YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts

Chapter 3. 99-Cent Film School: Shooting, Editing, and Rendering

Michael W. Dean

Choosing Your Weapons

To have a chance at being viral, your YouTube videos must have some quality to their look, feel, editing, and audio. They don't need to have stellar technical qualities, but they need to have those considerations not distract from the story and the acting. People don't need to say, "What stunning cinematography!" when they see your video, but if they say, "It's blurry, and the sound is horrible," it will probably never go viral.

Here we'll talk about the first thing to consider in this: choosing your weapons, that is, picking and buying a camera, microphone, and computer. We'll cover the different formats for different budgets—mini-DV, cheap webcam, video with still camera, and video on cell phone, as well as how to get good-looking shots out of any of them and a bit on making video from stills.

Mini-DV

Mini-DV filmmaking turned the world of motion art on its ear when it was introduced in the late 90s. Mini-DV gave filmmakers something that looked almost as good as expensive film, made it cheap to shoot hours and hours, and made it editable on a home computer.

The first mini-DV cameras cost a lot, as much as $4,000, and you can still pay that much (or more) for professional-grade three-chip mini-DV cameras. But the price of consumer cameras (one-chip) has come way down.

One recommendation I have is the SONY DCR-HC48.

http://tinyurl.com/52ytnk (URL 3.1)

This unit costs about $400 new and ...