When you're running around on a film set, it can be very easy to forget small details
or little tasks that would make a big difference in the quality of the final piece. Today I've
compiled five things that you should be doing before you even hit that record button.
These are ordered from most fixable, so you can edit it and change a little bit in post
to least fixable where if you don't do these things, you're pretty much going to have to
rerecord. Number five is the white balance.
This affects how your camera sees and records the world. More specifically, the colors of
your scene. If you go into your camera settings, there hopefully is one for white balance.
It will likely have a couple of different presets like cloudy if you're shooting outside.
Fluorescent if you're indoors. Daytime if you're shooting sometime in the afternoon
and likely one for custom as well, you might be able to set the Kelvin temperature, which
affects how warm or cool the colors appear, and you should also be able to set it based
on an object in your scene.
Usually a piece of paper and place it in front of the lens, and it will calibrate all of
the other colors based on this. You should be redoing the white balance every time you
change the lighting or move location.
So if you're shooting outside and come indoors, you'll need to set the white balance again.
This is kind of easy to forget because our eyes adapt to what we see, and it's not until
later when we pull in the footage that we realize something was really warm or really
cold.
If you forget to do this step, don't worry HitFilm has a white balance effect built in.
You can drag this onto your footage and then use the eyedropper tool to tell HitFilm which
part of your scene should be white.
It will then adjust all of the other colors. Number four is to get the correct framing
for your shot. This is more applicable if you're filming by yourself like I am here.
Don't just place the camera, hit record, and pray that you're in the frame because if you're
cut off, you can't come back and fix that in post.
Inside of HitFilm you can use the transform properties to readjust the frame. Zoom in.
Move it around or rotate it if you need to. But when you're setting up your shot on set,
keep in mind where your actor is, where they're going to go if they're moving.
Keep in mind concepts like headroom, which is how much space is above your actor's head
knows noseroom, which is if they're facing one direction of the screen, how much room
they have there, as well as things like the final aspect ratio.
Sometimes we create cinematics here that are in the 2.35 aspect ratio, so they have the
black bars on the top and bottom. If you film everything with the full frame 16:9, you're
going to have to crop off some of that information and it might not end up being the framing
that you had in mind.
Cameras usually have some sort of guidelines in their settings, so you can overlay things
like the rule of thirds, a center line and even the planned aspect ratio itself. Number
three is to expose your image properly, and this is where we start to get into the less
fixable, more you're screwed, you're going to have to reshoot sort of area.
Exposing properly means no clipping both in the whites and in the blacks. If your camera
has the option to display a histogram or maybe zebra lines on pure white, you should be using
these things until you learn what they look like.
Anything in your image that is pure white or pure black has no detail whatsoever, and
this cannot be retrieved in editing software. This isn't the same as your footage being
a little bit dark or a little bit bright, because that can be adjusted in HitFilm with
something like the curves effect or brightness and contrast or exposure.
What I'm referring to is when something is overexposed in the case of the highlights
or crushed in the case of the shadows. If you've been shooting on automatic and don't
know how to use shutter speed, ISO or aperture, it's time to switch over to manual and learn
these filmmaking essentials.
The aperture is usually the first thing that I adjust. A higher number means the image
will get darker, but I'll also have less depth of field, which means the blurry background
you see behind your subject. If I lower the number, the image will be brighter, but things
will also be harder to keep in focus.
ISO is usually the next thing to adjust, but raising it will give you more noise in your
image. So generally you want to keep this almost as low as possible. And finally, shutter
speed will also adjust the brightness, but it will affect the motion blur so how blurry
things appear in the frame.
This number I usually touch last because it affects how blurry things appear when they
move, and so things can look a bit less natural or more like a soap opera, if you don't set
it correctly. Next up is the audio levels of your scene, especially if you're recording
dialog.
Your camera likely has these audio meters on its display. These are measured in decibels,
and in the case of audio, you don't want to go above zero. If it does go above zero, it's
called clipping, and it's similar to overexposure, where it starts to get a bit distorted and
you can't get that detail back after it's been recorded. It's usually marked as read
on the camera to tell you not to do this. It depends on the setting, but if it's too
high, you'll want to look for something like input volume or gain to lower the volume that
is recorded into the camera.
In the case of this mic that we use here, it actually has a game slider in the back,
which would adjust how loud the voice comes across. And like over and under exposure.
This cannot be fixed in post.
You're going to have to rerecord, and the last thing you need to make sure is correct
before you even hit record is the focus. This seems like an obvious one, but again, I'm
recording by myself. If I recorded this whole thing and it was out of focus, I'd be completely
out of luck.
I use manual focus basically 100% of the time. These guys here know that when I'm on set
and we're recording something even after every single take, I'll be just double checking
the focus because you cannot fix it in post.
You have to get it right. Check in your camera settings for something like focus assist,
which will display red lines when something is in focus. Hopefully, these tips helped
you. Be sure to subscribe for more filmmaking and visual effects tutorials, and if you have
any tips and tricks of your own, feel free to share them in the comments below. Thanks
for watching, and I'll see you all in the next video.