Feedback on my youtube videos is appreciated

[Mark Suszko]

I think your lighting could be improved, but also your dark blue background choice is unflattering, especially if you’re wearing a dark shirt. You might also bring the mic down a little bit more out of frame, or consider using a shotgun mic, or a lavaliere, to take the mic out of the shot altogether.

Regarding lighting, add more backlight, slightly offset to one side, let it hit your shoulder as well as the back of your head. This creates better separation from the background and adds a sense of shape and dimension. Flat lighting makes for easy green screening, however, it is visually boring to the eye. In FCPX. I can fix that flatness by adding a spotlight effect on the face and offsetting it to suggest another key light. PPRo probably can do that as well.

Next, try a lighter background in the green screen comp. A lighter blue is good, add a subtle gradient to it, shading from lighter at the top to darker below. Add a subtle vignette effect to it as well. Add a cast drop-shadow to your matte, make it soft and diffuse so it looks like you are casting your shadow onto wall… a little goes a long way here. The point of this is to again, suggest a 3-d volume you are standing in. Gradients are not your only option. You could pick a real-life textured wall from a stock photo place, you could take a photo of a tech workspace and add enough gaussian blur to it so that it simulates a tight depth of field situation and is not too distracting. The overall brightness ratio between your matte and any background has to be considered, and usually you want the foreground a little lighter by comparison.

Your lens settings are creating a slight fisheye effect; explore a more telephoto setting, which might require backing the camera off a tad, then zooming-in a bit. Camera position should put the lens level with, or only slightly below, a line drawn between your pupils. Bring the lens too low, and you are looking down on your audience, not good. Lens too high, and you’re looking up at them; also psychologically not good.

How you sit or stand when presenting in the full-screen shots can be tweaked. If standing, one simple trick is to point both shoes 45 degrees off from the lens, and rotate from your hips; your body need not always be square-on to the camera, especially in head and shoulders shots. This pose is a little more visually dynamic, especially in full-body wide shots, but it has subtle effect in closeups as well.

Editing tip; If you are shooting 4K, you will be able to do digital zooms and re-framings/scalings to imitate cuts from wide to tight and back again. If you can shoot in 4k and output in 2k, then shoot all the green screen in a slightly wider framing in 4k, then go back into your timeline, blade it up, picking sections where a closeup for emphasis would be useful, then scale up that section by about 20 percent and re-frame it, so your eye line remains the same in both the wide and tight shots. A trick to doing this faster is, once you get that tighter shot the way you like it in the first close-up segment, you can highlight that section and hit “copy” in the NLE, go to another bladed section, highlight that one, and select “paste attributes”, and bam, each shot treated that way will automatically look like the first one you did, in just three keystrokes.

[Oleksandr Kocherhin]

OMG. This is amazing. Thanks a lot for your time and thoughtful answer. I will write everything down and improve it in steps.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m not a fashion expert by any means, but when you pick your clothing colors, color as well as brightness/saturation needs to be considered. You can find simple color wheels online, check your background color, look across the wheel for the opposite color range, pick a shirt in that color.

For years, whenever checking a shot, to verify the contrast is good, I would flip the monitor output to “monochrome grayscale”, as if being viewed by a color-blind person. This shows that colors you *think* contrast well, sometimes actually don’t. You probably already do this when picking colors in a web page creation, so the text stands out from the background. Same principles apply to TV clothing.