4 Mistakes Video Bloggers Make And How You Can Avoid Them

Here are four Video Blogging mistakes I see all the time and what you can do to avoid them.

  1. Mistake: your background isn't doing anything for you.  Don't set up in front of a grey wall. Or a brick wall. Or any kind of blank wall.

    Of course you can use white, grey, or black wall as an advantage. But you need good lighting to do that. Most V Bloggers don't use lighting so I counsel to just stay away from this: 
6a00e554caf24788340115705dd3ea970c-800wi.png

This looks better. Hey, who is this guy?  Note, I'm not using my laptop camera. 

Instead I have a mini DV camera (Canon HV30) perched slightly above me.  You'll see that the walls are creating interesting angles. The chair to the left breaks up the white wall and that the splash of blue on the wall helps enormously:
 

6a00e554caf24788340115715332b3970b-800wi.png

2. Mistake: your shots have you centered up in the frame.  Think about negative space. You will look stronger in the frame if you don't appear bullseye in the center of the frame all the time. 

This guy is centered up. We get bored of even 2 minutes of this.
 

6a00e554caf2478834011571534899970b-800wi.png

This person is against a black background but he's lit well so it's OK.

6a00e554caf2478834011571534b61970b.png

This video can be seen here: http://www.viddler.com/explore/AdventCreative/videos/2/

3. Mistake: you stick to a medium shot. In the following example, two of my social media gods, David Meerman Scott shoots a video of Chris Brogan with his Flip Mino.

David chooses to let the camera hang on a medium shot.  Two problems with this.  In video, only the face is expressive.  While Brogan has a nice chest and cool Sopranos-like shirt on. It doesn't provide the viewer with any information.  

The eyes, the mouth... focus on that.  Also, note all the head room above Chris' head.  Close that up.

4. Mistake: No Editing.  It's easier to hit record spew out what you're going to say in a medium shot and then post.  But that would be like writing a rant and not putting in paragraph marks or punctuation.  

Editing takes time to master.  iMovie has made their program pretty much worthless.  So try ScreenFlow, Final Cut Express or Adobe Premiere. Lynda.com has some great tutorials on Final Cut.

I haven't checked out the editing capabilities of the iPhone yet but it looks (just from the ad) like they are basing it on their iMovie platform. Yuck.  

Look what a little editing does here (and a mix of settings):