Basic terms associated with shooting videos

New to the world of shooting videos? Then fear not, it is not a very difficult art to master. Practice and following some basic rules will get you a long way in making perfect home videos.

Moms will find this a great way of making memories for their children by recording their various antics in video format. But before you start, catch up on some terms which is regularly used by cameramen.

1. Panning:

If you’re shooting something that is moving, then follow the subject with the camera instead of moving yourself. Avoid walking or anything more than pivoting at the waist as our aim here is to minimize the camera shake. This method of moving just the camera is called panning.

2. White Balance:

Objects look different under different light sources, for example in sunlight, in shade, indoors at night et al. In order to ensure that white objects don’t look yellow or blue-ish under different sources of light, you need to adjust white balance. It can either be done manually, or you can point the camera to a white sheet of paper and let the camera figure out the best settings.

3. Pixel:

It is short for Picture Element and is a small square, millions of which together make up the entire image. You will see these squares if you zoom in as much as possible and every pixel can been assigned a value between 0 and 225. One of the ways in which manufacturers market their cameras is in terms of pixel count, which is the number of individual pixels that go into making of each image. It could range from 1 million ( or 1 Megapixel) to around 14 million (or 14 Megapixels).

4. Aspect Ratio:

It is the ratio of the length of the sides of the images. For example, a 35mm film frame is usually 36mm wide and 24mm high. This gives an aspect ratio of 36:24, which is equal to a ratio of 3:2. Most video cameras use the ration 4:3, so that display in 800x600 monitor is perfect.

5. Digital and Optical zoom:

Most digital cameras have both digital and optical zoom. In Optical zoom, the lens changes focal length and magnification as it is zoomed and photo quality remains high throughout. But in digitally zooming an image, the camera simply crops the image to a smaller size, then enlarges that portion to fill the frame again. This often results in significant loss of picture quality.