1. Keep It Steady

The most telling sign of an amateur movie is shaky footage. This can be fixed in some editing software, but this will always lead to lower quality video, as the techniques involved actually crop and zoom the picture.

Ideally, you could shoot with your camera mounted on a tripod, but this is rarely practical in most family situations.

Wherever possible, hold the camera with both hands. Make sure the hand strap is as tight as possible on your right hand. Keep your elbows tight to your body to provide support, and stand with your feet slightly apart.

If you are using your zoom in telephoto mode (zoomed in) then it is even more important to keep the camera steady. Try to lean against a solid object like a wall or post.

2. Film More

Avoid the temptation of filming for the edit. Allow the camera to roll for a few seconds before and after the action. This will give you room to be flexible when you come to editing.

When putting your final piece together, you will be using probably a fraction of the footage you film, but to have plenty of footage to work with is a good thing.

3. Use Your Ears

It's surprising the things you hear when you play your footage back which you didn't spot when you were filming. Try to listen to the surrounding noise when you are filming. Some noises are unavoidable, but you should avoid excessive ambient noise if possible.

4. Avoid The Zoom

Try to avoid zooming in and out while the camera is rolling. If you do zoom, use a slow zoom. This may need some practising, especially if your camera has a small and sensitive zoom rocker.

5. Pan Slowly

Panning across a scene too quickly will not look good on your final video, and could cause your audience some disorientation. Try to pan slowly - around 20 seconds to pan across the scene in front of you will provide an acceptable scene. If you are filming a wide pan, avoid moving your feet and create the movement by swivelling the top half of your body, keeping the camera steady by supporting your elbows at the side of your body.

Holding your camcorder with both hands will help capture stable footage

6. Don't Speak

Providing dialogue from behind the camera will make your final film look amateurish. Add any commentary by recording it separately and adding it at the editing stage.

7.Get Your Basic Camera Settings Right

Often, DV camcorders come with two audio settings, 32kHz and 48kHz. The 32kHz setting enables you to record two separate audio streams onto the same section of tape. The second stream is for a voiceover which can be added at a later date.

If you don't plan to do this, or you will be recording a narration at a later date, set the audio capture on your camera to 48kHz.

One feature found on most cameras which is virtually useless is the digital zoom. Using this feature will lead to severe quality loss in your video. Switch this feature off completely, and stick to the optical zoom. You will also find that any zoom over 10x will be very difficult to keep steady.

8. Try Different Angles

Rather than shooting everything at eye level, try some different angles. Try angling the screen upwards and filming with the camera at waist level. If you are filming kids, try getting down to a lower level to get the action.

9. Take Some Stills

Many camcorders feature a stills mode. If you see an opportunity for a good photo, take it. Still photos are really useful for artwork for titles, intro sequences and dvd cover artwork, and you will get better results from still photos rather than from taking still frames from video, even if your stills mode is not the highest resolution ever.

10. Film Some Extras

Get Connected

One consideration you will need to make is how you are going to get your footage into your computer so you can start working with it.

If your movies were filmed on older analogue cameras (VHS or Video8 for example), refer to my article on converting analogue video to DVD for tips on digitising your movies.

If you have a MiniDV or HDV camcorder, you will need to connect your camcorder using a "Firewire" cable. Many laptops have a mini Firewire socket, but if you don't have one, they are reasonably easy to fit to your computer or laptop.

You may have a hard drive camcorder with USB connection. If so, you will almost definitely be able to connect this straight to your computer. Similarly, DVD camcorder footage is just as straightforward, requiring a computer with a DVD drive to transfer the footage.
 

Basic Computer Specification

To get started on editing your video, most computers or laptops made in the last two years should have no problems editing standard definition video. If you are looking around for a software package, always check the 'System Requirements' on the box or on the publisher's website to ensure your computer is up to scratch.

My Recommended Specification

As you continue to work on your movies, there are a few points which should be considered, as they will make the experience easier and you will be able to work with less interruptions. In addition, many of them are absolute musts if you are considering editing in high definition.

 

1. Second Hard Drive

When using any software, your operating system will be reading and writing data on your drive. If your editing software is trying to read and write data to the same drive, performance will be compromised. Adding a second drive to hold your video clips will solve this problem.

Look for a drive with a 7200 rpm speed. If you are running a laptop, you will need to add an external drive. Get one with a separate power supply, which connects by USB 2.0, Firewire or eSATA (the last two of these are preferable).
 

2. Physical Memory

Video editing utilises lots of RAM (memory). 1GB RAM should be a minimum, for high definition, 2GB RAM is a minimum. If you run Windows Vista, you should consider 2GB regardless of the format you are editing.
 

3. Fastest Processor

Most editing applications are designed to use the maximum power available in your processor, so the faster the better.
 

4. Screen Size

With most editing software, the larger the screen resolution, the more workspace you will have available.
 

5. DVD Burner

If you are intending to create DVDs, you'll need a burner. If your PC only burns CDs, then upgrading this is cheap for desktop computers. If you have a laptop CD burner, then consider adding a USB or Firewire external DVD burner.
 

Final Thoughts - Optimise Your System

Regardless of the finer details of your computer, your computer will run smoothly by doing the following.

Disable networking and anti-virus

When capturing or editing video, you should temporarily disable your network connections and antivirus software. Security software is well known to interfere with editing software and can cause it to crash.

Maximum Power Mode

If you are running a laptop, make sure it is running on mains power and that your power options are set to maximum performance. Also, in your 'power options', turn off the screensaver when encoding your final file or burning your discs.

Defragment your hard drives

Although you will see each file on your disks as a single file, your computer will actually break the file up into multiple 'chunks' of data in order to store it more efficiently. This is fine for smaller files, but video clips are often quite large, and it will take longer for your editing software to fetch each file it needs if your drive has to get multiple sections of data from different locations. Running a disk defragementer weekly will help speed up your system.

Best Performance

On Windows PCs, a certain amount of the resources are used to make the user interface look pretty. You can change the settings to 'Best Performance' to reduce the nice effects and get your PC to concentrate on your application performance.

Other Software