Hey Steve,
It’s pretty obvious that you’re a killer carpenter with tons of skills in the field, but from the stationary video camera, it’s also obvious that you’re not much of a professional photographer/videographer. Fortunately, I am and can offer a quick tip for future videos.
Many of the simpler little video cameras like the one you may be using for these videos have an auto-focus feature which the pro photographers and videographers try to avoid like a plague. The reason is because the camera randomly selects what to focus on and generally settles on whatever is closest to it and/or whatever has the most amount of light/shadow contrast to it.
In the case of the “Delta Body Sprays Part 1” video you unknowingly set your drill closer to the camera than your body so much of the time that you are talking, the video camera focused on the drill and not you or the important diverters that you’re talking about (which are extremely blurred in this video). Additionally, when a person moves around a lot while recording a video on auto-focus, the camera tends to get confused and jumps is sharp focus around randomly from some incredibly unimportant thing on a far wall behind you, to you and then again to something else unimportant in the foreground or background.
So here are a couple of tips that might help you with more focused videos.
1) The absolute easiest is to have a second person hold the camera and watch carefully for when it jumps out of focus and quickly refocus it on the fly rather than leave it set on auto-focus. (Even when a person is holding the camera the auto-focus will do all the same goofy things if the user does not take control.)
2) Take the camera off of auto-focus, stand behind your tripod and focus the camera on the area where you will working and is most important for people to see. (If there is nothing built or installed there yet, place a rag, piece of tape or anything in that area which you can actually lock the camera’s focus and leave it there. Doing this locks the camera in a position that will not move until you manually move it.
3) Set your camera’s aperture to F7 or greater. This means much of area will be in focus no matter what and even the things that are out-of-focus in your shot will still be much clearer than they are in this particular video. You’ll have to slow the shutter speed down to 100 or 80 and adjust your ISO to 800 to 1200, but the end result will still look better.
That’s my two cents. The information in your videos are awesome dude! Just wish I could see everything. Nevertheless, thanks for the info!
_Eden Vaschon
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