 So all of these sessions are recorded for, for you to access in the past. So Bruce has talked about how you compose your story and your script and your concept. And to be honest, these days, the way that the technology has moved, that's probably the most complicated part of your video process. Working out what you're going to film, how you're going to film it, when you're going to film it, things like that. Because we have access to all of these great reasonably low-cost pieces of technology that we can use these days to film our content. And today I'm going to talk quite a bit about this thing here, which while not really being a cheap piece of technology, is a piece of technology that most of us have got in our pocket. The good old smartphone. But we need to talk a little bit about what smartphones are good at, what smartphones aren't good at, and then what other equipment you'll need to get the most out of using your smartphone for video content. Now, if there's any other questions, like I said, along the way, or you've got any input, things that you use, things that you'd like to talk about, use the chat, I'd like this session to be as interactive as possible can be. And we'll go through those questions as we go. So, let's talk about getting our video together. So these days, back 20 years ago, we had big Betamax type cameras, very big things that went on your shoulder. And that was basically the only way we could get any decent video quality. Some of you or your parents might have been lucky enough to have a handy cam. And if you tried to use that handy cam, it pretty quickly ended up looking like the Blair Witch Project, because they weren't very good at handling those vibrations or things like that. So we've come a long way now where our mobile phones can shoot 4K video, which is fast becoming the fact that quality standard for online video. They've got plenty of storage in them that you can use for filming hours of video content. And the microphones and the video processors and things are pretty good. But there are a couple of things to keep in mind about using your mobile phone for video. Now, first things first, no matter what kind of phone you get, they have very small little sensors. Okay, they're about smaller than my arm or my little finger. Now, why that's important is the smaller the sensor, the hungrier it is for light, and the more it can look like it's shaking when you are filming something. So there's a couple of pretty easy ways that we can deal with that. So for today's session, I just have the fluros on in the room. Can I show you? Is that the camera? There's Harold. Hi, Harold. There's our fluros. Harold's just laughing at my camera work, which I always think is amazing. And there we go. So no big trick photography or fancy lights or anything like that today. One of the key things when you're trying to do video for a non-profit in particular is budgets, often a bit of a concern. We can't always afford to get the big lights out or maybe we don't have room or maybe we're dealing with somebody where those lights might be triggering for them. So the easiest way to manage that is simply to set up in a room that has plenty of natural light or coming through the windows or you've got good room light. If you are more interested in the story and less interested in controlling the light like we often are, you can get by with using the room lights just fine. If you're outside, you can get by using the available light outside. Just try to avoid any sort of harsh difference in light. So if you're in an area where you've got half shadow, half sunlight, you probably just want to move. Make sure you don't have the sun coming straight into that sensor on the camera. Now if you do that, we can avoid buying the expensive lights completely. Just makes it going to be a little bit fussier about the shots that we set up. So that's the first thing. That's our lighting sort of. Now the next part we want to deal with is the sensor movement. And you can see that I have got this on a tripod with a little mobile phone grabber thing that fits into the tripod. So this particular one is made by Peak Design and it comes with the mobile phone holder in the bottom here so that you don't have to forget it. Now there's a ton of different holders that you can get. And when we've done these kind of mobile video workshops face to face with big groups, actually I haven't presented this to nonprofits, but when we do present this to groups, we can assemble a tripod and a mobile phone now and a couple other bits that we need for under $10. So you can get a decent tripod that will hold your phone up. A little mount to hold your phone on top of your tripod. $5 on eBay. You can spend a lot as well. Carol's tripod that she's using at the moment is quite a bit more than that. But you don't need it when you're starting out. You just need something that's going to hold the phone stable so that we don't have big, shaky things. And you can see the little bit of jello, the little bit of wobble that's coming into that. We can just avoid that by using a tripod to deal with that. If we want to go a little bit more advanced and a little bit more clever with the way that we do that, these things from DJI, the Osmo Mobile, this is the newest version, which I think is the $5. These are great for just being able to maintain the balance of the video. You see here it's got three motors. One up here, one down here and one here. That move to compensate for your movement so that your vision comes out nice and smooth. They also fold down really small, so pretty easy to just chuck in a backpack or something like that. And you can keep the equipment with you wherever you go. Great for your mobile phone. Great for taking it with you where you need to go. Because if you don't have a good way of being able to just chuck it in a bag and take it with you, you won't, which is always a big problem when you actually need it. You have nothing to smooth out your footage. So now we have a nice, stable camera. We have nice, natural lighting to do our video. So the next thing that we want to look at is how do we get the audio into the camera. Now if you're starting out, depending on how much noise there is around you, you might want to give the inbuilt microphones in the phone a go. And a lot of the time they will be just on. A wide microphone, like this little thing here that I prepared earlier. These are kind of only about $70 for a good one. And you can get them with special plugs that will go straight into the bottom of your phone so that they're going to make sure that they work for your phone every time. Now these ones are made by an Australian company called Rode Microphones, which is, you probably can't see that, that's alright. So Rode Microphones, Australian made, they will clip into your iPhone or your Android phone, Samsung, whatever you've got, so that you can get that microphone in. But the only problem with that is that you've got to make sure that you are then within about that far of your phone. So that's fine, but at the moment Carol's about three microphones away from me, so that's going to make filming her reliably really tricky. But I can put this microphone on me and it gets out of the way nice and easy. I can run the cable through my shirt so that you can't see it. But then what we've got with these ones is the, these ones are wireless. So I can plug my microphone into one of the wireless transmitter. These are super small, super easy to carry around and just slide in through your shirt and it's basically, I keep going, it gets almost invisible at that point. So wireless options for your microphone is going to run you a little bit more. About two or three hundred for those. But they become basically essential, particularly if you're in groups of people. So you don't want somebody running through your shop and pulling over everything that you've set up because your camera's in the, your microphone cable is in their way. So running wireless ones is a bit of a safety benefit. But it's also a convenience factor so that you don't have to worry quite so much about where your people are. These ones in particular work on a wireless signal, so they actually need a second half that plugs into the bottom of your phone so that they can talk to each other reliably. Turn on, power on with the same charger as your phone and off you go. Microphones from there go up to thousands of dollars, but we really need that audio quality solved as a first step. There are, of course, cheaper ways of doing it. You can buy really sort of crappy microphones on eBay for a couple of bucks. If you email us after the event, jump on the refuel-created website and send me a message. We'll send you one hour. But recommend if he's getting serious about video, start off with about that $70 mark and then get some wireless ones as soon as you can because you'll never regret buying a set of wireless microphones. Cool. So we have our camera. We have our tripod. We have our audio. We have our lighting. So now we're good to film. So Carol has reluctantly agreed to be my model for this next segment. Congratulations, Carol. She looks very happy. So let's talk about actually filming your shot. Now you can see in my vision of my iPhone here that we have some guidelines that split the screen into three. So if you are familiar with photography at all, you'll know that that is the rule of thirds. And Carol is trying to align herself with them. And the rule of thirds is essentially just a photography rule where or guideline of thirds, I guess you could call it, a photography guideline where you've got a better composed, better looking, more natural shot if you find this along. So what I want here is a bit of visual interest. Let's say I was going to interview Carol about video. Then what I want to do here is just align this so that I've got a camera in the shot over on one of my guidelines. It's a nice, easy way to start the shot. And then I've got Carol on the other side. So it's composed reasonably naturally so that Carol can now be interviewed and away we go. If you don't have those guidelines, maybe I'll give Carol a break. If you don't have those guidelines on your phone, if you go into your setting options, you'll be able to see where they are. Now, if you're not sure what I'm talking about there or you're going, well, I don't reckon I've seen this before. If you go to your telly, I'm going to draw again. Carol, look out. So if you're watching the telly tonight, your telly probably looks something like this. Maybe it's a little bit straighter than square. You'll probably be watching at some point an interview where somebody is either seated or standing, particularly on the news. And it'll probably be here. This person's on the news. And they'll be sitting over here. This person's not going to be on the news. So what we'll then do, you'll see if I draw my guidelines through and basically split my shot into nine quadrants, nine parts. You'll see that most of the shots that are on interview shows, most of the shots that are on tonight shows, most of the shots that are on TV in general will be broken up, something like that. The people will generally look much better illustrated than that. But the face is generally centered on one of these guidelines. And then there's some negative space left over here just to let the frame breathe. But that will also mean that the person will generally be looking in the direction of the negative space. Now, you can try this for yourself. If you tried to put together a shot like that with the person over here looking off-camera, it looks really, really weird. The person looks uncomfortable, the shot looks awkward. People are really confused about what they're watching. So I would try and avoid that. But if you want to try something different and you want to go, oh, no, no, no. We won't worry about thirds. And I'm going to have my person in the center of my frame instead. What ends up happening is we still have our thirds. And these are in roughly the same spot as they were before. But what you've done now is you've framed the head within the thirds. And you've still got the person's head roughly halfway through that line. So you've done the same thing. They've just moved somewhere else and they're looking at the camera instead. Which can work quite well for testimonials and short social videos. You've got a few different options there. But there's a range of different options that you can put together for your shots. But my suggestion would be you try and stick within those guidelines of thirds, particularly if you're new to video. You haven't done a lot of video. If you use this as a bit of a guide where you get in your feel for what works for you and what works for your organization and what doesn't, you'll be able to pull something like this together reasonably quickly, get your shots and then feel your way through to make sure that you've got what you need coming out of the camera. All right. Now, if I go back to my camera, you can see I have... I'll put this on normal video. We were experimenting with the new iPhone video before. So what I want here is I want to make sure that I've got my video mode correct. So you can see I can select between my 4K and my 1080p. A good trick with 4K is if you have the luxury of shooting 4K, I could shoot this shot of Karam just fine. And then the center third, I could crop in and still get a usable shot for social media. So I have a bit more room to play. Or something better, some carol for a sec. I have some more room to edit that down and to crop that down later on. Because the reality is on social media, most of our video is going to be 1080p at best or high definition. And at worst, it might be some square version for your social instead of being the normal wide-screen angle. So that gets me through the process of getting the shot. All I, the only thing I haven't done so far is push the record button. Simple way of managing after you've done the shot is using an iPhone. I'm moving on the iPhone is really powerful these days. You'd be able to drop your vision into iMovie, you'd be able to edit together your footage reasonably quickly, export out and you can put it straight up on social media from there. If you work for an organization that uses Office 365 or Google Workspace, you'd be able to import all your footage into your organizational file storage, which is a good thing to do at the end of every shoot anyway, just so you can keep it for archival purposes. And then you'd be able to edit it on your desktop. This is an area where Macs have a big advantage over Windows computers. If you've got a Mac, you can bring in iMovie and you can get your footage edited reasonably quickly and reasonably easily. If you don't have a Mac, then if you jump onto the local TechSoup affiliates website, so for us in Australia that's connecting up, they will have Adobe Premiere Elements as a low-cost option where you can use something like Adobe Premiere Pro as part of the creative plan. Now, I've been talking for a couple of minutes. Do we have any questions so far? I see we've got a couple more attendees have jumped in. So I'm grabbing a drain. Any more, any questions at this point? Have you got any questions? I have a question. To upload your video to social media platform, what do you think is the best format to export? Shape or file format? Format. Okay, so we would export... You would know this question, Carol, I reckon. We would import all of our footage into all the social media platforms as a page 2.6.4 file. The one thing that you should check before you upload is just what bit rates they all support. You'd be able to find the documentation of what the latest bit rates are because what happens is if you have your bit rate, which is an indication of the quality of the video too high, you'll find that all the social platforms reject it and you have to sit there and re-encode everything for a day. So that would be my suggestion. Some of the social platforms are less fussy than others, so I'd suggest you have a look at the latest specs on each one because, unfortunately, they do change quite regularly. Instagram are my favourite for that. But they now allow 60-minute videos, so we can't be too grumpy in Instagram this way. So questions come through. One of the most ideal might set up to pair with basic DSLR cameras. And I'd say that depends on two things. Three things. What your budget is and how many people you're interviewing and what kind of camera you're using. So I grabbed a couple of cameras here just to talk about real cameras as opposed to using your phone. So this here is a Sony mirrorless camera. Very handy because you can film yourself with a little pop-up screen. And this one here is a little Rode VO micro. These things are great because they're cheaper chips. These are about $90. Very simple little cord plugged into any standard microphone port. But they allow self-power, so there's no extra charging or anything like that. Now, these are probably a good option if you're looking for filming multiple people. Particularly if you're roving at an event or something like that. Very directional microphone. You can point towards people, get the audio that you need for the interview and move on. The only problem with these kind of microphones is that from time to time they can pick up noise off to the side. So you want to make sure that you test it a little bit and make sure that you're happy with that. The convenience might be worth it just to get the shot and then not worry about the little bit of noise that you're going to pick up. And that's probably the cheapest, smallest one that I'd be happy with running on a DSLR. I'm not sure if you were here before, Paula, but these RODE Video Micro goes. That would be my choice for a DSLR. And they do a new version of this that allows you to pair two transmitters for your microphones on your talent to one receiver, which is long been a pain point if you're using a DSLR. Getting two microphones into that is always a pain even out of extra cabling and things. Now you can just use one of these, and it's about $300 or $400 for the pack that does two, which considering how much microphones can cost wireless microphones in particular, $300 or $400 is an absolute steal. I think our wireless microphone kit's worth about $1,500. So getting one for $300 that does that is perfect. These are all clamps just slide into your cold shoe or your DSLR. So that's a perfect kind of combination there. Get it in there. And there you go. You can run that as well. Other than that, really just depends on how much you want to spend. If you've got a Sony, there's a good option that just connects straight into your cold shoe so you don't have to worry about extra cables or anything like that. But that's probably a bit off track if you start talking about that but that's probably a bit higher in budget as well. And Isabel's asking, you have any suggestions on the best phones for filming videos in 4K? Yes. Unfortunately, that always means the most expensive ones because every year that's one of those areas where Samsung and Apple and everybody knows they can get you to upgrade if they do something cool with cameras on the phone. So today I'm using an iPhone 13 Pro Max. That has their new cinematic mode so that we can automatically keep people's faces in focus and also move the focus point between different people and different objects. If you go onto the Samsung side, again, they're flagships. It's always one of those things that they improve or the Google Pixel. But essentially at some point, any iPhone or Android phone that's been released in the last couple of years, that seems terrible to talk about this in terms of price, but anything that costs more than about $500 will do a good job. Anything under $500 will do a better job than something that you had a couple of years ago. So it's worth just having a look at the phone that you've already got, seeing whether you can make that work and then looking at what you want to do from there and work out whether it's worth investing in a dedicated camera, something like this here or whether you just keep using the phone. Yeah, and so that's... I've got any other questions at the moment. So that's probably the other thing I wanted to talk about. Just looking at... I've used my phone. I've got the most out of the phone that I can get out of it. What do I do from there? Where do I go? I want to buy a dedicated camera. As I first step up, the Humble GoPro is actually a very good option. But one of the things that you do with a Humble GoPro is they brought out a couple of years ago this thing called a Media Mod. So you can see here this is a bit bigger than a normal GoPro. This has a tiny little shotgun microphone on the side of it, much like the road one that I was looking at before. But the other thing that it does when you add the Media Mod is you get ports. I have a spot. So what we can now do is take our road microphone kit and I can actually put that up the top here. Plug it into my GoPro. I now have a pretty good camera that shoots 5.6... 5.3, 5.6K. So a bit over our 4K that we were talking about before in super high quality and doesn't rely on my mobile phone battery. So very handy little device now with the GoPro. You also get a port on the back for HDMI. Well, it's micro HDMI but it's still HDMI. So you'd be able to plug that into a TV or plug that into a laptop or something like that. So you can use it as a webcam. You can use it as an external camera. You can do whatever you want to do with it. But that is a setup. The camera in the Media Mod will run you somewhere around $800 and it's substantially more robust and smaller than grabbing a proper DSLR camera. I always want to throw it against the floor just to prove the point but I'm not that. I'm not going to do that. But very small, very handy, very capable little camera. From there, the real step up is the DSLR or the mirrorless DSLR. So this one here is a Sony A6000 series. Again, with the little fold out screen. These little fold out screens come into more and more of these little cameras as we've got vloggers and media identities and people like that looking for something like this. And you could get something like this for under $1,000 and then you just need to hook your microphone up to it. So really cheap, easy way of getting both a video camera and a steals camera does both. Not an extraordinary expensive investment. So it is the kind of thing that you can have in the office if it does break, it won't be as sad as if your microphone broke or your big camera broke but it will give you more of a gateway into managing the video internally. Plus you've got a steals camera to boot. So a good little path there. And once you get into this kind of camera you can keep going up as you need something different. Sony, Canon, Nikon, depending on what kind of lenses you've got they've all got something for you and they'll all take increasing amounts of your money until you get the BZS that year. Probably the one thing I would caution you on is don't just buy new cameras all the time. Usually they give you incremental benefits. So you may as well stick with what you've got and keep using it effectively rather than just upgrading for the sake of it. Your nonprofit can probably hang onto a camera like this here for 5 or 10 years no problems as long as it doesn't get broken. So that's your video pathway, getting your shots done, getting your equipment sorted. Now if you are looking at this today and going, oh I want to get started, what's the bare minimum that I could get started with? I would say a quiet room that is well lit and a mobile phone on a tripod. That would get you started with basically no investment and then you can get your tripod and your microphone as your next things from there. Those are probably the biggest things that you're going to need to get started properly. But again, they won't be overly expensive investments. When we do these kind of things we always emphasize the smartphone because it's generally the most advanced piece of technology that you're carrying with you that can do this. So it allows you to get started with no investment at all. And if you've got an iPhone, the video program that's built into it is a pretty good option as well. I'll just wait for some more questions to come in. But one last one I wanted to talk about just because it's cool and I've got them here is, yes, Carol's laughing, I'll make the shadows what these are. They're Facebook glasses. Welcome to the future. So you've even got options like this where it just presents some interesting creative opportunities because they've got little tiny cameras up here. You can push a button and you can record up to about a minute on footage when you do that. They charge off the case and that video goes into your phone. It doesn't have to go straight to Facebook. So for some nonprofits trying to tell their story you're actually able to suddenly do a genuine sort of see things in this person's eyes where you can go through a day working with your organization or what it's like for certain people on a daily basis and it's a great way of really just capturing those unique angles as we go. Hayley has asked, do you have any advice for sound when shooting outside? So these things are what we use for shooting outside at a basic level and Rude being an Australian company has some very ridiculous names for them. Some people will call them fluffies. Rude like to call theirs after Australian wildlife so they have a dead cat. They have a dead wombat. I can't remember what the other one is. Dead cat, dead wombat. And so at a basic level what these do is let you just cut some of the wind noise out from hitting your microphone which is really probably the biggest thing that kills your sound outside. We would also, I prefer to use these kind of microphones most of the time so this is technically called a lavalier microphone or a lab. They're really directional which is why we put them here and point them at your mouth but they've got that little fluffy on top. You can get a bigger one if you need it to cut out that wind noise but because they're so directional often you don't need to. So maybe if you just turn the person that's talking slightly you'll be able to cut out that noise and keep going. Those are the two biggest ways I would do it and if we're doing this at a level where we're talking about mobile phones and cameras and things then that's probably the best way to deal with the outdoor issue and the wind issue. There are bigger more advanced options things called a blimp where you've got your microphone suspended in a cage basically to cut out the wind noise but nine times out of ten you use something like that so that fluffy actually comes with the video microphone. If you use something like that it will cut out what you need. If you need something bigger than that and you need a blimp or something like that I'd probably kind of argue that at this level maybe you shouldn't be outside because you might get blown away. Hopefully that answered that question Haley. Alright so we've got a couple minutes left if you've got any other questions please send them through. Otherwise I want to thank everyone for joining us today for a bit of an experiment for us today we're using the whiteboard we're using equipment we usually do these just as a bit of a normal webinar so feel free to send through any feedback you have if you'd rather not see me and Carol again that's fine we won't be top set but I really love to hear your feedback because we're currently shaping the events that we run for next year so if there's anything in particular you'd like to see please let us know. But other than that unless we have any more questions I'm going to close it there there are any more questions feel free to send them through after the session and we'd be happy to go through it. So next month so in December we'll be going back to our regularly scheduled format and we'll be talking about preparing for the new year so I look forward to seeing everybody then. Thank you.