Don’t have much of a budget for equipment? Don’t worry; you don’t need much to create a professional looking video.
In fact, most smartphone cameras are more than sufficient enough to create professional videos. Similarly, I actually know professionals who use tablets to shoot their videos. Much more important, and your number one priority, is to have some sort of lighting enhancement.
(suggestions are listed in order of importance)
Photography Lighting Set: You don’t need lighting specifically designed for video. That’s because we aren’t talking about producing large, national commercials. For the vast majority of your projects, you’ll just have either one person addressing the camera or an interview setting. In these cases, photography lights do the trick – at a fraction of the cost.
Suggestion – Neewer 3 Piece 660 LED Lights ($240)
Tripod: While your phone will work well enough to record video and – to a lesser extent – audio, you will want to have the ability to hold the phone steady. So you’ll want to get a tripod made for phones. Fortunately, they are pretty inexpensive.
Suggestion – Acuvar 50″ Camera Tripod with Quick Release ($15)
Video Editing Software: You’ll also need a video editing software, but you can try to convince your IT department that this expense should come out of their budget. It’s software after all! While I am partial to Adobe Premiere, if you’re an Apple person, Apple’s Final Cut Pro will also work.Suggestion* – Adobe Premiere ($21/month)
For $53/month, you can subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud, which includes more than 20 Adobe products, including Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. In other words, Adobe has structured its subscription levels to make it really enticing to just go with this higher plan, because if you are creating video, chances are you’ll want to create graphics or edit images to use in your video. And this higher subscription level let’s you do just that, as well as use these products for other marketing-related projects.
GRAND TOTAL: $355 (not including Premiere; remember IT is going to take care of that for you!)
*If you aren’t able to get your IT department to take on the expense of Adobe Premiere, and you don’t have the budget for it in your own department either, check out Lightworks. It is hands-down the most sophisticated “free” editor. It will take nearly as much effort as Premiere to learn, but the tools it provides will make it worth it. Plus – there are enough similarities to Premiere that once you can prove you can produce great videos in-house, moving to Premiere is a pretty easy transition. So if cost is a big issue in your pursuit of bringing video in-house, this is a great option to explore.
Learn tips and tricks to help bring your video marketing concepts in-house.
Please note: while I only recommend tools and equipment that I have either used, have spoken with people who have used, or understand the specs enough to make an informed recommendation, please know that some of the hyperlinks on this page may be affiliate links. In this case, I may receive a small percentage of sales if you make a purchase. Integrity and authenticity continue to be of the highest importance to me, and therefore, I am extremely selective in which items to recommend.
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