that reads as intentional. But for a produced piece, like a student story or faculty profile, where you don't have a host that's holding a mic up to someone, don't put a big black box on their shirt. There are clean, discreet audio solutions that won't create a visual distraction. If you're not sure what those are, you can reach out to me.
00;33;16;11 - 00;33;35;02
John Azoni
I'm happy to point you in the right direction, but I'll just drop a few terms. Laugh. Mike, you know, you can take that same road, Mike, and just attach a laugh, a livelier microphone that has the wire on it and attach that to their shirt and then hide the box. And then the other pet peeve when you do that is don't show the cord.
00;33;35;02 - 00;33;55;23
John Azoni
Don't let the cord just hang down in front of their shirt. You got to tuck that into their clothes, put it underneath their sweater, have them do it or whatever, but don't have it. Just a cord hanging down that looks equally as garbage or get a shotgun. Mike Shotgun. Mike's going to plug it know into your camera and it's going to be out of the frame, but it's going to be capturing quality audio.
00;33;56;11 - 00;34;19;26
John Azoni
Okay, So what I've just presented in this is intended to get more amateur in house videographers kind of up to speed on what good looks like and what's acceptable and not acceptable to achieve good. What can you automate or streamline versus what you should do highly manually and really know what buttons to press there? So in conclusion, these are a lot of things to worry about.
00;34;19;26 - 00;34;39;17
John Azoni
It takes some practice, but if you're going for a professional video, look, this is the stuff that you just have to learn to control and all of these things work together not only for the look of the video you're filming, but for the entire system of asset management where other departments and people who aren't videographers need to access this footage and repurpose it.
00;34;40;00 - 00;35;06;17
John Azoni
The decisions you make when viewed through a systems lens are going to be different than an individual camera operator, filmmaker, DP or something would be making to make that one specific video look the best it possibly can. So my theory is you want to set your footage up to be repurposed by people other than you, because that's the thing that's going to benefit everybody.
00;35;06;17 - 00;35;31;03
John Azoni
It's going to impact the video work. It's going to increase enrollments. It's going to help you keep your job. So you don't want to be working in a silo where only you know where to find video clips and how to process them to completion. So don't do that. Bust down that silo, make your video assets work for everybody and set everybody up to make use of the stuff that you're doing.
00;35;31;03 - 00;35;49;07
John Azoni
So it just doesn't just sit on a hard drive. So one thing I want to leave you with, assuming your hired videographer listening to this, one of the big bottlenecks teams face is editing backlog. And we really didn't talk about anything editing related in this episode. But if you're working in-house, chances are you have projects piling up and not enough time to prioritize all of them.
00;35;49;17 - 00;36;16;17
John Azoni
And so if that's the case, reach out to me because we have a bunch of really great editors ready to take on projects so that you can focus on what's louder on your plate. So email me at John at unveiled Dot TV that's Joey and unveiled is spelled you and VII old Dot TV and we can talk about it and what it would look like to outsource some of the editing for the projects on your plate would love to connect with you if you have any questions too, about anything I've talked about in this episode.
00;36;16;17 - 00;36;21;27
John Azoni
Also, feel free to email me. I'm happy to shoot the breeze with you about video gear, video theory, whatever.
