What's up creatives this is Tom welcome back to another video you're all
probably wondering why on earth this shot looks
so so dreadful allow me to explain i have the canon m50 the cheapest camera
that i own set up pointing and filming me and i'm
gonna take you through the five steps required to take your shot from looking
like this to a shot that looks like this
So guys obviously Budget Wednesday is normally posted well sometimes posted on
a wednesday but here i am on a sunday like i just wanted to
release this get this out the door and it's definitely a very budget topic so
forgive me but we're gonna rock it anyway and i hope you enjoy this video
and i'm gonna be focusing for the duration on this video
predominantly on video this is sort of a way to
improve the overall look and feel of your video footage
coming out of pretty much any camera in existence i literally can't deal with
this audio any longer so we're going to switch over now some of these steps will
of course be totally applicable for uh the
photography side of things as a a camera operator but on the whole this
is a video focus about leveling up your video footage Budget Wednesday is
of course a budget series i'm gonna be using gear that i have
in my room for instance the uh the light that you can see
over just uh over my shoulder here that is because i have this equipment
available to me i shoot professional video
uh full time but what i will do is anything that is a little bit more
expensive i will link a budget alternative in the
description if you are interested in that
as i'm sure you can tell audio is absolutely massive
in video production i know strictly speaking this isn't a camera
improvements what's at the front of the list we're just going to get this out of
the way because the audio is like essential
people say that's 50% of the look and feel of a video but i
would argue that it's actually sometimes more important to have a
really good audio source there are lots of budget options right now i have
a shotgun mic going into a tascam recorder again all of this will be
linked down below in the description so i just
recording my audio totally externally and then later
i will sync that up in post even something as simple as this this is a
rode uh video micro that i believe is under about fifty dollars
and will make an enormous enormous difference to the audio
quality in your videos if you have a camera but have not invested in some
decent audio equipment definitely make that the highest
priority thing on your list
okay guys so now briefly we are going to talk about lighting now lighting is
extremely important and it's really essential for you to learn basic
lighting principles if you're interested in video production
because it will just help you out massively so i have a light behind me is
the Godox SL60w a really good option
for a big decent light source that is not too
expensive this will run you about 150 150 pounds roughly
in the uk and is a really high quality light that will provide a good
lighting source for video so what we're going to do is we're going to turn off
these horrible overhead lights which you can see is casting this just
horrible shadow like top down shadow on my face so we're going to
turn off all the lights in this environment now
so now as you can see literally the only light is just from my computer screen
literally just back here but now we're going to take the godox
sl60w and i'm going to take the softbox off that light and i'm going to just
turn that on and show you what that looks like
all right guys here we go that is what this looked like so i have the godox
sl60w off to the side of me it is literally
blinding me every time i look at it because there's an
unbelievably harsh light coming from this side because i have no
diffusion if you don't what diffusion is that is
this stuff like i have a big soft box here which i can add onto the front
of this light it will make a dramatic difference in terms of smoothing
this light source and making everything feel a little bit more natural
all right guys there we go that is an example of one layer
of diffusion on this light as you can clearly see what that's done is just
really sort of reduce the harshness of that light it is still
looking a little harsh right now so i'm actually going to get another
layer of diffusion we can add that on
and there we go so that is really looking like a much nicer
more even form of lighting you can see that i've got quite a lot of
shadow on this side of my face right now so i'm actually just going to bring this
light over just a little bit and then i could
also if i wanted to introduce a fill light so something to just brighten
up this side of my face here there we go i haven't used a fill for
this shot but there's a good just example of how much difference a decent
lighting source can make and again something like this
is maybe a little bit more expensive than some of you might have been looking
at but there are cheaper alternative options
for lighting and those will be linked down below but this is a very good
budget choice for decent professional lighting
okay guys next one i wanted to talk to you about is white balance
so obviously right now i have my camera set to
a daylight white balance and that is because this sort of lighting source i'm
using right now is uh is about 5200 kelvin which is a
daylight white balance but before when i had the
original shot with the sort of indoor lighting i
looked incredibly orange and there is a simple way to fix
that and it is through white balance now these are a very very
affordable little uh accessory we have a white card
a black card and i think a roughly 20% gray card so
what you can do is you can actually use on pretty much any camera
you can set a custom white balance so on the m50
it's as simple as taking a photo in the environment that we are
sort of using right now i can take a photo of this gray card
and you can use that photograph as your white balance moving forward there we go
that's now done you won't have seen a massive difference
between this shot but you could have will have been very clearly be able to
see the difference from going to the sort of horribly lit
shot at the start with a really awful
corresponding white balance to this shot where we are lit for
daylight and things look much nicer and with decent skin types
okay guys so now what we're going to talk about is backdrop sort of this area
behind me and apertures as an alternative to using a backdrop so what
i'm actually going to do is set up my sort of studio background
that i use here and again this will be linked
down below in the description it again is on the sort of budget side
for the type of professional gear that it is so i probably spent
about 150 pounds on this kit so again it's cheap for what this type of thing
can cost but it's still an investment in your gear so if you aren't wanting to
go with this sort of quite you know
elaborate sizeable and quite large studio backdrop
what you can think about is your own backdrop and a really good
tip that i would give you is to stop down your aperture so shoot
in an aperture with an aperture that is low
so you want your f number to be as low as possible within
reason when you're shooting a shot like this it
means that the background behind you can look nice and blurred and focus will
be on you without the background detracting from that
it's also a great way to use practical light so i'm going to grab a light here
and put it on one of these shelves in my background
because i'm using a slightly shallow depth of field a
low F/2.8 on this shot you'll get a nice sort of subtle blur on this in the
background if you don't want to invest in
a studio backdrop this is a good way to do it
there we go if we just ignore this giant massive wire in the shot as well you'd
be wanting to somehow organize that so that it went
down and out of sight but that is a good example of shooting with a shallow depth
of field and having a slightly nicer shot
background behind you
all right guys and here we are this is the sort of finished output with the
studio background behind me again you don't
need to go for one of these but personally this is the vibe that i like
to use for my youtube channel and they are such
a nice way of sort of increasing the overall
production quality of your video without really investing a
ton of money in additional gear but also not having
to invest a ton of money in additional space
so as long as you have the space to actually set up the stand
really these sort of possibilities are endless for the amount of backgrounds
that you can do if you want colors if you want to sort of have a white or gray
background and then shine lights on them you can really get very creative
and of course i also use this with client work as well if
i'm wanting to sort of get a nice purple backdrop i can do that using this type
of setup and there is briefly one extra thing that i want to talk about
the sort of fifth tip which is play around with your camera
settings so for video we want to be mainly shooting
in manual camera settings and really sort of fine-tuning
the uh sort of options that you get with your camera and i would also
thoroughly recommend you to shoot in what is called a flat
picture profile so on more expensive cameras you can choose to shoot in
what's called log and that gives you a really flat
picture profile to really play around with the colors in post
on cheaper cameras like this what i actually do is shoot in the neutral
picture profile this sort of flattest picture profile that you can
and i actually reduce the saturation and the sharpness
down in that picture profile meaning that it gives me a much more neutral
look out of camera that i can grade and play
around with in post to get a look that i am happy with but guys there we
have it that in five steps is a way that you can go from a
shot that looks like this to a shot that looks like this hopefully
you have found it informative and or helpful if you have any questions please
leave them in the comments section down below i hope you're enjoying the budget
wednesday series i'll of course link the playlist
down below in the description so you can follow along if you've missed any and
i'll catch you guys next time
you