Hey all. Steve here (with Tara opposite).

Any advice for getting back into making messy vids?

We have zero kit... all our old camera's are terrible resolution and the batteries are shot anyway.

Been looking at some £150-ish 4k (allegedly) camcorders on Amazon. I am not splashing out £600+ on something posh yet.

Not that 4k is probably wise anyway due to the upload size restrictions? Out videos were always at least 30-45mins long. Advice welcomed on that.

I assume the UMD is still the best place to host?
Been out the loop nearly 10 years!

Tara is so goddam excited. It's like looking after a kid whose eaten 3 bags of Haribo

Thanks!

At the risk of stating the obvious, do you have a smartphone with a built-in camera? Assuming that you'll need a tripod etc. anyway, getting a mount for your phone should be cheaper than buying a dedicated camera.

Yea we have Smartphones. Not sure they will handle 45mins + of decent quality video footage however? Maybe.

Would still need a remote mic etc

Worth going to 4k for the masters, release in Full-HD to keep the sizes down but means in ten years time you can remaster at 4k and re-release. We upgraded to a 4k camcorder over the winter. UMD absolutely the best place to host and sell, with Vidown second. Avoid C4S like the plague, incompetent fuckwittery and active sales-prevention - I tried to buy a scene from a producer who uses it, and got a load of utter bollocks about "temporary email addresses" even though I was using my main business address that's registered with HMRC. Plus as I remember they charge an insane 40% commission.

Definitely buy a proper camcorder, quality of footage relates to size of lens, phone lenses, though very good, are tiny.

Welcome back to production!

Hmm.

4k camera is looking to be too expensive. We never made that much out of these videos (not sure whether that has changed), but I certainly don't want to blow big money on a camera at the start.

I will have to investigate further

Depending on the quality of the camera on your smartphone, you could try using a gimbal on a small tripod then connect a mic.
I use DJI Osmo 3 gimbal (Youtube videos, you can also set it up for tracking. The package cost just over £100 plus the cost of your mic. You just need to check the camera settings on your phone to see if it is just HD or UHD. Shooting more than 30 fps would also give you good options for slow mo's.

We used to include zip packs of hundreds of photos, taken from various angles with various still cameras.

Is that still thing? Do people still bother with stills? (apart for promotion reasons).

It was SO time consuming, going through 2000 pics each session, cropping, watermarking etc.

Tara x

I can only speak for myself, but I think most stills are only for promotional purposes now. There could be some fans of pics, but I would guess they are the minority. Though someone may come along and correct me.

Well that's what I thought.
I think we will still do one set of stills from a static camera, but not go mad like we did last time.

We had 5x cameras on a cyclic trigger mechanism taking a shot every 5 seconds.
We frequently shot well over an hour of footage, so do the math!!!

I remember Steve literally spending whole evenings (swearing) and deleting probably 90% of the shots anyway.

As for a camcorder. We are not going to shell out huge money (and it is) on a 4k camera to start.
I have found a small 1920x1080p camcorder with a wide angle lens. I think that will do for starters.
We need a very wide angle lens because our rooms at our house are not vast.

Tara x

One thing you could do is a trademark instead of a watermark. That way the whole picture becomes wholly yours.

How does that work?
I thought you ideally needed your watermark on the images to help stop them being shared (although easily cropped out).

Me no understandy

Tara x

Trade marks are things you register with the trade mark office, and cover things like business names - so you can't set up a burger bar and call it McDonalds for example. I don't see what that has to do with image watermarking though?

In respoinse to other points, I replaced my full-hd camcorder with a 4k one through the winter, it was an expense but as a registered business it's a business expense. Cost £600 (over £800 once I added a high capacity battery and memory card, but worth it as an invesrment in the business. People used to talk about various types of pro cameras in the £10k price range, but when your competitors mostly shoot on iPhones, there really isn't any point going that far.
In my case I also shoot railway videos for pleasure so the camcorder is worth having for those too.

Stills: I used to shoot hundreds, sometimes thousands, along with videos. Nowadays though the Youtube generation expects every image to move. I shoot a very few stills for promo purposes and otherwise don't bother. I usually take quite a bunch before we roll the video camera, models clean and dry, showing their outfits in full detail, front and back including low angle shots as well as head-height ones, then if there's a natural break-point part way through I'll get a few more of the models half-messy, and then when we get to the end and stop the video I shoot another set of front and back view stills to show the end result and how messy the models got. Advantage, only a few dozen shots to look through afterwards and because they are all actively posted the models tend to look better in them too.

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First: I would think that a limited number of photos would have some appeal, especially for promotion.

I, for example, am always on the lookout for free cover art and then I would cross-promote to the best of my ability and likely be alerting customers outside of UMD to your site. All offers gratefully received.

Second: I would go with the cheapest kit, especially if your current smartphone will do, to test the waters. If you start making money, you can consider upgrading.

Beyond that, DungeonMasterOne makes a good point about the future which will be constantly demanding higher and higher resolution.

Thirdly: Trademarks would require you to trademark each photo. At least this is the case in Canada. Prohibitively expensive.

Generally speaking your photo, your entire photo, is protected by copyright the moment you create it. Putting a copyright notice on it might help you out in court. But you have to ask yourself, do you ever see yourself going to the time and expense of hiring a lawyer?

I bought all of your videos and still enjoy them. However, I never once looked at the photos. In my opinion, you can eliminate those.

Thanks for clarifying seems I'm still in the learning phase of how this all works

Hope it's not out of place to jump in here but, this is something I've been pretty sure is the case for like 99% of people who buy scenes. It would save me a TON of time if I didn't actually go through the editorial process with all of my photos from a scene as I know most people are after the video when they make a purchase. I pour a ton of effort into shooting stills though, so I'm hoping not everybody feels that way

MessyHot: I sent you a DM about this.

Videos are wonderful, but personally I LOVE stills. There is so much that can be captured in a single photograph. And sometimes the lack of context of backstory adds so much complexity.

I get that videos rule the day in the end, but I'd be really sad if they sort of disappeared entirely.

I would seriously be looking at a used GoPro Hero 5 or newer if you want 4k, or one of the older ones if you don't mind 1080p. Get yourself a dive case for it and you have a complete mess protected camera (I think all of them are reasonably water resistant, but the more the better is what I say!)

MPB is often quite a good place to look, but you can get some decent deals at CEX too and that one comes with a 2 year warranty too!

I'm a 4K fan and shoot in 4k but I will say to keep the file size in mind, because it can cost you sales. There are still a lot of people with shitty internet, so when they see that 2 gig file, they might pass since they know the download time is going to be insane.

This is also why I tend to keep my clips on the short side - I feel 10 minutes is right in the pocket, also for pricing. I see a lot of producers (not here) uploading 40 minute clips, huge file size and trying to charge $29.95. For every 1 person who buys it at that price, they're losing 10 other customers.