How To Make A $300 Camera Look Pro!

now what's up my name is Nigel and as you can see the shot looks absolutely horrible and it sounds horrible and you know what I'm using a Panasonic gh3 it was made like back in 2013 and they're pretty cheap lens on there that's probably why this shot looks so bad so I think I should just go out and buy a new camera and that's gonna make this shot looks so much better just kidding buying a new camera isn't gonna fix this shot the effect this shot looks horrible is the fact that I haven't lit absolutely horribly and I've made a bunch of rookie mistakes like shooting with a way to close down aperture shooting with my iso way too high and not white balancing properly and also the lighting in here is absolutely horrible I have practicals on and I thought most one LED light pointed right at my face these in my opinion are mistakes that probably every new filmmaker makes and so I just want to show you that even with an older camera like mine you can still create a really great image and you can go from looking like this to looking like to this so I did a video looks similar to this a while back you can check that out right here but I basically showed that you can take an image from looking really bad to looking pretty decent by just switching to lighting up a little bit and doing a little bit of color grading and obviously bringing in some better audio so that's something to do with this video and it's gonna be kind of like an updated version of that older video that I did so let's fix this shot and I'll show you that even with an old camera like my gh3 and a relatively cheap lens I'm using the DJI 50 millimeter F 1 point 7 you can create a really good looking image so first thing we need to fix is the audio is this sounds horrible and using the internal blanks on my th3 so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use this really cheap-ass ping stereo HQ lav mic and was gonna clip it to my shirt I will see just how big of a difference a cheap little $30.00 might like this make to your audio alright so now we're using the Aspen's stereo HQ lav mic and doesn't the audio just sounds so much better even just with a little $30.00 laughs like this I'm not using any special adapter I'm just plugging it straight in my pants on gh3 with the audio levels turned all the way down and as you can see or I guess as you can hear the audio sounds way better so step one get the audio better and people can even forgive the horrible image that you've created with your camera so I think the next thing we need to do is change some settings in the camera and right now I am shooting it I think like f11 so there is no depth of field or separation between me in the backgrounds so I'm gonna switch my lens back to f17 and I'm gonna change my ISO back down to its native ISO which is also the lowest on the gh3 which is ISO 200 so let's change that right now alright so there we go we're back at ISO 200 so you shouldn't be seeing any grain in the image anymore and we're at f17 so you can kind of see there's some little bit background separation and some bokeh and going on the next thing I think we need to do is take those practical lights down and in my studio actually have those lights controlled by a dimmer so I'm just going to turn those down right about there as you can see those lights were casting a lot of light on the background and now my background is really dark so before we do anything else we do need to fix the white balance on my camera right now my face is kind of blue and it looks really bad so most cameras it's pretty easy to set the white balance the way I do it is I just go into the custom white balance setting on my gh3 I find something that's white like this white piece of paper and I might balance it that way super easi alright so now we're white balanced and honestly this is starting to look a lot better so now I think we need to focus on my key light and my key light is pretty harsh and it's kind of creating like one dimension on my face you can even see how harsh those shadows are if he's kind of hold one of your fingers up to your face those are pretty hard shadows and not really that appealing so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna soften those shadows up by using a simple umbrella this can be bought on Amazon for like 7 or 8 bucks and this little rx-8 is on a really cheap light stand so I'm gonna put this umbrella on the umbrella bracket that I have on the light stand so I'm also gonna take this light I'm gonna raise it up a little bit so it creates more of a drop shadow on my chin which is gonna create a lot more of a flattering light on your face all right so now we got our key light with the umbrella and if you hold a finger up to your face you can see how much softer the shadows are and since it's at a higher angle it's creating a nice drop shadow here at my chin which is a lot more flattering on my face all right one last thing I'm going to do with my lighting is I do have one other practical on right over here which is creating some fill on my face but just can be okay but I'm actually gonna turn this off because I want to go for a little bit more of a dramatic look but if you wanted to keep a shot like this having a little bit of fill can sometimes help but I'm actually gonna turn this practical off and it's just to be right of the frame alright so now we have our key light and we got some practicals but what I am noticing is that I am completely disappearing into the background with this black shirt on so I'm actually gonna do is put something on that'll help separate me from the background a little bit more alright so now I have something else on that's gonna help separate me from the background so instead of wearing just a plain black shirt you can actually see that there's some color here and you'll see the difference between me and the background but something else that you can do to help separate your subject from the background is to have something called a hair or a kicker light what I'm actually gonna do is use another rx-8 light and I'm gonna use this as my hair light so one thing that's kind of cool about these RX eights which you'll see in the video that I did for them but you can actually manipulate these lights and bend them a lot which is pretty cool because it's kind of like built-in barn doors for your lights and you can help create more of a narrow shape of light so just hit where you want it to hit instead of spilling all over the place so I'm gonna turn this on I don't want it to be too bright but right around there I think is good I'll just put it slightly out of frame and there we go we have a little bit of a hair light it's also kind of bleeding right here and just helping me pop out from the background a little bit more so I think right now we are at a really good spot to just call it good but there is something else that you can do just to add a little bit more of interest into your shot and that is adding some color so I'm gonna actually try to bring some color into my shot with this little Falcon eyes pocket light 7 now I just did a video on this light you can check that out right there if you want to but yeah this is a little RGB light and I'm gonna use it to kick on to my background just to add a little bit of color to my shine but you don't have to use something like this this is a little expensive it's like 140 bucks if you wanted to go super cheap you could just get another $50 rx-8 lights that I'm using right now is my key in my hair light and just get some binder dividers and use them as gels and then just gel your light and put that onto your background it's dead but since I have this I'm gonna use it so I'm going to set it to teal and kind of light up the background a little bit just to add some color into this shot so this is basically the final shot as you can see behind me I have the little pocket light f7 creating a little blueish teal color in the back of my shot honestly this looks pretty good and if you compare it with what I started out with this is just absolutely night and day as you can see even with an older camera like my gh3 and a pretty cheap lens you can still produce a really a nice looking image and that's just kind of what I really wanted to encourage you with is that even if you have an older camera or a cheaper camera you can still get really good images out of it if you just add some lighting and some better audio and you don't have to go crazy like this lav mic that I'm using is only thirty bucks and these two lights that I'm using as a key and a hair light are only 50 bucks each and like I said if you get another one and have an entire lighting kit for about 150 bucks and just you know use some gels if you wanted to add some different color but that's just kind of what I wanted to talk about is that like so much of making a good video is how its lit and how it sounds not necessarily so much about what camera is shooting with and honestly a better camera wouldn't have fixed that shot before but I was able to fix it with some really cheap lights and that's gonna cost you a lot less than going out and buying a brand new camera so I hope that was encouraging and helpful in some way if it was it'd be really cool if he's the like button and be sure to subscribe to my channel you enjoyed my content as always there's links in the description to a bunch of gear that I use and recommend and also a link to my patreon and self AI accounts and if you dig the music that I use in my videos I actually am an ambassador for music bed and I can't stress enough how much I love music bed they just have such a huge library of such amazing music by awesome composers and artists and I've never been able to not find what I'm looking for when I go to music bed and I've used a lot of other subscription services and music bet is by far the best that I've ever used so definitely go check out that link you can get a 30 day free trial anyways you can click right over here if you want to check out some more of my videos thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time bye [Music] you [Music]

Channel: NigelBarros

Views: 3,020,579

Keywords: best cheap camera of 2019, cheap camera of 2019 for vide, best cheap lighting for film, cinematic lighting for cheap cameras, turn crappy video to pro video, Panasonic GH3 2019, Can cheap cameras look this good?, color grading, film look, premiere pro, best video camera, how to filmmaking, falconeyes RX-8T, bmpcc lighting, cinematic lighting techniques for cheap, best camera for youtube, cheap camera, Nigel Barros, Youtube studio on the vheap, cheap good lav mic

Id: 0wqUWYx3UrY

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/millan11]

Just knowing how to light your room and to fix your camera settings.

Edit: He explains this way better than my film teacher ever did

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/iambolo]

It took me years to really understand this. I wish there were videos like this when I was a kid. People just starting out tend to think lighting is "extra" or something you don't need to worry about. I know I used to, and it showed.

[u/areditacc]

I think all of this dismissal of high end cameras is certainly very encouraging for beginners alike, and it is partially true for narrative filmmaking when you can control the lighting like this. But we must not ignore the advantage of a nicer camera with a beefier codec and log. Especially for documentary shooters that can't control the lighting. A nice camera with a crap ton of dynamic range will practically make anything look excellent. I got this epiphany after upgrading my g7 to a bmpcc4k. You can just literally point it at any scene and it will look great. And you can't exactly emulate negative film or slap on a print film lut with a non log camera. So you can do a lot with a cheaper camera, but the potential with a nicer camera is very important as well.

[u/[deleted]]

And a jacket, don’t forget the jacket

[u/MrRabbit7]

The lighting equipment he uses is as expensive as the camera.

[u/mznh]

I don’t even own a camera, why am i watching this till the end

[u/Crippledidiot]

Now that is a great video. It really helped me a lot.

[u/FunboyFrags]

Great video. I’ve been wondering about this stuff for a long time and now it makes a ton of sense.