When I set up a camera for an interview, testimony or announcement video, I work through five things in order: resolution and frame rate, exposure, white balance, focus, and framing. On this shoot I started from a camera that was way off.
The setup was a camera on a tripod, a mic on a boom overhead, and a softbox light off to the side, all pointed at a plain white backdrop with a little blue light hitting it. The room looked like a mess once the lights and mic cables were in place. That's normal. The finished shot still looks clean.
When I first looked at the back of the camera, the subject was badly overexposed. Shutter speed was 1/200, ISO was 1600, and the aperture was wide open at f/1.8.
For a talking head or interview video, I shoot in 4K. That gives me room to crop in or adjust the framing later, and I won't lose detail when I export the video in 1080.
I shoot at 24 frames per second. That gives the most natural looking motion blur and the best looking image for this kind of video. I'm not slowing any of it down, so I don't need a higher frame rate for slow motion. On this camera the menu showed XAVC S 4K with a record setting of 24p 100M.
Exposure comes down to three settings: shutter speed, ISO and aperture. I set them in that order.
The shutter speed was 1/200, which is way too fast for video. The 180 degree rule says your shutter speed should be double your frame rate. At 24 frames per second, that's 1/48. This camera doesn't do 1/48, so I set it to 1/50, which works great.
Slowing the shutter down lets in more light, so the image got even brighter. At that point he was a white ghost and you couldn't see him.
ISO was at 1600, which was way more than this shot needed. I brought it all the way down to ISO 100, as low as this camera goes, and the image looked a lot better.
The aperture was at f/1.8, the lowest this lens can go. To judge it, I looked at the histogram, which sits just above the ISO reading on this camera's display.
Nothing on the histogram was pushed far enough to the right to be overexposed and unrecoverable. But looking at the histogram and the bright side of his face, it was a little too bright and the light was a little harsh on his face. It was workable, but I wanted to bring it down a bit.
So I raised the f-number to f/2.8. A higher f-number means a smaller opening and less light. It also means a little less background blur, which was fine here because there was nothing going on behind him except a plain white backdrop. At f/2.8 the bulk of the histogram sat right in the middle, which is what I want for this kind of shot.
The white balance was set to the Shade preset. Switching to auto white balance looked pretty good. But I've done a lot of shooting and testing in this room, and the Kelvin temperature that looks the most natural for this room and this light is 5200K. So I set a custom color temperature of 5200K.
If you scroll through the Kelvin values, you can see what's happening. Go lower and the image gets cooler until he looks blue. Go higher, up toward 8500K and 9000K, and it turns orange. For this light and this room, the sweet spot was about 5200K.
Autofocus would probably have worked fine for this shot. But the camera was locked off and the subject wasn't moving, so I switched to manual focus, set it, and left it there.
Start by putting the subject's eyes on the top third of the frame. After that, the kind of video decides the rest of the framing.
If the person is addressing the camera directly, like an announcement, I leave the framing head on with the subject in the center.
If the person is talking to someone off camera, as in an interview or a testimony, I shift the framing to one side depending on which way they're facing. In my example the interviewer sat off camera to the right, so I kept his eyes on the top third and lined his body up with the left third. That leaves open space in front of him as he looks across to the person he's talking to, and it looks more natural.
When I lined him up on the right third instead, he had almost no lead room and looked cramped. The light also crept into the frame on that side. You don't have to hug the edge of the screen. Sitting on that left third is enough to give the image a nice look.
Comparing the before and after side by side, the difference is clear: the first frame was washed out and overexposed, and the final one is properly exposed with natural color and good framing.
These same settings also apply to live streams. If the person running camera on Sunday doesn't know how to set exposure or check focus, you can't always be looking over their shoulder while you're handling other things. When the camera operator knows how to set the settings correctly, the whole stream runs simpler and smoother.
I shoot interviews and talking head videos at 24 frames per second. It gives the most natural looking motion blur, and you don't need a higher frame rate unless you plan to slow footage down.
Follow the 180 degree rule and set your shutter speed to double your frame rate, which is 1/48. If your camera doesn't offer 1/48, use 1/50.
I shoot in 4K so I can crop in or adjust the framing later without losing detail when I export in 1080.
Put the eyes on the top third of the frame. For an interview where the person looks off camera, line their body up on the third that leaves open space in front of them.
Want the full camera and video workflow we use? Church Video Made Simple walks through it step by step.
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