How to Shoot Great Video With Your Phone

You don’t have to be a professional videographer to shoot video worthy of posting on your college or company website. Smart phone video capabilities become more sophisticated and simpler to use with each new release. But even if you don’t have the latest phone, you can upgrade your video quality by following these 10 tips:

1. Turbocharge your camera. FiLMiC Pro is a $14.99 app for iOS and Android phones that gives you full manual control of exposure, frame rate, aspect ratio, color grading and more.
2. Use a wireless microphone for better sound. View options at various price points by searching “wireless mic for phone video recording” on Amazon.
3. Find an interesting setting with plenty of light and remove anything in the frame that will be visually distracting.
4. Pick a quiet location with minimal background noise.
5. Position your phone horizontally unless you are shooting for a social site like TikTok that requires vertical orientation.
6. Use a tripod to keep the camera steady or a gimbal to stabilize the image when the camera is moving. The PHOPIC tripod and DJI OM 5 gimbal are good choices.
7. If you are the subject and are shooting handheld, hand the phone to a friend. As the video director and/or star, you should not do the holding.
8. Instruct the subject to look into the camera lens, not at the person holding the phone.
9. When you’re finished, export the video using AirDrop; a cloud service like DropBox; or via USB cable to your desktop computer. Emailing or texting video from your phone will lower the quality.
10. Edit the video with a simple app like iMovie (iOS only) or Adobe Premier Rush (iOS and Android). Add polish with transitions, titles and maybe even music.

And for those bigger video projects, the team at Allied Pixel is always available to help.

Meet our team member Tom Mikowski

Tom is VP of Business Development and Higher Education Partnerships. During nearly 30 years working in higher education enrollment, he has worked on numerous projects in the college marketing arena. They include video production, virtual tours, photo shoots, print and digital media and social media campaigns. Tom has a zeal for innovation, technology and building long lasting partnerships with Allied Pixel clients.

We’re proud to work with these new clients

• Barry University
• University of Southern Indiana
• University of Arkansas at Little Rock
• Baker University (Kansas)
• Oystershell Consumer Health
• Putnam Plastics

Congratulations to Neumann University

Neumann won two awards in the national Educational Advertising Awards competition for videos we collaborated on:

• Silver, Outdoor category
• Bronze, Single TV Ad category

As always, I appreciate your thoughts and comments. Email me anytime: bill.haley@alliedpixel.com.

Warm regards,