How to Use a Digital Video Camera

Video Transcript

"Let's talk about video camera basics. Most people have a video camera, just like they have a cell phone and all those other things, but they don't know what all those buttons mean. I'm here to tell you, you don't really need to know every single button on your camera, but there are a few that you definitely need to know cause it's going to make your video look professional. One of the first things you need to know about your camera is how many chips it has. If you look at the side of this camera here it says 3ccd. That means there are three chips registering color. Just to make it really simple for you. Red, green, blue. One chip looks at red, one chip looks at blue, one chip looks at green. All those chips together work to bring your image to you in tandem. A not so professional, or consumer camera, only has one chip to register all those colors. That's the first and foremost thing to know between professional and consumer cameras is the chips. The three chip camera has a beautiful, quality picture. The one chip camera has a beautiful, quality picture too, but no where in comparison. If you have a one chip camera and you want to get the best quality out of it, there's one thing and one thing only. Light your scene well. With the three chip cameras, usually comes with something called white balance. It's one of the first things you're going to do when you shoot your video. You're going to take your video camera and someone will stand in the distance where it's lit, with a white board, some kind of white board or even a white wall, or a t-shirt, or something that's pure white, and you're going to hit a button on your camera called white balance. What that actually is doing is taking these three chips that are in your camera, and forcing them all to see white the same way. That way you have a pristine color image. Whenever you change from one room to another or you change your lighting, you want to re white balance. To always keep that pristine video quality. One chip cameras generally do not have white balancing capabilities. Another area to help you when you shoot, on professional cameras, usually they have these little stripes on the inside in your viewfinder. Those stripes are called zebra stripes. They tell you the exposure level that your camera is set. I'm not going to go too far into it. Generally most cameras, on the side, have something called an exposure level. You adjust this exposure level and on the inside of your viewfinder you will see the zebra stripes either become more apparent or less apparent which tells you whether you're over exposed. In case I'm throwing too much out at you at once, just go ahead and hit rewind and look over again the ideas of zebra stripes and white balance. Also, if you can't remember this, look on-line to some digital video definitions about zebra stripes and white balance to help you understand your camera. Let's go further now and take one step closer to making professional videos by looking at audio."