New Corporate Video Equipment

[Brittany Rae]

This is all great, thanks so much Joe!

[Brittany Rae]

I would love to, but unfortunately the company I work for has crawlers that pick up anything having to do with the organization… I can’t find anything except a short screenshot before we started filming. This is someone standing in while we were getting set up.

[Mark Suszko]

I have to say, that doesn’t look as bad as you made it sound earlier. I thought by the description that this was going to be really horrid and thus a slam-dunk to fix. This is not the worst I’ve ever seen; and that makes constructive criticism much harder because there’s not that much to criticize.

The lighting is a bit flat, and the focus is a little bit soft, but there could be various reasons for the softness. The key-to-fill ratio on the face could stand a tweaking, but the next thing I would look at would be the lens settings and other camera settings in terms of getting it sharper and more vibrant. Every camera has a “sweet spot” in terms of lens opening, and to make the most of it, you lock that manually and then light to meet the needs of that lens opening. If you have a knee adjustment on the camera, it might be useful to bump it up and down a bit to compare the effects.

The stock footage you use is probably lit in a more dynamic manner, with a higher contrast ratio, and the chroma and brightness levels maximized. Getting that to match your own footage will take some work with color-correction in post to get both images closer to each other in appearance, and if the stock footage is high-contrast, then maybe your footage needs a different lighting scheme to help it match, using more hard light, and perhaps some gobo patterns to add variation to the walls.

[Brittany Rae]

This is great Mark, all of this will definitely come in handy! Thanks so much for your help!