Chet - I certainly don't claim to have any special skills creating video. But I have picked up a few things over the years.
All the video footage is handheld using a Nikon compact camera. You need a camera with image stabilization, and then I hold it with one hand using my arm as a form of steadycam. I've found the worst thing I can do is to try and brace my arm, especially against the truck as that transmits the road vibrations to the film.
Other tricks I've found (learning by my many mistakes over the years):
Not panning the camera around too much - static shots pointing at a subject work better than panning around the scenery and are easier to edit together - plus it is too easy if you do pan to find that because you are often in scenery that almost every shot you've got is a pan and when you try to edit them together they look awful and make you feel motion sick. Basically try to keep the camera as still as possible.
Plus don't make your shots too long (which naturally happens when panning) the viewer gets bored.
When filming leave time at the start and end of each shot to allow you to easily cut to the next shot.
Don't go mad filming everything - you just end up spending hours trying to weed out the boring stuff during editing, and it fills up your disk quickly.
Try to avoid random chat while filming, unless you are going to dub music completely over it.
Be brutal on the editing. Early on I tried to keep everything in and would end up with a 1 hour boring video. I try to keep to 10 minutes or less now.
Avoid too many fancy transitions that these editing packages create - they look amateurish - look at what they do in films and TV, almost every transition is a straight cut. However, I find that if I happen to have two moving scenes I need to edit together I put a fade between them (the professionals avoid this by planning their shots so they don't have to edit two moving shots together without something in between). I also sometimes use a fade via black to give an impression of time having passed between two shots.
Sometimes when moving from one shot to another where the sound changes significantly it can be worth fading the sound of the 2nd shot in before the video - it seems to lead the viewer into the 2nd shot rather than just bang - different sound and video in one go.
Less of a problem, but I stumble across it sometimes when editing - "crossing the line" - e.g. filming your wife walking from her left, then cross her path and film her walking from her right. When you are there it all makes sense because you know you crossed the footpath to film the other direction, but when edited and someone watches it looks odd because your movement between shots isn't apparent and it suddenly looks like she has turned around and is going the other way. Again, pros will plan to avoid such mistakes, where-as I typically forget until I realise it looks ugly during editing.
And these days you have to pay attention to frame rate. I film 1080 lines at 30 frames per second, but have to manually set the video editor to render at the same rate or the movement comes out jerky as the input and output frame rates differ. I don't always get it right though even now.
Steve.
