Microsoft Windows Movie Maker 2: Visual Quickstart Guide

Choosing the Right Camera Settings

If you produced camcorders and sold them to untrained consumers, your primary goal, if you wanted to sell a lot of them, would probably be to allow your customers to produce the best possible videos right out of the box—no tweaking of controls required. Camcorder manufacturers are a bright group, and this is pretty much what they've attempted to do.

Still, in certain instances, you can improve the quality of your video if you tune the controls to match your surroundings and the goals of the shot. In addition, there are certain camera features you should always use, and some to avoid at all costs.

Finally, two realities of consumer camcorders—lighting and audio—have their own sets of challenges, which you should ...