Nearly everyone the world over celebrates some sort of “Winter Festivity” and it’s the most beautiful time of year for gathering great video of annual traditions along with a reflection of the past year and getting a year-ender together to share with family and friends.

Whether you’re making a holiday video filled with all the pageantry and glorious color, or have taken on the daunting task of making a year-end compilation, there are a few things you can do to make your task a little bit easier, more fun, and artistic.

I’ve covered the holidays for decades and have made many year-ender and ‘this is your life’ compilation videos. Next week, I’ll have some tips on getting those year end compilations together. This week: a few tips for shooting the holiday events, for a special video to give as a gift to family and friends.

If you have some holiday video tips, pass them along and we’ll share them with our wonderful readership, too.

-1- Let the magic of light and color work for you. Here’s a few tricks for shooting holiday lights. first thing’s first: You have to use manual focus and manual iris for these tricks, and a tripod or some other steadying device.

If you see a specially vibrant over-the-top light display on someone’s home, ( or your own!) don’t make fun of it, rather make use of it… the lights can make for a beautiful backdrop portrait. Set your camera and subject across the street from the lit up home, so you’re not too close. Too many people get right in front of the lights for a photo op, and lose a lot of the beauty of the shot. By setting across the street, your lights will be in softer focus, be more plentiful, won’t overwhelm the scene, and your subject will stand out from the background better. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever directed or set up a live event, you know how hard it can be to find reliable and affordable camera operators. Though there is nothing that can beat a knowledgeable camera operator, Panasonic has come close with it’s new AW-HE120 pan and tilt camcorder. Their camcorder can mount to any surface and give a video feed and remote control ability to a director making multi-cam events easier and cheaper than ever to pull off.

Panasonic made this camera 60% lighter than their previous offering, making the camera mountable on almost any surface.  In order to get a video feed, the camera can be connected through HDMI and a standard Ethernet cable. The HDMI gives a high quality 1080/59.94p video feed while the Ethernet cable allows a director to control every aspect about the camera from a distance. The camera also comes with a 20x zoom range so that you can mount it in the back of a room and still achieve excellent close up shots, has a 2.2 megapixel U.L.T. 3-MOS sensor (in true Panasonic style), and has three different ND filters – 1/4, 1/16, and 1/64. Though the ND filters seem like a bit of an overkill given that the camera will almost always be mounted indoors, it did include some excellent engineering with a pan range of -175 degrees to 175 degrees and a tilt range of -30 degrees to 210 degrees meaning that this little beauty has more flexibility than an owl.

For those needing to mount the camera to a white ceiling, the unit comes in pearl white though a black metallic model can be bought for theatrical occasions. Panasonic will be shipping this item in what they call “winter” so expect it to come out shortly before CES in January.  The suggested retail price is $8,900, making it clear that Panasonic is targeting the house of worship and theater markets with this product. However, if you’re finding it hard to get quality camera operators for a fair price, this could be the product you’ve been waiting for.

Videomaker workshops offer a great ways to get good video info fast.  While Videomaker has lots of ways to learn about video — webinars, training DVDs, a monthly magazine, or can getting tips sent daily to your email — nothing quite compares to getting some face-time with a real live person. Luckily, there’s an easy way to get the personal attention that you crave – Videomaker‘s in-house workshops are the perfect opportunity to get all your toughest video and videography questions answered by a live Videomaker expert. Our experts love to help you make better video, so these popular and informative workshops thrive on student questions. Bring your biggest questions and trickiest problems and get some answers.

The Basics of Video Production is a great way to get a hands-on introduction to making videos. Various lectures by video experts will cover the fundamental techniques of shooting, miking, editing and lighting. Our best video experts are always on hand during these educational sessions. Each workshop contains lectures, demonstrations and Q&A sessions with experts. But by far the most popular section of the day is when attendees get to take their cameras out into the field to put all the new techniques they’ve just learned into practice. Previous workshop groups have used their skills to craft professional-looking video movies in just three days. End your weekend with a complete video project to how the class. It’s no wonder that previous attendees rave about Videomaker workshops; 100% of attendees rated this workshop as good or excellent and that’s a record we’re proud of.

Sign up for The Basics of Video Production today and you’re sure to agree.

Intensive Editing is a three-day, hands on course is for students who understand the basics of video editing and want to advance their skills. Each student will work on a supplied HP laptop, using Adobe professional editing software that will take you from the basic skills to some advanced techniques including time remapping, advanced trimming features, multi-camera editing and more. Seating is limited so register for Intensive Editing today!

Sign up for our Intensive Editing Workshop and get ready to learn.

With the aid of green screens and special effects, even the most impossible scenarios can be a believable part of your video. Videomaker’s Green Screen and Special Effects Webinar will teach you how to make the most of green screen and special effects illusion techniques – even with a limited budget.

In addition to valuable information and a free special report, this event will also include live Q&A; our team answering questions. Videomaker’s Green Screen and Special Effects Webinar starts at 11:00 AM (PST) on Wednesday, Sepetember 21st, so be sure to sign up soon!

For years, Videomaker has been offering training events to help our readers improve upon their video production skills. From expos to workshops, our training events have always focused on teaching quality courses in a manner that is easy to understand. Videomaker’s Webinar Training Series provides a wide variety of webinars that cover topics including Advanced Editing, Documentary Production, Lighting for Video, Advanced Shooting, Audio for Video, and much more.

Have you ever had an idea for a documentary, but just didn’t know where to start? Videomaker’s Documentary Production Webinar will help you obtain the knowledge you will need to organize your documentary, tell your story effectively, and improve your chances for distribution success. With the proper techniques applied to your documentary, you can affect how the viewer perceives the issue while increasing the overall impact of your documentary.

Following the webinar, all registrants will receive a copy of our special report special report, Mastering the Documentary Interview. In addition to valuable information and a free report our Documentary Production Webinar will also include  live Q&A; our team answering your questions. Videomaker’s Documentary Production Webinar starts at 11:00 AM (PST) on Wednesday, June 22, so be sure to sign up soon!

Not interested in Documentary Production? Videomaker’s weekly Webinar Training Series is taught by our experts and features a wide variety of video production and post production topics including Advanced Shooting, Green Screen and Special Effects, Advanced Editing, Lighting for Video, and much more.

Videomaker has been publishing video production tips and techniques for 25 years and on June 2, Matt York and Videomaker celebrated our Silver Anniversary with a party for family and friends. During the event, Matt sent a live-streaming message to our readers, contributors and a host of others who helped make Videomaker the success it is today. The following is the text from Matt’s live streaming speech.

Welcome to our humble abode and thank you for coming.
As you look around you will find the people most responsible for Videomaker’s success. I want to extend my warmest appreciation to each and every one of them. Starting with my son, daughter and wife (all of whom currently work here), thanks for putting up with me and my devotion to this company that, at times, may have overlapped into our family a bit too much. Thanks especially to my wife Patrice for being the keeper of the purse strings. She and I are a perfect balance, as I tend to be the visionary risk-taker and she’s the pragmatic voice who keeps us grounded in reality. As Vice President she has been and remains “the other half of the sky” involved in every important decision ever rendered here.

Outside of my family, I want to recognize the people who I approached 26 years ago when I first had the idea for this magazine. One of our local business leaders, Howard Isom, and I spoke last week about the day we first met. Howard said I was just a hippie living in the woods with a crazy idea and that no one had ever published an international magazine in this town before.

Some of the people who I pitched actually invested in Videomaker (Howard wasn’t one of them), but Garey Weibel (the then Publisher of our local newspaper, the Chico Enterprise Record) did. Some would say that Garey and I couldn’t have been more different, but we developed a keen relationship based on mutual respect. Garey’s advice over the first few years was indispensable and more than once helped save this fledgling company from disaster. In one harrowing incident in our earliest days, Garey literally rescued the company from the brink of disaster, contributing venture capital when it looked like this start-up was going to run out of cash.

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