subject: Flip Video Camera Techniques: Light And Color [print this page] Shooting quality videos with your Flip Video camera isn't all that hard. In fact, it was designed with non-technical users in mind, allowing those with little experience in video recording to capture scenes easily, without requiring much extra work. While a Flip Video camera is generally intended for point-and-shoot recordings, a little technique can go a long way towards ensuring you get consistently great quality shots.
Avoiding Too Much Contrast. A Flip Video camera adjusts its exposure automatically, depending on the amount of light available when you're shooting. To get the proper setting, it finds the best exposure the average of all light in the frame. As such, if you capture scenes with extreme contrasts in illumination, your video will look too light and too dark in different areas.
Try To Shoot With Sufficient Lighting, Whenever You Can. The Flip Video camera is designed to compensate when recording scenes under low-light situations. Unfortunately, many videos shot during poorly-lighted scenes end up grainy and blurry in parts. If, at all possible, try to record with decent lighting if you want videos that you'd actually want to keep for a longer time.
Shoot With A Single Light Source. When you shoot recordings with different light sources present, such as a bright sun-lit window and a lamp right next to it, you can end up with unusual colors in the scene. That's because all light emits some form of dominant hue (an indoor lamp usually has a shade of orange while sunlight comes with a shade of blue) that are often bypassed by the naked eye. When both of them come together on a recorded scene, however, it can lead to some unbalanced color that can affect the quality of your recording.
