What's your biggest challenge shooting video on your own?

[Drew_Geraci]

One thing I've found out (as I get older, ha) is that it's much harder to do a single-person setup with reliable lighting, focus and composition. I was really impressed with the new ZV-E1 and how (indoors) you can use it to VLOG yourself but I'm curious what everyone else's setup are for YouTube, IG/TT/FB. Do you just use a tripod, camera, and auto-focusing hoping you capture a solid frame or do you tend to hire others or ask friends to help on productions? 

[Blackapino]

My Only challenge is Time. Working F/T and Being a Content Creator I Only have 1 day to come up with an idea, then record it, and then Post it for next week, but it's what I've been doing and it's all I know and I'm not changing it for anything.

[LensBrew]

Few days ago Dunna Did It made a video on how to capture video as a 1 person team. He mainly talked about outdoors though. As for indoors, I've seen some adding a large monitor to their setup to view themselves and take test takes to ensure good focus. As for light and composition, that comes with skills and experience, and good quality gear.

[Joey-Austin]

For the mean time it's just me, I use my Ipad pro as my monitor so I can see the focus better, but even with that sometime I have to re-shoot an entire video because I missed things in the video

[thesaltedimage]

I wish I could hire someone, I find it very challenging to video myself at work. My lighting in my basement is terrible and the sound quality is pretty bad due to sharing the space with our heater/AC unit.

[bmcdonough]

I can't imagine filming myself - I don't think I'd be good at it at all! @jasonvong probably has some good insight on this. @thesaltedimage AC units will be the death of me for video work! I use the rode go II with lavaliers, which help a bit. I'm sure higher end mics would help more but for now I'm on a pretty limited budget!  

[thesaltedimage]

On 8/1/2023 at 11:26 AM, bmcdonough said:

 @thesaltedimage AC units will be the death of me for video work! I use the rode go II with lavaliers, which help a bit. I'm sure higher end mics would help more but for now I'm on a pretty limited budget!  

Do you have a video posted somewhere that I could listen to the sound quality? I think the audio is what keeps me from filming...and just a lack of a nice space. My basement is quite dungeon like. 🙂

[bmcdonough]

@thesaltedimage sure! Here's a link to a clip of selects from an interview I did. 

For this I plugged the Rode Go II into my Sony a7R IV and it links the audio to the footage, which saves some time in post. You can hear some background noise (birds, wind in the trees, and such) but I think the interview is pretty clean. I hadn't done any processing to the clips at all - audio, color, or anything. This was just for my client to get an idea of things!