 Moving from photo to video is similar to going from first class to coach. You find you have a lot less wriggle room. The video box is a much tighter fit. Photoshop puts cropping and scaling tools into the hands of every photographer, and most use them freely. Very few photographs reach the client without some finessing of color and framing. Cartier Bresson's insistence that cropping should be done in camera seems somewhat quaint. Videographers enjoy no such flexibility. The pixels captured by the camera have a one-to-one relationship with the pixels displayed on the TV. Cropping and upscaling a video image by even 10% produces a significantly degraded image. Swapping still cameras for video means going back to the days of Cartier Bresson and paying meticulous attention to framing, we need every single pixel. Unfortunately prosumer video cameras (most all video cameras under $10K) do not show all the pixels in the viewfinder. Viewfinders and LCDs typically overscan the image, in the same way as TVs. This means that they do not display the full image - often only 90% of the image recorded to tape is viewable in the viewfinder or LCD. The technical rationale for overscanning has disappeared but most modern TV sets overscan, HDTV units included. The amount of overscan in modern sets varies, and video displayed on computer screens "underscans" which means every pixel is visible. Looking at the picture above - in the viewfinder of your digital video camera you will see the portion of the picture inside the red frame, whereas a growing number of viewers will be able to see the whole image. It's difficult to shoot inside the box when you don't know how big the box is. Solutions The first step is to connect your camera up to a laptop or pro monitor (with underscan) and determine the amount of overscan. Some cameras, the Sony Z1 for instance, do provide an underscan option in some shooting modes. Engaging underscan will reduce the size of the image, so recommended practice would often be to just use underscan periodically to check the image. Shooting in a studio the main gotcha is the boom mic creeping in to the top of the frame. This footage will fail most broadcast specs. Clients won't be over-impressed either. With a locked down camera and a bland out of focus background it may be possible to fix this in post. For FinalCutPro CHV have a clone plugin that makes the fix quite simple. Shooting VJ style, handheld run and gun, the problems are more likely to occur and they will almost always be impossible to fix in post. The first thing to be aware of is the mic. On smaller cameras mounting a shotgun mic with a fuzzy wind buster will cause problems. Both Rycote and Lightwave market extenders to isolate the mic from the camera. These gizmos are really designed to reduce the possibility of the mic picking up camera noise but also work well for moving the fuzzy out of the frame. Avoid strong vertical line near the side edges of the frame or horizontal lines near the top or bottom.Watch the foreground particularly. Shooting handheld those lines will make camera movement much more distracting. The same goes for any high-contrast object that is shifting in and out of the frame. Shooting run and gun without underscan it is imperative to shoot with both eyes open. Many shooters prefer to shoot with a viewfinder rather than an LCD screen - one eye for the camera image and one for the scene. With practice it is possible to shift focus from one eye to the other without effort. Whether shooting with a viewfinder or an LCD - remember that neither one is giving you the full picture. | 
