Getting Started: The Seven Deadly Camera Sins

Good programs start with good camera work. No matter how carefully you plan a show or how assiduously you edit, you can't make a good video out of lousy footage. Garbage in, garbage out, to coin a phrase.

Quality video recording is surprisingly easy to do, as long as you tread the path of video virtue by avoiding the seven deadly sins of camera operation. So, without further ado, here they are.

Firehosing means turning the camera on and then aiming it vaguely at one thing for a moment before wavering off to inspect something else and then sweeping around to almost frame a composition but not quite because the fickle camera has already wobbled on to its next non-frame....

In short, firehosing is the sin of not knowing what you want to shoot. You just sort of wave the camera around in the hope of occasionally capturing something. The resulting footage irritates viewers because it never stays on anything long enough to see it properly. The constant, random motion could upset the innards of a tuna boat skipper.

To avoid this most common of all camera sins, simply frame each shot before you roll tape. Shoot long enough so that viewers can make sense of the image, and stop the camcorder before framing the next shot. If you edit your footage (and you really should, you know) it's okay to keep rolling while waggling your way from shot A to shot B because you will delete the firehosing between the two when you edit.

What if you really want to pan, tilt, or zoom between compositions to show the relationship between them? In that case, start by framing, but not shooting, a rehearsal composition of shot B. Then set up shot A, lay down the footage, and move smoothly and decisively to frame shot B. Your viewers will accept and enjoy the move because it looks planned and well executed.

Snapshooting means making shots too short to view comfortably--shots suitable only for a machine-gun car commercial or a hyper music video.

Snapshooting results from two bad habits: unconsciously treating the camcorder like a still camera, and failing to shoot head and tail footage. Many Getting Starters come to video via still photography, and the habit of point-and-click is hard to abandon in the very different medium of video.

Unless you edit in the camera, it is essential that you roll tape at least three or four seconds before the action you want and another three or four after it apparently ends. There are two important reasons for shooting this bookend material:

• Leading footage starts recording a control track before the essential action begins. In editing, that track will display timecode numbers so that you can cue the shot to hit a precise edit point.
• Bookend footage offers you leeway in adjusting start and end points for the edited shot. Perhaps two times out of five you will want to trim the footage differently from the way you imagined it when you recorded it. Without head and tail footage, you're stuck with the edit choices you made on the fly.

Headhunting is the practice of framing subjects so that their eyes are in the exact center of the image: half- way down from the top and half-way in from the sides. It's called headhunting because the resulting composition looks like the picture in a gun sight. (Ouch!)

Centering people is natural because that's the way we look at them in real life, eyeball to eyeball (unless we're selling them TVs off the back of a truck). But our human vision does not have an unforgiving border around it like the frame around a video image. Like it or not, that frame turns raw visual information into a pictorial composition; and a composition that centers the eyes looks, well, dumb.

As a rule of thumb, or maybe nose, keep the subject's eyes on or above an imaginary horizontal line drawn one-third of the way down from the top of the frame. Interestingly, this one-third eye rule works with most image sizes between full shot (entire standing body) and big closeup (forehead through bottom of chin).