5 Tips to Instantly Make Your Videos Look More Professional

Identify Target Audience

Identifying your target audience is essential for all types of media. This will allow you to plan your video production to appeal to a certain demographic, leading to long term consumers. This may seem like you are limiting the number of potential customers, but this is not the case as you will still attract people outside of your target audience.

High Quality Audio

Investing in high quality audio equipment will significantly improve the quality of your videos. Try to avoid using a camera or phone microphone as the audio quality won’t be ideal. However, for practice they will work just fine!

Lighting

Access to lighting equipment provides the freedom to shoot any time of the day in any location. Lighting can drastically change the style and mood of a video. Different uses of lighting can help to tell different stories. For example, scenes with low lighting can convey mystery or sadness. On the other hand, scenes with plenty of light can convey cheerfulness.

Background

The background plays a role for setting the mood and style of video. There are two types of background, real and fake. A real background uses the location of the set, for example a city centre or a football stadium. A fake background is often through the use of a green screen where you can display a graphic of your choosing.

Keeping the background simple is a great way to focus the attention on the subject. If the elements in the background are too empowering, this will drift the attention away from the foreground. The colours of the foreground and background are important to consider to avoid them clashing.

Shoot to edit

Shooting to edit is shooting with the intention of doing as little work as possible in post-production. Too much editing in post can lead to unnatural looking shots.

B-roll

There are steps you can take to increase the efficiency of your editing experience. One of these steps is shooting plenty of B-role. B-roll is your secondary footage. An example of this is shots of a university to supplement your primary footage of interviewing people on campus.

B-roll has multiple uses. It assists in the storytelling, adds depth to create a more visually appealing video. It is also useful for covering up potential mistakes when filming.

Keep unusable footage to a minimum

It is important that you focus on the quality of every shot (lighting, audio, camera focus, camera shake etc.). This will save you time in post-production as you won’t have to spend time editing or removing subpar footage.