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Video Kitchen constructs exciting presentations that you will be proud to show your family and friends. Displaying the project you created from photos and video clips is a great way to share your memories and create new ones that will last a lifetime.

Cook Up a Great Video

Creating Great Videos
by Carlile Crutcher

Walk into any major bookstore and you will find dozens of books telling you how to take photographs or work with your digital camera. If you dig really hard, you may a few books discussing how great movies or TV documentaries are made in Hollywood. So where are the books helping the budding videographer? They just aren't there. My hope is that this will get you started.

So you have bought a camcorder and have shot some footage, but truthfully you don't much like the results. Maybe I can help. My advice is based on ten years of looking over people's shoulders at my business, the Video Kitchen in Louisville Kentucky, where people transfer old home movies, duplicate video tapes they've shot, and edit their raw footage. My staff and I see a lot of mistakes being made. Other times we see exciting footage shot by an amateur who claims to have no education in the art of videography. What makes the difference? Lots of things. I'll cover a few of the biggest issues here.

Let's start with a test: What's the easiest thing to teach a kid to do? Is it to feed itself, to go to the bathroom in the toilet, to walk, to talk? . . . No, none of those answers are the one I am looking for. Here's a clue: What do most kids do for more than 20-hours each week? Sleeping doesn't count. OK, here's the answer I'm looking for: The easiest thing to teach a kid to do is watch TV. As the kid grows up, how much time to we spend teaching him or her to create TV? How much time was spent teaching you how to create TV? Not much.

Many years ago, when I first started taking home movies, the firms, such as Kodak, that sold film came with instructions how to make good movies. Then, when you got your film back from the processing lab, you might find the dreaded "It's not my fault" note telling you how you screwed up with advice how to do better next time. Not so with today's video equipment -- you're on your own. Maybe a family member will suggest your video is lacking, but most likely everyone will watch in stunned silence and politely thank you for the experience as they excuse themselves to get some fresh air or go get a drink.

The learning curve for shooting video is similar to learning how to cook -- rarely does a beginner produce a gourmet meal, but we all know what tastes dreadful and what is truly gourmet. This makes learning how to "cook up" great videos intellectually exciting. What looks trivial -- just push the red button -- really isn't. There is much more to it than that, just as getting a great meal out without burning half of it and serving the other half cold and undercooked can be a huge challenge for the beginner (and even some of us who have been doing it for years).

Fortunately for the rebellious souls among us, the rules for shooting great videos are not cast in stone -- you can do rude things and your audience may love it, just as a great chef may burn and over-pepper a fish and sell it as "blackened" to an appreciative audience. But you really should know the rules of the game before you start breaking them -- you need to know how to use your tools and what happens when you push things to the limit.

Put a video camera in the hands of a teenage boy and one of the first things he will do is shoot a bunch of footage in near darkness. Put the same camera in the hands of his teenage sister and one of the first things she will do is turn the camera sideways and upside down. Such fun -- just let me out of the room when we have to view this junk -- it's roughly equivalent to a child baking his or her first cake with it's soggy middle and chocolate all over the kitchen.

Most of us struggled through 12 or more years of school where we were required to create essays for evaluation by our teachers. Back the papers would come with red marks all over them correcting grammar, spelling and suggesting that we didn't really get our point across. A lot of years and a lot of essays later we might feel comfortable putting words on paper.

This isn't the case for creating video. Some schools offer a course or two but rarely have the poor teachers been taught anything about the subject, so how are they supposed to pass much knowledge on to their students? At best the system turns out budding newscasters, great for TV stations who can pick the prettiest face from a huge oversupply of kids who want to chase policemen, but not really useful for all the other commercial and artistic opportunities that are showing up as video moves to hundreds of cable channels, shows up on PC's and soon will be everywhere on the Internet.

This booklet is not for those who want to shoot video commercially. Most people (by a huge factor) simply want to create good videos for fun and family just as many of us who aspire to be great chefs have absolutely no intention of ever darkening to door of the kitchen in a commercial restaurant. Unlike great or bad meals, however, a video will likely be around for many years and in some cases will be viewed by generations of unborn grandchildren who may judge you unfairly if your video-making skills are inferior.

So now I've scared you a little, I don't want you to run from your video camera. Instead I hope you feel challenged to jump in and start to master the subject. Like any subject, your skills improve with practice, practice, practice. You are in control. You can (and should) throw away your junk footage. Plan on letting the world see maybe as little as one-sixth of what you shoot and you'll have much more fun.

If you were making a Hollywood movie, you would need a script, professional actors, and a support team of dozens or hundreds of people to manage everything from lighting and staging to snacks and insurance for the crew. If you were shooting a documentary, you'd need a story line, a point of view, an argument that you'd want to show and prove. Much the same can be said for videos that sell, train or record for posterity a defined event or staged production. But here you are, you have a camera, want to shoot video, but don't have any of this working for you. What are you to do, leave it in the closet? No, but you do need to go about your task with some "do's and don'ts" in mind.

When your job is to watch days and days of old home movies and family videos, you understand the comment of one of my staff after a really busy period: "I think if I see one more Christmas tree, shots of kids at the beach, or a family eating a large Thanksgiving meal, I'll throw up!" In the middle of this rush, a large order came in of 1940's footage shot in and around a family summer home that was a total show stopper for my staff. My guys all said, "Wow, look at this!" and we did. For me, it was a time warp -- return to a childhood era I knew, but for my young staff born 30 years after the footage was shot, it was completely fascinating too. What had this long forgotten uncle done right that so caught our eye, so interested us? Simple things, really, things that you and I can do with no great effort or planning.

Here you stand, camera in hand, with no story in mind. You don't know how the day is going to unfold, nor do you expect anything unusual to occur. You don't even know who your audience might be if you roll the camera, but you want to capture the moment, you want to play with your new toy. Where do you start? Here are some things to think about that may help.

Be selfish: assume that you will be the ultimate audience -- that you are trapped in a nursing home with hard floors and hard walls surrounded by strangers, lonely, and no longer interested in a world that is spinning away without you. What would you want to relive and enjoy?

Create an imaginary pen-pal on the other side of the world: imagine you are exchanging "this is my world" videos with that person -- someone you want to impress but whom you feel has no idea what everyday life in your world is like. Perhaps instead of a pen-pal on the other side of the world, you need to imagine that grandchildren 50 years from now will be watching and enjoying your footage -- they need to see more than this year's Christmas tree or a collage of unidentified faces all wedged together at the end of a table.

If traveling and touring about, consider being rebellious -- don't shoot a video that the travel industry would want to buy, don't try to outdo the shots on the picture postcards, don't come back with hours of footage of old churches and great overlooks. Instead, shoot the little things that are different: the tacky, the elegant, the ugly, the glamorous. Get kids at play, beggars on the sidewalk, strange trucks, painted front doors, signs that tell you that you are "going to hell . . ."

In other words, take great care in capturing what the trade calls "establishing shots" of a time and place. Get a picture of the neighborhood, the house, the rooms you know and live in. Capture shots of things that wear out and become obsolete: cars, telephones, stoves, TVs, clothes, shopping areas, airplanes, you name it.

Break away from your friends and family and get shots that put them in a time and place. I remember one morning looking at a home movie shot in the hills of Kentucky at a family funeral, probably 60 years ago. There were white frame houses, the family all dressed in black, old square cars, a white frame church and spectacular shots of a cemetery on the side of a hill on a green and golden fall day. I didn't know are care about the family faces but the cameraman had so captured a time and place that I couldn't take my eyes off of it. It was a glimpse into an era that no longer exists, and it was caught very simply by a novice family member with movie camera in hand.

However, you and most of your audience will care about the family faces in your video, and this is where you really have to go to work. Some of the best shots occur when you behave like a fly on the wall -- the actors in your video no longer care or know that you are there. It's actually a lot of work. You need to shoot, or look like you are shooting so much that everyone starts to ignore you. You aren't asking them to smile or say cheese. You aren't interviewing them. You are simply making a fool of yourself standing on a chair in the corner, crawling on the floor chasing the cat, pushing in on the stove while someone tries to stir a pot, eavesdropping in on every conversation. You tell everyone to not worry, that you'll probably throw 90% of what you shoot away, and you well might.

With the fly-on-the-wall technique you are hoping to capture real people in action. Twenty or thirty years from now you'll want to know what grandma sounded like as a young mother, your kids will laugh that their uncle still walks just like he did when he was a kid, they'll be amazed at how playful all the old goats were back then. These reactions don't come if every shot is posed. A few interviews and testimonials may be good, but if they're bad, what do you do with them -- throw them on the floor and hurt someone's feelings?

The fly-on-the-wall technique assumes you will follow up and edit out the junk and the boring but you don't just want to leave the camera running endlessly. You want to get shots from different angles. You want to grab snippets and move. You need to hit the red button and stop the camera before you hunt for the next shot. Sentences have periods. Don't be guilty of taking run-on videos.

If your subjects get busy and decide to do something interesting, grab the camera. Maybe the guys will tear into a car or motorcycle, maybe everyone will play a rousing game of Monopoly, perhaps the women will go shopping, how about a pickup football or basketball game, and certainly get shots in the kitchen. Get dad in his tool room, get mom picking flowers, film washing a favorite pet, capture a stroll through the park.

Let's look at taking such videos from another angle. Suppose you find yourself with camera in hand at a deadly event you'd rather missed filled with boorish in-laws you really don't like. Just for the fun of it you decided to record the event in the most hateful manner possible. Here are a few ideas. Start by shoving the camera in peoples' faces while they are chewing on food and make them say something. Then move everyone to a cramped area and make them repeatedly say cheese. If possible, put a bright light in their eyes or put them outside in the sunniest place you can find. Make the parents feel guilty for their kids that won't stand still and film their anger and frustration.

After that, hope everyone slouches down in a couch with a beer or too much dinner to watch a football game on TV. Stand over them like a regal king and shoot down on them making them look as slovenly as possible. If you block their view of the TV, maybe one of them will stick his tongue out, curse you or give you the finger, all of which you can happily record for future generations. One of my favorite shots occurs when you burst into a bathroom while someone is sitting on the pot. Wake someone up who is taking a nap. With luck you can so invade someone's territory while they are having a serious discussion that they will stick the palm of their hand out to block your lens just like a good communist policeman might have as he was beating up on a kid.

Find the fat people and film them to show off their large stomachs. Find the old and shriveled people and go in tight on their bad skin. If one of the kids is a bully, film him persecuting his younger siblings. Capture whining and temper tantrums if possible. Pray for a big family argument that you can film surreptitiously.

That's just a few suggestions how to make people look awful -- it's very easy to do, and most subjects will rise to the occasion without much prompting. In fact, if you are not careful, you will accidentally capture lots of such footage without really trying. We see it all the time at our shop.

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So you'd like to upgrade your camcorder (or you are reading this, but don't own a camcorder yet). What should you buy? Ten years ago this question was a big deal -- today most choices are just fine. The improvements in the technology have dribbled down from the pro gear to most of the cheapest consumer gear offerings, so you will likely be able to get stunning results regardless what you buy. There are way too many tape, disk and stick formats out there:

VHS - The old standard, too big, not digital, easily played anywhere without conversion.

VHS-C - A small cassette that fits in an adapter to play in a regular VCR. Most people who have these older units record at the slow EP or SLP speed which gives them borderline crummy results. Not my favorite, as you may guess, but these camcorders are cheap, cheap, cheap. In the right hands, I've seen dazzling results.

S-VHS and S-VHS-C - Called "super" VHS, this format puts more details on a VHS-like tape than regular VHS camcorders do, but unless you have a VCR that plays it back, the picture looks all torn and raggedy. A good non-digital format for pros but on its way out.

8mm, Hi8 and Digital8 - A popular family of camcorder tapes primarily engineered by Sony, the small cassette looks sort of like VHS-C but there is no adapter to play it in a VHS VCR. It started with 8mm, got improved by Hi8 (which used to be expensive), and went digital with Digital8. Hi8 camcorders are now on sale very cheaply-- they are a good choice for the budget-minded. The D8 (Digital8) format ain't bad -- it costs less lower than some of the other digital formats, it's a little larger (therefore more robust?), and D8 equipment is compatible with computer editing systems through it's Firewire plugs just like pro gear.

MiniDV - A small tape format that at one time or another all the major manufacturers agreed upon (but some have broken ranks as you step up into pro gear or move to still smaller tape or non-tape formats). At the time this is written, I'd say this is the best all-purpose format around. It's used in mid-range consumer cameras up to some fine pro-gear used by the broadcast industry, worldwide. You can generally record one hour or so on a tape at normal speed and can get 50% more time at slow speed, but watch out: tapes recorded at the slow LP speed may not play back anywhere but in the camcorder that made them -- great 10 years from now when the camcorder has gone to camcorder heaven and you want to dig out those old shots only to discover they play like your VCR has a bad case of the hiccups.

DVCAM and DVCpro - Industrial step-ups of the MiniDV format and standard. Electronically these digital formats are the same as MiniDV, but the tapes are bigger and there are other differences that Sony and Panasonic love to argue about. We mix and match a lot of MiniDV and DVCAM at our (primarily Sony) shop, using DVCAM in our more expensive camcorders where we need to shoot for two or three hours without stop. Panasonic's DVCpro is similar and has been bought into by a number of broadcasters, but it is less compatible when mixing and matching with MiniDV (in my opinion).

Then there are some emerging formats that I've seen for sale or read about, but haven't bought into yet:
MicroDV - a very small tape in very small Sony camcorders
MiniDVD - a DVD disk in a cartridge used in some Hitachi camcorders.
MPEG video in still digital cameras - some still camera manufacturers feel that you want to also record video with their units. Usually you can collect snippets of less than a minute. The results are interesting to post on a web site, but that's about it. This video is usually captured on whatever memory sticks or diskettes the camera uses -- another whole subject beyond the range of this discussion.
DVD - A major playback format but not yet widely available in camcorders.

I didn't go into all the older formats and broadcast formats that are still lurking around: 3/4", BetaMax, BetaSP, and 1" to name just a few. On top of that, if you are sort of an international soul, you've run into the fact that other parts of the world have different TV standards. Ours is called NTSC, much of Europe is PAL, France is SECAM and there are subsets of these. If you are a student of world history shortly after World War II, you can fan out these three major formats to the rest of the world by who was in charge of or aligned politically with whom. The tapes and disks are the same mechanically, but what's recorded on them is different. It takes special equipment to translate from one format to another.

A big part of our business is dedicated to just transferring all these old and new formats to the more popular playback formats: VHS and DVD. The digital formats are here to stay and pretty-much obsolete the older formats. As this is written, high definition camcorder equipment is not yet available for consumers -- this equipment will probably be very expensive when it first shows up. Get a good camcorder today while everyone is still healthy and around, and the kids haven't grown too big, and don't second guess yourself about what might or might not be coming down the road.
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Chances are your video camera has more buttons on it than you wish it did. To use it you need to know where about four buttons are -- you may be able to take stunning videos even though you never master all the others. Let's start there (but not spend too much time on it because you are probably already checked out on their use):

On/Off - On some brands you actually have to find two or three switches to accomplish this. You may be required to choose between camera and VCR or VTR, you may have to open shutters over the lens or remove a lens cap, and you may have choices about snapshots, locked, standby, or video. You're probably ready when you see a picture through the viewfinder with no unexpected icon flashing in the middle.

Zoom - Changes the lens setting from wide angle to telephoto. You see what's happening in the viewfinder.

Red "Take" button - Rolls the tape. Usually "REC" shows in the viewfinder when recording and "STDBY" shows when the tape is stopped.

Beyond that everything else is automated on most consumer camcorders. You only have to master all those other buttons if you want to take control of things like focus, exposure, shutter speed, color balance, stabilization, depth of field, freeze motion, volume, and tons of other special effects and titling. On most camcorders the default manufacturer settings are the place to start -- they've done a very good job taming all these options. You should only need to make changes for particular scenes when you see things going wrong. So let's not trail through all the buttons and menu options out there right now. Instead let's focus on you and all the problems you can create.

Let's examine other areas that separate the pros from the beginners. It's always said, and frequently demonstrated, that if you put the cheapest pile of junk camcorder in the hands of a pro, the resulting footage will look dazzling. It doesn't work the other way around. It's not the tools that separate the 8-year old baking her first cake from her grandmother -- it's lots of little things, some of which are hard and tedious to document, and some of which fall into discussions and hot arguments that might be lumped together under the category called "style."

Let's get you started with some of the obvious areas. As you shoot video you will naturally get competitive with and wonder why your footage doesn't measure up to the footage you see on TV and in the movies. This will cause you to start adding tricks to your trade consciously and unconsciously. Most of us are very critical viewers of TV and movies.

The first sign that there is a rank amateur running the camera comes when you realize it is being hand-held because the picture bounces around (and may actually make some viewers seasick, watch out!). The standard answer to this is to lug a tripod around with you. This is great if you are going to be positioned in the same place for more than three minutes filming a game or stage performance, but if you are zipping around like a fly on the wall you have to take other measures. Here are some:

Lean on things while filming to stabilize yourself. Find a tree, a wall, a table, a friend . . .

Take a deep breath and hold it. Dig your elbows into your inflated rib cage creating a triangular bracing system between the camcorder and your stable chest. Do not answer any questions thrown at you and stop filming before your whole body starts convulsing trying to purge the stale air.

Zoom out (going to a wide angle setting) and then move yourself and camera in close to the subject. Wide angle shots are much easier to hold steady. Zoomed in telephoto shots really need a good tripod.

Practice, practice, practice. While rolling tape, pick a stationary object near the corner of the viewfinder, lock in on it, and don't let it move around in the viewfinder. This turns your whole nervous and muscular system into a self-correcting stabilization machine. It becomes second nature if you work at it enough just as a waitress can carry a tray of drinks without spilling any.

Push the "take" button to stop rolling tape when you realize you are about to lose stability. You'd be surprised how many shots run until the cameraman bumps into something, loses concentration or literally falls off a step.

Be sure the camera's built-in motion stabilization feature is turned on. On some brands the stabilization feature reportedly snaps and jerks the picture too much as the camera is moved around. You'll hear that the feature should be turned off. Don't accept this advice as gospel -- play with it for a while first because this objection is true on only a small percentage of camcorders.

Don't dismiss using a small mono pod or very light portable tripod for those "on the go" shots. These won't serve you well when shooting a long event but may be just the ticket when moving around like a fly on the wall.

Another rule to consider is how long your shots should be. Watch TV and count how long their shots run. You'll notice that the average 30-second commercial may have 20 different shots. Pretty much the same with MTV. Now watch situation comedies and cops and robber stories -- maybe shots stay on 3 to 5 seconds. Follow up with slow running talk shows on PBS. Even there they switch the camera before 10 seconds have gone by.

Back when you were getting advice with your home camera movie film from Kodak, the advice they gave was to count to 7 and shut the shot down. They advised against lots of jerky short clips. While that was in a slower and more graceful period of time, it's still a rule to seriously consider. Tightly edited sales pitches, action packed movie clips and music videos may demand one to three second clips, but this is too fast for general family footage. We find that when people put photographs together in a video presentation, six seconds for each photo is about the right time.

On the other hand, you'll lose your audience if you make your shots too long. I can't tell you how many times I've seen shots of a baby being fed in its high chair that a proud parent lets roll for over a minute. It's equivalent to a 3-hour sermon in church or a filibuster in congress.

Even though you and I may have no interest in a "feed the baby" sequence unless we know the baby, it might keep our attention if broken up into multiple shots such as an establishing shot showing where we are, feed the baby, look at the mother, close up of the mess, close up of mother's stress, picture of baby wiggling feet in the air, mother leaning back in exhaustion . . . . All of this puts you the videographer to work. You have to move around and compose several shots telling a story. Some shots may be long, some short, but the overall impact is dramatically improved.

Closely related to this is rule #3: avoid "hunting" with the camcorder. We've all seen shots where the camera is panning to the left surveying the scene only to change direction and pan back to the right again, then no, maybe what it is looking for is down, let's zoom in for a second, darn it moved out of the shot, let's follow it putting everything out of focus, well heck, we seem to be looking at a blank wall, and with a shake of the camera, it's turned off finally, followed by a totally unrelated shot taken hours later.

You avoid hunting by following rule #2: shut the camera off when a shot falls apart. Also you avoid hunting by getting your head out from behind the camera before you start the shot and planning out what you are going to shoot. If you want really good footage, you might practice the shot a couple of times before you push the red "take" button. Does it stay in focus, is the movement too extreme, is there a bright light or window that comes and goes as you pan causing the camera to change the color and brightness of the subject, etc., etc.?

Paint your scenes with shots that move in one direction, then quit. Don't backtrack in the same shot. This applies to all three movements you control: panning, tilting, and zooming. This seems so simple and yet this indecisiveness shows up all over the place in the work of amateurs. You "hunt" before you "roll." A few seconds of planning pays big dividends.

Rule #4 builds on the two previous rules -- vary your shots. Some shots should be from a distance to establish where we are and some should be very tight so we can really see the subjects in your video. Some shots should be long and some short. Here's what to avoid: lots of mid-range shots with three or more people posing in them.

TV is an "in your face" medium -- watch it closely. It sits across the room from you. The pros cut the tops off of heads with impunity. You need to be "tight" on a lot of shots to make it interesting but you want to vary it so as not to be too invasive.

Also you need to be sensitive as to whether you are above the subjects you are shooting making them look small and dominated or you are below the subjects making them look lordly, controlling, and terrifying. If you get down on the floor with kids they look a lot more like little human beings when looking straight at the camcorder than if you are always shooting the tops of their heads.

Rule #5: let the motion come to you -- be careful how much you zoom, pan and tilt. Watch what the pros do and you'll be surprised how little zooming you see. Any pans or tilts (looking from side to side or up and down) are generally very slow. When you do see the pros chase the subject, you'll usually then see a series of stable shots to let you get your bearings again.

The pros hate zooming in and out. Instead they lay a track, bring in a crane or rent a well-trained Steadycam operator to follow the subject around smoothly. This technology is beyond the casual user's reach, so we zoom. Best advice, zoom slowly and zoom less than every third shot. Use the zoom feature to frame in a shot correctly before you push the red "take" button, and keep your fingers off it while rolling. Fast or excessive zooms cause nausea and disorientation of your poor audience. You don't want to have to provide air sick bags at your showing.

These rules barely scratch the surface. Start by following them and when your footage looks more respectable, you'll be ready to study the hundreds of other things you see the pros do in great movies and on TV that makes their footage dazzle.

Now let's take on some of the many buttons on your camcorder. You should have a large owner's manual that explains what they do and I don't intend to duplicate that. (Most owner's manuals were written in Japanese first and then are translated into dozens of languages, perhaps by a computer. Legal warnings probably fill the first two pages and the really interesting stuff is frequently buried away in tiny-typeface footnotes. Don't get discouraged, you are not alone when wondering if you no longer know how to read.) If you've studied photography a lot, the information that follows may be old hat, but I've got to cover it to show you why you may want to explore some of the buttons from time to time.

Basically you are simply managing light and motion. Start with light: too much light and everything is blistered out, too little light and details get lost in the shadows. The human eye has a much wider range from bright to dark in any given scene than does any video equipment. A video shot of your "true love" that looks OK to you standing there may play back later with white splotches and blisters all over his or her face. How can something like this happen, you ask? You assumed the camera would "close down" automatically when the subject got too bright.

The automation in the camera can fail you if there are extremes in any one shot. It adjusts for the average brightness. Hot areas are averaged with dark areas. The range it can handle is limited. The middle or average of the range you are trying to shoot may not be the setting you want for a correct exposure where the true subject is very "hot" surrounded by a lot of dark holes. You have to take charge deciding to throw away the details in the dark holes in order to get proper exposure of the main subject. Shots of someone on a stage in a spotlight is the most typical example of having to manually take charge of the exposure setting in your camcorder.

The other extreme occurs when details of your true subject are crushed into a gray mess because your subject is surrounded by a very bright background. You need to open up the exposure, throwing away the details in the bright background so you can brighten up and see your subject correctly. Some camcorders have a button called "backlighting" that does this for you.

This doesn't mean your camera can't take pictures in extremely bright or extremely dark places: it can if the whole scene is bright or the whole scene is dark. The thing you have to be sensitive to occurs when there is a mix of bright and dark, your true subject is not in the middle of the range of lighting intensity, and your camcorder is calculating an average brightness setting that is wrong for what you want to capture.

What do you look for to adjust exposure? If your camera is anything like most of ours, there are several ways to adjust exposure -- some are redundant and others handle extreme situations beyond those discussed above. How do you sort it all out?

If your camera has a wheel or dial called exposure and the picture gets dark and light as you turn it, then that's where to start. You will need to "turn it on" telling the camera's automation that you are taking control of exposure and to butt out. This may require you to read the manual -- different manufacturers have different ways to block you from tampering with their automatic settings. Once you are in control, here are several things to consider and several words of advice:

Be sure you trust what your camcorder's viewfinder is telling you. In an ideal situation, you want to play with your camcorder in some very tough situations taking and reviewing throwaway footage before you "go live" on location. The viewfinder may have its own settings which if set wrong will mislead you. For example, if the picture in the viewfinder looks dark and dingy, but it looks great when played back on a TV, brighten the viewfinder setting, not the exposure setting of the footage you're taking.

Flip out screens are a wonderful invention everywhere except outside on a sunny day. Because it's so hard to see anything on them when it's too bright outside, you may be tempted to crank around on the brightness setting of the flip out screen. Fine, but this may seriously mislead you when you come back inside again -- be careful. Try to remember the setting before you changed it outside and go back to that point as soon as possible.

Once you trust what you are seeing in the viewfinder, learn what to look for that clues you when to switch off the camcorder's automation and change to manual exposure control. Then you need to know how to set the exposure manually. Set it wrong and everything will come back too dark or too bright -- sadly it's easy to do.

There is a trick I use when going to manual exposure at an event such as a stage performance or a wedding. Let the automation help you! Before going to manual exposure, zoom in tight on an important face that is lit pretty much as you expect will be common throughout the event. The camcorder should adjust its exposure to a nice mid-point of the light on that face. Then flip the manual exposure feature on. Normally this will "lock-in" the automatic setting that you trust is OK. Do not turn the manual exposure knob -- the camcorder is set to the desired value. You are now free to zoom wide and pan around the room knowing that a bright window in the background won't close the camera's lens down and black holes won't cause the faces of the main stars to blister out.

As I mentioned earlier, many cameras have other ways to accomplish the same results when working with uneven lighting situations. Many have a "backlighting" button that will take faces out of the shadows in a scene with lots of hot spots in the background. Solving the other problem, some have a special features setting that shows an icon with a face in a spotlight. This feature will help eliminate blistered out faces in your video where the main characters are surrounded by dark holes in the background.

You may find these settings are easier to use that trying to adjust the exposure manually. Just be sure to turn them off when no longer needed. We see videos shot with the backlighting feature turned on during normal shots -- they are all washed out.

The camcorder engineers didn't stop there. Lurking behind every senior male electronics engineer is a teenage boy who wants to develop the perfect camcorder that will shoot good footage in near darkness. The race is on between vendors. This means you will likely find still more exposure settings that address this issue. Most of these settings result in footage with horrible color, jerky motion, and grainy images. Go there if you must but all of these features are outside the scope of this booklet.

The next basic issue centers on focus. Most cameras have a very good auto focus feature. This feature probably does a better job by far than you can do manually if you lack experience or just use the camcorder from time to time. Some situations confuse the automation, however, and to get decent footage you will have to jump in and take charge.

There are two things to look for: 1) the camera is focusing on the wrong thing, and 2) the camera is confused and is hunting back and forth for something to focus on. Most camcorders today look for a sharp vertical edge in your picture. Once found, they very quickly focus in and out picking which direction better sharpens this edge in the picture. It's the same process the eye doctor uses: "Which is better, A or B"?

No edge in the picture: the camera is lost. A clear edge close by and another in the distance: the camera is confused which one to select. Most of the time you can help your poor camcorder by just centering in on a sharply defined object that you want to film. If it's really lost and is focusing on the dust on its own lens when you want to shoot a sunset, you can move things along by aiming the camera at a tree or something else in the distance before you push the red take button. Once it's focused for distance shots, it will usually stay there.

If none of this works you are going to have to learn how to turn off the automatic focus feature and take charge of focusing yourself. This is not complicated. One switch or button gives you control and usually the ring around the lens moves so you can change focus. Some camcorders let you go to manual but have a button or spring loaded switch setting that lets you tell the camera's auto focus feature to quickly do its job and return to manual operation.

That's all for now. This is a work in progress and I've put the rough version up on the web hoping for some feedback. If there's interest, maybe that will spur me on to finish it up.