Tips for creating a pre-recorded video

If you are planning to record some video to include in your presentation, here are some tips that may help.

1. If using a phone, record your video horizontally, not vertically.

It may feel natural to hold your phone in portrait mode, but most of our screens these days (other than phones which do both) display video in landscape format so it looks odd if you have a vertical segment in the middle of the wide screen.

2. If you are recording with your phone, have a look in the settings and see what size video you are recording. These might look like 720p, 1080p, and 4k (among other possibilities). Capturing 1080p is a good balance of size and quality without being too taxing on your system.

Try and get good lighting on your face. Don’t sit with your back to a window or other light source, instead face it. This stops you from becoming a silhouette.

If you are using a window as part of your light, you will get a better look if it is indirect light (i.e., the sun is not directly blasting in on you or part of your background).

Also think about where you are sitting in relation to the main light source (even if that light is just a regular fixture on the ceiling). Try to have it be in front of you. It is ideal if you can see it (without overly looking up) from where you are. This will keep your eyes well lit. If the light is directly overhead, you might get what is sometimes referred to as racoon eyes (darkness cause by the shadow of your brow). Again, if the light is behind you, it can confuse the camera and make your face overly dark.

The other side of having good light has to do with the quality of the image the camera can physically take. You may have noticed your phone takes much better pictures outside during the day and much worse pictures indoors or at night. The camera sensor in webcams and phones is generally very tiny. They can be fine when there is plenty of light but the image can get very grainy and soft very quickly if the camera is struggling with low light.

Check out some examples here.

4. If you can, try and minimise background noise while you are recording. Avoid filming in areas near roads/rivers, turn off music, move kids/pets into different rooms, etc.

5. Write some notes about what you want to say beforehand. It will help.

6. If you can’t manage to record everything you want to say in one go without fumbling a line/a dog barking/etc, consider breaking your content into smaller segments, and then edit them together later (see the iMovie tutorial for an example of this).

7. Wait a beat (1-2 seconds) after you press record. That little bit of extra video can add wiggle room which can help during editing.

8. If you want to add narration to a clip you are recording, it can be difficult to do both at the same time. Consider recording the narration afterwards and adding it to the edit. If you are in iMovie you can do this in the application. If not most phones come with a basic voice recorder now, or you can capture audio on Zoom if you need to.

9. It can feel a bit unusual to speak straight to a camera if you haven’t done it much. Try sticking a small cut-out of a face next to the camera (really near – maybe 1cm away) and make eye contact with the picture while you are speaking.

10. If you are speaking to camera, plan to throw away your first few attempts. Even if you are scripted and planning to record in pieces as above, push your way through a few times as rehearsal. Record them to get a sense for what it is looking like, but plan to throw them away as you will improve as you go.

11. If you are capturing video scene (i.e. not a person speaking) try getting lots of short clips. If you watch the windows video editor tutorial below you will see that he has recorded a bunch of 10 to 20 second clips and then takes segments from those. Even if you use a different editor you can get a good sense of putting a short video together from that tutorial.

12. If you are on Windows a simple/free video editor is called Windows Video Editor. It is a part of the newer windows Photos app. There a really good basic overview on getting started here:

13. If you are on Mac OS a simple/free video editor is called iMovie. There is a great introduction to getting started.

14. If you have an iPhone and want to edit your video on a Windows machine (if you are having issues) you might want to visit this link for some guidance. 

If you need any assistance or questions, get in touch with the learning and development team and we will do our best to offer guidance, or find someone who can.