Poor Man’s $20 Steadicam

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Are you tired of your camera shaking around and making you and others sick with your video footage? Gohepcat will show you a homemade steadicam that will only cost you $20 to build. If you’re too lazy to find all of the parts you can buy a steadicam kit for $39.95.

Complete instructions and sample videos are located at that link as well.  This sample video was very impressive – filmed while running with homemade steadicam and camera 3-6 inches off the ground.  Very cool… I have a feeling I’ll be building one of these pretty soon!

How To Upload Sharper Videos to YouTube

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Cory a.k.a. “Mr. Safety” of SMP Films gives an excellent tutorial on how you can upload sharper videos to YouTube (and all of the other video sites) using Sony Vegas 5.  I highly recommend Sony Vegas if you need a good video editing program.

If you don’t have Sony Vegas,  try to use these settings on whatever video editor you currently use.  Some of the keys are using 30 frames per second, speed of 1mbps or higher, 128 kbps audio and the sharpest possible settings.  I use slightly different settings with Vegas 7: Render as MP4, Best video rendering quality, 30 fps, 2 mbps constant bit rate and 128 kbps audio.  Experimentation is the key.

What settings do you use?