How To Make Your Videos Look More Professional - Like Apple Does!

So, how do you like my new background?—the white one back there. Now, it’s not actually
a green screen. I’m not doing anything fancy here with the editing or with the software.
It’s purely just white background. Now, it’s not always easy to get this kind
of effect. But if you have the right equipment, which is quite affordable and you can get
away with quite affordable equipment; you can get this effect really nicely.
And what’s cool about this effect is that it gives you obviously a really nice and professional
look to your videos. Companies like Apple have done this really well when I do these
interviews with their product designers and with everybody on the team. And they have
this really nice white background that allows them to create this purity. And it’s clean,
no frills type of videos. So I will show you inside this video my new
studio set up which is inside my house. There’s still a lot of junk in the studio. It’s
more like a studio. It’s more like a garage. It’s the garage that I’ve just set up
with some interesting things. So this is just early days and hopefully as I go through the
process of setting this up, I’ll be documenting this for you so that you can do something
similar in your own garage. I’ll show you a bit of a tour of what I’ve got and show
you how you can get this sort of effect. Talk to you soon.
Okay. This is the white background, without me on it, and I want to show you the set up
that I have. Over here I’ve got two lights. There’s one light there. And these are fluorescent
lights—one on that side and if you go to the other side, there’s another one there.
They’re exactly the same. Let me just see if I can come around here and see if you can
just see what they’re like. They’re pretty bright lights and basically, what they’re
doing is they’re shining on top of this white screen that I have here.
Now, it’s actually just a screen that I’ve stuck on to the wall, as you can see here.
I went to buy this screen actually from a video shop. But there’s no reason why you
can’t just use any kind of white screen that you can find in your house—even maybe
a bed sheet that could do the job. Something that’s kind of white or pretty close to
white. So I’ve just put it up on the wall. Pretty basic stuff as you can see. I mean
you’ve never sort of expected this kind of basic technology if you saw just the final
product of the video. Anyway, in the back of me, normally this is
where I’d be standing. As you can see this is just in the garage and what you see there
is the tripod where the camera normally sits. Now, I’ve got the camera on my hands. So
you can’t see the camera. But that is the tripod. So it’s purely just standing there.
And then I have one more light sitting here just next to the camera. You can possibly
use two lights to get this sort of effect but I found one light is fine. And you know,
I’m recording this at night. So what’s cool about this set up is that you can record
at any time during the day. So perhaps what I’ll do next is just quickly
draw you a picture of the lay-out — the plan view of all these components so that
it’s very clear for you to see how it all fits together.
So I will show you what I’ve got set up for my own situation here. But of course,
you can just use this as input for your own situation. So this is my garage. Say, this
is something that represents my garage. The place where I have the screen is over here.
So this is the screen - kind of sitting right over there. My camera is sitting about over
here. So you need some good distance for it. So that’s the camera. I’m obviously not
a good camera drawer. But anyway, that’s the camera.
Then I have two lights here. So there’s one light here and there’s another light
here and the job of these lights is to shine nice, bright light onto this white background.
It kind of over exposes it. But I have another light here and the purpose
of this light is to shine light on me, or if there’s another thing that you’re recording.
Now if you want to, you can also get another light here that does the same thing. But I
found just one of these is good enough especially if you angled it kind of close—you have
it close to the camera. So your angle is not quite 45. It’s more like 20 or 30 degrees.
Anyway, so I’ve got this set up just for this one light and with the camera over here.
So that’s what it looks like looking from the top.
Ok. So what do you actually need to be able to pull this off in a nice way? What I’ll
firstly do is tell you about the equipment that I’m using to get this effect and then
I’ll explain some other ways that you can do it that’s maybe more affordable.
What I basically have are three lights. So I’ve got a light over there—that is shining
lights on to me or the subject or the thing or person that you’re recording. Then I
also have two lights behind me. There’s one back there and one right back there—another
fluorescent light. So all three of these are professional fluorescent lights. Each one
is about $400. So they’re not cheap lights. But you can use just normal fluorescent lights
as well, depending on the kind of camera that you’re using because sometimes there’s
a bit of a flicker issue. But if you’ve got the right kind of camera, it shouldn’t
be an issue. The camera that I’m using for this recording
is a Canon 60D which is just an amazing camera for recording short clips. It can only record
for about 12 minutes at a time. But that’s not really a problem because you just press
Start and Stop and then keep going. Stop and Stop, wherever you are in the sequence.
The other bit of equipment that I’ve been using, of course, is my Macintosh computer
with ScreenFlow as the editing software. Now because this is so nicely set up, I don’t
actually have to do much in the software to get this effect. The recording that I put
into the software—the footage already looks great because I’ve got it set up like this.
Now, on this particular camera I’ve just set the ISO to Auto and it seems to do a great
job. If you somehow have a problem with the white background there not being white enough,
you can increase the ISO to higher levels. You may need to play around with this a little
bit to get this sort of effect. If you’re using a camera like a Flip for
example or the Kodak Zi8, it may be a little bit more tricky to get this sort of effect.
But all you need to do in the software is increase your brightness or the gamma or the
contrast. And maybe you need to play around with those settings individually. Just search
for them inside the software. They’re not too difficult to find. Normally it’s the
brightness and you may just be able to increase the brightness slightly to increase the exposure
of the background so it’s nice and white. So there you have it.
There you go. It’s pretty easy. It’s not very complicated at all. You mainly do invest
in some good lights and the right kind of camera and maybe a white background or you
can just paint it white if you don’t have a sheet like I’ve got. But really, it doesn’t
have to cost a lot of money. If you’ve liked this video and you haven’t
signed up for my Rapid Video Blogging Report yet, please do so. It’s a 92 page report
totally free. It teaches you how I turn my video views into cash. And it’s there for
you totally free to download at RapidVideoBlogging.com. Thank you for watching and I’ll see you
inside the next video.