Good Video quality is what every creator wants but doesn’t come easy even with the most expensive camera on the market if you don’t have the right setting and accessories to compliment it. In this article, I will discuss some things you can do to improve your video quality with little to no expense. 

Now let us get started with the things:

1. Get yourself a Microphone

The first and most important thing for increasing your video quality is not something related to the video instead it is related to the AUDIO. It is very well known that a person will sit through your video if your video is bad but not if your audio is bad.

Therefore, the first step is to improve sound quality and to do that you need a microphone. Now I know some microphones will cost you upwards of 10K but there are other cheaper and even free alternatives too. 

If you would like to use the free option, you can use your phone as a mic.

If you are recording videos from your phone then you are already using it as a mic but feel like the audio is bad, it is because the phone is away from your mouth, try using another phone closer to your mouth to record audio and replace the audio in post. This is the cheaper way but remember this can only get you this far. To get really good quality audio you NEED to invest.

I would personally recommend using the BOYA M1 mic (I have been using this mic for more than 2 years now, you can look at any of my videos to see the microphone quality), it will cost you around 800-1000Rs (Amazon Link). I like this mic because it is one of the cheapest yet great quality microphone that you can purchase from amazon.

 

2. Try and find the best combination

Now the second step thing that you need to change is not a device or accessory instead, it is the settings that you are using to record the video. If you are using a phone to record videos, a piece of general advice would be to try to use the rear camera to record videos. I know recording videos using the rear camera isn’t very intuitive as you can’t see what you are doing, for that I recommend a small mirror that can stick to the back of your phone(Amazon Link). Also, there are some other things as well that you can try, check them out here (old phone photography video)

The actual advice here is to use Manual settings on your recording device. Many phones nowadays come with a pro mode in the default camera application.

if yours doesn’t have it you can download the open camera from Playstore/Appstore.

The settings you need to adjust are the F-stop value(Aperture), White Balance, and ISO value.

For those wondering about Frame rate and Shutter Speed, select the frame rate you like and set the shutter speed to double of framerate, and try to adjust it a bit to avoid flickering.

My recommendation is to use the following:

  • F-Stop –  Try to get the value to as low as possible with your lens. I use about f/3.0 (the lowest value I can get on my kit lens) This will create a BOKEH effect and help create a sense of differentiation between you and the background.

  • ISO – Get it to as low as you can get in your camera without your video getting way too dark. This will help eliminate noise or grains from the video.

  • White Balance – It’s a thing you won’t realize is wrong until you see the correct value. To adjust my advice is to set it to custom. Hold a white paper in front of the camera and tune the setting such that the paper appears white in the camera as well. This step should be performed after the next step that I am going to discuss.

The settings that I use are discussed in the video, you can refer to the video to check the settings that I use.

3. Mess this up and all is messed

This is the most crucial step to improving the quality of your content, even more, important than the setting of your camera. LIGHTS.

Lighting plays a very important role in making or breaking a video, a video can look dull boring, and noisy without good lighting but the same video can look amazing with proper lighting. 

Let’s get into some theory before discussing the ways we can improve it. Lighting can be split into 3 parts – Key Light, Hair light, and Fill Light. 

Key Light is the main light source that lights your subject, Hair light is a light that provides some information about depth, that separates you from the background, and Fill light is a light that we use to fill out the areas where we feel more light is needed. Key light and hair light are very important while fill light can be ignored.

Let’s discuss key light first.

The trick that I use to light my video free of cost is to use a LED bulb(Technically it is not free but as compared to professional lights it is), I use an LED bulb along with Tubelights to light my video up. 

Some tips for using this are, don’t place them too close to you else it will hurt your eyes and make you look all overblown in the video. Secondly try to use something to soften the light, as the light coming from such a small source is generally too harsh. I use a homemade softbox and that does the trick for me, If you wish to purchase one check this one out(Amazon Link).

If you are willing to spend some money and buy a professional light, I would recommend using the Osaka video light(Amazon Link), you can see my review video about it here(Review video link)

Now time for fill light:

As you can see there is a TV behind me in the background, I use it as a hair light and also a fill light. I use a static non-distracting image as my background for videos. The trick here is to reduce the brightness of the TV to the lowest so that the image is still visible and works as hair light without being too distracting and overly bright.

If you use these three steps correctly, you can improve your video quality drastically, which can help you reach a new height in your career as a creator.

To see these tips in action, check out the video below.