Lighting your video shoots can be challenging, especially when you start with video production. You must understand the essential difference between how your eyes perceive light and how the camera lens perceives.
Cameras require more light to provide a qualitative picture than you may imagine. There are more nuances than just light and shadow that you need to consider when planning your video shoot.
It is vital to prepare well and plan accordingly to set everything straight. The below guide can help you find the correct lighting for your videos.
Step 1: Get Everything on Track
Whether you are searching for a video shoot or photography, it is a great idea to find the spot for your location. Consider the lights entering the room through windows and cast shadows – also take into consideration that there may be a quick change in the weather. If you have adequate lights, it is better to avoid depending on natural light, as it is volatile.
Step 2: Choose Right Lighting Types and Options
Affordable Video Lighting Options
You can use cheap clamp lights. As these lights are versatile, one can mount and thus can be used in different ways. However, due to the lack of diffusion and dimming control, these can provide harsh lighting; hence, ibcdata.com recommends using diffusion materials.
Mid-rangeLightings
The studio lighting kits generally use big florescent lights and comprise of diffusion materials. Kits with light stands are suitable for setting up the lighting quickly and usually give higher light output.
Best Lightings
These are video lighting kits and feature a higher price range. These kits include many fancy features like wireless controls, full range dimmers,change the colors, better diffusion, and high output.
Here is a list of best lighting equipment you can use to shoot your video.
Step 3: Set up Three-point Lighting
The three-point lighting is the standard set up for shooting professional videos. The configuration involves a key light, a fill light, and a backlight. The critical light or main light should be the brightest of all and should provide most of the light to your subject.
Fill light will eliminate shadows caused by the key light. It should be less intense than key light, so it removes the shadow but doesn’t make the video flat.
The backlight is used to separate the main subject from the background, creating depth while preventing the flatness of the video look.
Three-point lighting is the best option if you want to shoot promo videos, YouTube videos, webinars, and other similar purpose shoots.
Step 4: Choose the right Light Color Temperature.
Light can be colder or warmer depending on the filament in the bulb. Human eyes can also perceive this. Consider how the office of a doctor looks as compared to a comfortable living room setting. This is the color temperature and can be measured on the Kelvin scale. It is better not to mix lights of different color temperatures. With mixed temperature lights, videos will have improper color balance.
Step 5: Look out for Glare
Glare on the glasses can be a huge problem, particularly around lights with bigger diffusion boxes. To avoid this, you can choose to raise lights on their stands. If you have someone to raise the camera, you can look through the camera viewfinder until the glasses’ glare is no longer visible. If this doesn’t help, try moving your ley light and fill light far from you while keeping them relatively equal.
Follow the above guide to set the right light to provide a professional look to your video. Once you get familiar with the basics, you can experiment with the lights to see what works for you. For more information about the lighting in your video, you can visit deanosborne.com.
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