You Ask, I Answer: Recording Better Video on Smartphone?

In today's video, Linda asks, what recommendations do you have for recording video quickly and easily? The camera on my iPhone isn't doing the job. Well, here's the thing. Unless your iPhone's like over five years old, in which case it probably is barely functional. Um the camera on most modern smartphones, if your phone is less than two years old, is probably more than enough, right?

Most camera phones these days can record at you know 1080p or better. Um iPhones, you know, you this one's two years old now, I think, uh records it at 4k. So it's not that the phone itself isn't doing the job, it's three problems that you probably have. Number one, lighting, number two, stabilization, number three, audio. So there are some relatively inexpensive things you can do to mitigate this.

Alright, so let's talk about some of these solutions that uh you can use. Lighting is straightforward. We've talked about this before. A simple, cheap, you know, yard sale lamp is more than enough properly positioned so that you get decent lighting. Right?

Most smartphones, most cameras do not do well in low light. That's just a fact of of life with any kind of camera. The better your lighting within reason, the the better the camera's gonna look. So a couple of simple solutions. You can get little inexpensive battery-powered LED lights.

These things can be, you know, put on and you put them away from your subject. So it's not like this close. This is too bright. You can see that on the video. But put it, you know, on a on a ledge or on a tripod or something.

Um, this cute little one comes with a little hook, you can hang it off of things, and you'll get plenty of light. If you need something a little bit bigger, look into a power bank that has an integrated LED panel. Again, like the the little one, you can put this pretty far away, and it it provides some nice lighting, very portable, easy, uh, and will give you much better quality of video as opposed to like sitting in a dark room all by yourself. So that's lighting. Second problem you probably have with smartphones is stabilization.

These little devices, they are light, right? That that's one of the reasons why we love these things. They are lightweight, they are easy to hold, to carry, etc. That also means that they are jittery. So if you're trying to hold a phone and film, just minute changes in your hand move the device.

The way to fix this is to make this device heavier and bulkier, which sounds counterintuitive, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Now there are some you know market solutions for this. Uh example is a s uh like a gimbaled stabilizer, but this is kind of overkill for stuff that's probably gonna be static shots. All you really need is a simple like a monopod. This is a very straightforward monopod.

Uh just extended out here a little bit, and a selfie stick clip. What you're doing here is taking away motion at the point of device and essentially putting it elsewhere. So put this in your monopod, and now you have a much more stable platform. You're gonna have a lot less shake, a lot less jitter. And the heavier this thing is, the better it works.

If you actually have a real tripod, um, I like to put my phone on a tripod sometimes. It's it makes the video so much more stable, much less jittery. Um, even if you take something as simple as one of these these silly like trade show selfie stick mounts, right? And you just put this on like a five-pound weight, but I don't know if it would all of that. Um, but put it on a piece of PVC.

Uh, this will do wonders for stabilizing your phone. Taking out that jittery handshake that makes your video look unprofessional. You know, this here, even just this stabilizes the phone a lot. And bonus, if you're just shooting in a in a static environment, like um at somebody's desk, plunk it on the floor, and now you've got a camera stand. All right, so stabilization, second thing.

Third thing that is probably not performing well with your uh phone is the audio. And again, we've talked about this a lot. Audio quality matters a great deal. David Temez over at KinoEye says the great video begins with great audio. The camera on these phones, fantastic.

The microphone, terrible. Uh it is a small microphone, it is embedded inside of a little piece of glass. It is very difficult to get good sound out of it. So there's a couple of different solutions. The easiest and simplest solution, if you don't mind the look on screen, is a nine-dollar wired microphone from Amazon.

Clips on here. This end, depending on your phone, may or may not need extra connectors. Plugs into the bottom of your phone, and now you will get near broadcast quality audio from just this little clip on mic. It's a very, very straightforward solution. If you don't like doing that, or it doesn't look good, or it's a problem, you can get the same microphone, tuck it in uh into somebody's jacket, and plug it into a tiny little audio recorder, right?

Again, relatively inexpensive. I think these are like 70 bucks on Amazon. And what this does is it records the audio separately than from the phone. Remember that the goal of good audio is always to get the microphone as close to your mouth as possible. Right.

So when the phone is eight feet across the room over there or whatever, it's gonna sound terrible. It's gonna sound like you're you're talking inside of a giant tin can. When the microphone is inches away from your mouth either on your jacket or uh you know or there's other microphone options like a shotgun microphone but the Lavalier is the simplest, easiest and and uh hardest to screw up that will get you great quality sound. You will, if you go the audio recorder route, you will need to take this and audio and put it into a video editor and sync it up with the uh the the the recorded video on the phone. Generally speaking uh that's one of the reasons why you see movie studios have clapboards you know those things with uh we see them make that loud snapping sound it's not just for decoration it is so that when the audio editor is working they can line up that loud clapping noise in a video editor and make it sync up.

Easy way to do it if you don't have a clapboard just clap your hands and you'll see in the editor those two claps and you can line up the the sound that way so that's generally what goes wrong with video when people are talking about their phone not being good enough. It's bad lighting it's no stabilization and it's bad audio. If you solve for those three things there's a really good chance that your phone can look and create great near studio quality video. There was a great video done uh by the band Evanescence not too long ago um uh called Waste It on You. It's on YouTube and the it was a shot entirely on uh band members' phones.

They were, as we all are, uh under a shelter in place, uh, as we record this in in mid-2020, and they had to make do with what they had. So the director told them what shots to take, they took their with their phones, and then with a lot of post-production, and you can see it because the post-production stuff, folks can do things that make video look like anything else, black and white, you know, old style, um, stabilizing it after the uh afterwards, you can do it a tremendous amount in post-production. But it was shot on phones, right? So even though it is a polished production, it started with one of these devices. So those are the recommendations that I would suggest.

If you want to spend money and a lot of it, um, look at a camera like the DJI Osmo Pocket. Uh DJI makes uh phenomenal mechanic uh electronically stabilized uh uh gimbal camera that shoots beautiful video, absolutely beautiful video. It is one of my favorite devices. Looks like this. Um and you'll see it has the ability to track, you can move the camera around well without the lens moving around a whole lot.

These are about $350 on Amazon. If you shoot a lot of video, it's worth it. If you don't shoot a lot of video, um, I would say use the much less expensive tricks to try and get more out of the existing smartphone that you have. If your phone is over five years old, may not be the worst thing to upgrade your phone. Uh, if you have follow-up questions on this topic, it's a fun topic, uh, leave them in the comments box below.

Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data, analytics, and digital marketing problems? Visit trustinsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.