Encoding guides are generally aimed at maximising video quality. Although this is clearly an important area of presentation, equally important is the innovative camera and editing techniques used to create a polished, professional looking video that stands apart from the average home movie. The most expensive video editing systems won't guarantee professional looking results; low budget systems will provide admirable results providing time honoured techniques are implemented in shooting and editing.
1. Ensure your subject isn't centred and avoid cutting off people's heads as you would in any photograph. Just as important is ensuring people's legs aren't cut off in long shots. Even if they aren't the focus of your viewers attention, always ensure "complete" people are in view for longs shots.
2. For shots with movement, place the subject in the first or last third of your viewfinder to make the shot instantly more interesting. For static shots, ensure the subjects eyes are in framed a third of the way down the screen. If the subject is looking at something, ensure the object of their attention is placed in the following two thirds and clearly visible.
3. Make sure you shoot from differing angles too. Don't worry about having only one camera - overlapping audio can create the illusion of having more than one camera by keeping the sound constant despite the video cutting to a different angle.
4. Keeping your film rolling also ensures you have enough "room" to edit - and you may catch something you wouldn't have thought of using whilst in post production. If you're worried about battery life, avoid overuse of zooming. If you're going to zoom in, make sure it's for a good reason.
5. Do you need to zoom? Close ups are best used for intense moments where the persons head fills the screen, extreme close ups are even tighter with just part of the face in view. A medium close up (where the shot is framed around the waist) can be achieved in post production with a medium level system, which also provides the opportunity of ensuring you actually need the zoom.
6. One of my greatest problems was making conversations flow - the camera's limited field of vision combined with my less than professional panning techniques made for dreary dialogues despite lively debates. Keeping the camera static doesn't provide the impact required and continually panning without a tripod (sometimes you just can't use a tripod!) causes viewer sea-sickness and confusion. I overcome this problem by just keeping the camera rolling throughout the entire conversation and panning as and when I feel the conversation demands. The video editing stage can then tidy up where my camera technique failed - I separate the audio from the video. This way, you can cut to someone's reaction whilst someone is speaking, eliminating the jerky movement of the camera by simply overlapping the audio. Make sure you always stay one side of both subjects.
7. Its tempting to overuse the million and one transitions that come as standard on most video editing packages - but your movie quickly degenerates into a 70's music video and you might as well throw in a glitter ball and flares. The artist in me sometimes proves too much and I do occasionally feel the need to get cute (using the iris fade when someone took a picture was something I felt justified for example). But simply cutting works wonders, and most of all seems to work wonders for professionals in TV and Video. Provided you have some kind of continuity and you're not cutting from one scene to the next every five seconds, avoid fades/dissolves and the like. However, I do find that if you are cutting a lot, there isn't any dialogue and you have slow soundtrack, long cross fades to black work wonders.
8. Shoot cutaways to ensure you have something to drop in the timeline between scenes
9. Adding music makes an instant impact to your video. However, consider what music to use and lay it down before you start editing. That way you can cut according to the music, cutting on specific beats or slowing action down/speeding it up according to the tempo.
10. Try ensuring you have a dramatic or punchy introduction. This most certainly won't be the first thing you shoot, so don't stick to the chronological order of your events. If it's a holiday video for example, try making it into some kind of story. It doesn't hurt to mix up days to make your film flow. You may have explored a town over a few days, with other activities in-between. It doesn't hurt to put all the footage of that town into one scene to ensure continuity.