From Instagram, YouTube to mls video is becoming an essential part of any real estate or construction small business. Lucky for us smartphone possess all the tools we need to create high quality videos that can be shared on social media and on our website. In the following I provide some tips on how to use smartphones effectively for video.
Before we think about camera settings and angles. We need to first organize the house or project before shooting. Look for eyesores such as: papers, a messy bed, or a crowded kitchen countertop, anything that can distract the viewer from what you are trying to show them. The last thing you want to do is spend time shooting the house to only find a lot of photo's unusable.
FPS which indicates how many frames per second the video was shot. Movies are often shot in 24 fps because that is most realistic to the human eye. But there are advantages to shooing in a higher fps and luckily for us most smartphones can shoot in 60 and 120 fps.
The reason to shoot in higher fps is because it allows us to slow down video in post processing, creating a smooth, less jittery video that limits the up and down movements of someone walking.
Nothing reeks amateur like choppy video. Even if we shoot in higher fps we still can get a choppy video if we are bouncing all over the place when shooting. Consequently, it is vital to master the gimbal walk. A proper gimbal walk includes: keeping our knees flexed, proper heal placement, and walk with out raising our foot. This video describes the gimbal walk in more detail.
It is important we keep our camera vertical when shooting video. Why this is important? Because firstly, we want to have equal ceiling and floor in our image, and secondly we want to avoid distortion. The latter being when walls, windows, doors all looked curved and disproportionate to how they look in real life.
To keep our camera vertical we can use a gimbal. A gimbal will automatically keep the camera vertical. However, there will times when we don't have a gimbal with us. If this happens to be the case we can use our phone apps built in level. Which is a line that displays how vertical our camera is.
We all have taken a selfie in portrait mode on our phones and noticed the background is blurry. This is what we call bokeh.
Smartphones because of their small sensor achieve bokeh with effects. While DSLR's with a larger sensor and better depth of field achieve bokeh through the lens. All in all new smartphones have become quite adapt of creating bokeh.
Most smartphones will have a portrait mode that will create bokeh. But also newer smartphones allow us to change aperture, thus actually changing the degree of bokeh we want in our picture.
Because Bokeh allows us to put emphasis on the subject of our photo. Whether that is fixtures, flooring, countertops, Bokeh allows us to keep the viewers eyes on these smaller items without the viewer being distracted by other objects in the photo.
Truth be told in real estate photography we don't be long clips. Most real estate videos are just a series of small clips. And really we can achieve this with our smart phone and without a gimbal.
All we need to do is keep the camera straight up and down, make slow, smooth movements using the gimbal walk, and shoot at 60 fps.
Our audio with smartphones is not going to be the best. Lucky for us there is a lot of lavalier mics that will do the job. A mic used in conjunction of our phone can make audio sound way better.