Hello everyone, we are furniture makers, not video profs but, we have a following for our videos which are posted on youtube.com. I am getting very poor quality videos uploaded and wondered if someone can help.

First off, here is the link to my channel page where you can take a look at the videos

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

Secondly, we are very low budget, the camera I have is a Panasonic 3CCD. I have a Sima MZM-1 zoom microphone attached to the camera.

I use Pinnacle Studio 9.4 for editing my videos. I upload the video in DVD quality to my computer. After editing, I use a couple of the audio effects to clean up the sound. I render the video for youtube using mpeg4. You can see the results. I know I need better lighting, but don't know much about it so need direction.

Please help!!!

Feel free to email me at workshopofcharlesneil@msn.com if you need more information from me. Open for extreme critique, I want good videos. I can moderately upgrade some equipment but don't have a lot to work with right now.


Thanks in advance.

I will offer a tip or two, although please bear in mind that I am NOT a cabinet maker and have no knowledge what so ever of the video's subject matter.

1. First of all I think the video would benfit greatly from a multi camera shoot (at least two cameras). I f you don't have two, then script the video a little more, and switch between profile (effectively what you have shot this video in) and head on (90 degrees to your current shot and in front of the speaker).

2. Quality, I actually thought the quality was quite good for YouTube, but I did notice that it takes an earth to load (In fact it didn't stream very well at all). The only thing I can suggest is to try encoding in a streaming format such as WMV. You can download Windows Media Encoder for free (Just google Windows Media Encoder).

3. I thought that the video was rather long, and the speaker tended to jump his subject from time to time. Scripting would greatly improve this.

4 Additionally I didn't really like the transitions (bit home movie like for my liking, but hey thats probably just me). Again a two camera shoot (or 2 position shoot with one camera) would help this as you could do a simple CUT between scenes. Otherwise I would stick to crossfades.

Having said all of that, I couldn't really fault this, it was well shot, well framed and well edited. Couldn't see any significant problems with the lighting. You are right it could be improved, but I would go bust a gut for it, it is fine as it is.

I can see why you have built up a fan base. Well done I say!


Enjoy

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The audio sounds pretty decent, the problem your having with your video resolution is that your going to mpeg, youtube compresses every file to flash, I would suggest since your video is 8 min long. to export out either divx compression or flv compression at 1200-2000 kbs (just keep messing with it until you get the best file size under 95mb that looks the best also you are going to want the ratio size to be 425x355. If you want to upgrade a little better audio I would suggest looking at a boom mic even with a little $75-200 shotgun microphone. Do you have any compression programs or just render out of Pinnacle?