Hey guys, new here, I'm directing a short video for myspace really soon, sort of a prequel to a zombie film. It's going to be hand-held style (like Quarantine or Cloverfield) and I have a pretty neat and unique story reason why the situation would be naturally recorded.

Anyway, the camera I have probably isn't that good, but it works for the story. I was looking for some advice though on how exactly to just get the best quality and appearance nearest to what the lighting and stuff really looks like in real life.

The camera I have has enough settings I suppose, shutter rate, iris, backlight compinsation, focus, white light setting...even a couple confusing ones like soft skin and magicpix. I know that the biggest issue I dislike is how alot of lights look orange; I definatly want a white-ish look to the video. Another problem is the video is going to switch from natural daylight, to dark building, to daylight again without being able to stop the camera at any time. I guess all I can ask for is some really great tips on how to adjust the settings to have the overall best picture, and if there's any wacky setting secrets, hopefully you can let me know!

Thanks!!!

P.S. I think the main things that are confusing me is the iris and the shutter rate. I guess those are two things I know not much about. =(

1. Manually white balance to get rid of the orange look, or if you have a tungsten preset use it.
2. Make sure you have additional lighting in every place that you shoot. If you're camera is not good with low light situations additional lighting is a must. Also, make sure you test out each of your shots (especially the daylight to dark building) to make sure that they work. Remember that it's better to have more light than less because you have the ability to darken it up in post, making things lighter doesn't work too well.

Practice with your manual controls. You can get much better results when each change in iris or focus is deliberate.
As for the white balance issue, just keep that on automatic. the film will look orange indoors but you can fix it a bit in post to get more of a consistent look. Also, you can get the whiteish look in post too.
Also, keep the exposure time at around a 30th of a second. If you don't, movement will look too choppy in daylight and too smeared in low light. Leave exposure to the iris. And if you have a camera that can do 24p or progressive at all, do that too. These things will give you a slightly more cinematic look. A lot of people will think that for cloverfield type films you should make it look as much like video as possible. but cloverfield was shot partly on a sony digital cinema camera that will give you anything but a video look. so do as much as you can to make it look cinematic instead of homemade. It will be more convincing, but still look like a cloverfield type of movie.

I read/watched some things about the production of Diary of the Dead and the hand-held camera movies really are just as complex! Some of the really neat things I thought up about my video; the story-line is that a group of friends visit this girl for her birthday, and they plan this surprise with a cake and everything, and they want to film it...so they go to her trailer, which is sort of naturally run-down, and they go inside and find that the place is trashed and that the girl has become an enraged virus person. Before they find her and she chases them though, the guy holding the camera walks around the trailor trying to find her in the dark, and the neat thing is I also thought that he could also hold the cake with the candles lit, which would give lighting to the area since the lights will not be on. But if that doesn't look right or the cake is to hard to hold at the same time, I may get someone else to hold the cake. For having extra lighting, I know that I'm probably going to need extra mics for sounds, and I thought about lightings...but if this is definatly on-location, would it be fine to just let more sunlight into the rooms, or what? My camera is pretty good in the dark (and it has a light and everything) so hopefully I wouldn't have to go as far as really setting up alot of lightings.

Basically, the video is going to be very 'home funniest videos' style, like you know how you see those videos on that show and its all natural home-video stuff? Like, I want it to look this way, but at the same time, I definatly want to film the best quality I can to make sure I get everything in the shots and all the details (since like you guys said, alot of things can be done in post). I guess the questions I still have, is what about shutter rate? Just playing with my camera and all, it seems that changing the shutter makes everything darker and grainier, what really is the purpose of shutter anyway if it just makes everything darker? Also, the iris on my camera seems pretty sensitive, you change it and things get too-light really quick or too dark. It seems one setting generally looks good in all lightings, for this cam. But I havent been to location yet, so I'll have to see.

I really like your idea for the birthday cake. The only problem is the candles are probably not bright enough to make a good image on your camera. But you can always fix these kinda things by having someone walk around behind the cameraman with a light bulb at the end of a stick to give some extra light.

The shutter rate just determines the duration of the exposure. The longer the rate, the more light will be read, and vice versa. So setting the rate to something faster than 1/30 a second will darken the image. By the way, is that how your camera measures it? In fractions of a second? Or does it measure it in degrees? But like I said, leave it at 1/30 because anything else will look pretty bad.
Do digital cameras measure the iris in f-stops? It should either say something like f-11 or f/11 if it is. This is the aperture of the lens. When you move it from f-11 to f-8, you're letting in twice as much light. f-stops are also confusing because the smaller the number, the more light is entering your camera and vice versa. This should be your primary control for changing light, not the shutter time.
I'm not sure why it would only look good with one setting, but play around with it a bit. Go into kinda dark rooms and daylight and stuff and set the shutter rate to 1/30 and then play around with the iris.

What camera do you have by the way?

As for lighting, don't worry about it too much. Just use the lights that are normally in the room. Letting in some sunlight is good, but try not to film the window at all because it won't look too great (it will just overpower the image).

Getting a camera to act just right can be tricky, but a lot of these things can be touched up in post. What editing software do you have? A lot of them can do minor color grading, which is really useful to get that whitish look you were talking about. But my advice to you would be to BE SUBTLE with the color grading. A lot of people go crazy with it once they figure out how to do it. When you grade too much, it starts to look like an amateur film that is trying way too hard to be professional looking. But a lot of people don't know that professionals shoot to get really natural colors, not many extremes. Some do some crazy things with the film, like bleach bypass, which is where you skip the bleach step in the film development. It can give you a really interesting look (the color image superimposed on a black and white version of the image), but just know that it's extremely hard to reproduce these kind of effects digitally because it's very easy to make them just look bad. So try your hardest to get everything looking the best in camera before it goes to the computer.

My camera, the iris starts at like what it says is '18 GB' and gets darker going down in number. The shutter starts at 1/60 and gets darker at 1/100 then to 1/120.

My cam is just borrowed from a friend actually, lol, it's a Panasonic Dvd-R one, I actually can't find any special name on the camera anywhere to know exactly what model it is, unless the model is the No. VDR-D220. Anyway, I've been playing with it alottt in my room, daylight with the lights off, and at night with the lights on and off.

The two worst things I dislike about this camera: the area of depth and the light focus. Say you're filming a object very far away from the cam in zoom. This camera is mega-clear, but the second a closer object comes into view, like say, the tiniest portion of a chair or wall, it suddenly focuses on that nearer thing, no matter how tiny the atom of the object is. Same thing happens with the light focus, if you're filming a sunlit room, everything looks clear and bright as realism, but the SECOND a tiny portion of a window comes into view, it focuses on the window and blacks everything else out. I'd expect this on auto, but it does it on manual =[.

But maybe that's just normal....I still dislike it though! lol

Anyway, I think today, I'm going to film alot of stuff while I'm riding into town with my mom, like, alot of street signs and people and just put it together in collage. Problem is, I don't have a good editing program besides what the camera can do itself and windows movie editor (eww)...the camera's own program may end up being good enough but...for the long run, is there any good free editing programs about on the net?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: CSmitty,

Oh right, I completely forgot about interlaced vs progressive stuff. In that case, the 1/60 shutter is the way to go.
It also must have sort of a fake manual because it shouldn't be compensating for light unless it's on auto. I guess you would have to live with it and shoot it so that no real bright windows come into view.

Try to at least see if your camera has a manual focus though. I doubt it, but it can always be helpful to actually be able to focus on what you want... Although, seeing as your camera also adjusts for light when it's on manual, the manual focus might just do the same thing.

As for free windows editors, I'm not sure, I tend to stick with the other end of the computer spectrum if you know what I mean. I think there's one called Videospin that's supposed to be pretty cool.

If you want to do color grading however, you're going to have to find a copy of after effects or magic bullet looks or something. Those might actually not be very cheap though, so just look around on the internet.