A $3,500 Light Beats a $3,500 Camera. Here's Why.

Welcome to the Marketing MadMen. Nick Constantino here with my boy DJ. DJ, how you doing, bud?

Good, man. Just making it happen.

Today we're going to take common principles about film production and editing, and talk about what you should spend money on and what you shouldn't, because the world's wacky right now. First thing I want to hit is lighting. I'm staring at a light right now. Tell everyone how much this light near-blinding me costs.

That light is right about $3,500.

Okay, so the camera, the microphones, the board and the mixer I use together don't add up to $3,500. Talk about why lighting is so important, and why you can have the best camera in the world and if the lighting is poor, none of it matters.

Lighting is truly everything when it comes to photography and video. You're capturing light most of the time, and the darks too, to some extent, there's information in everything. When it comes to home studios and getting your look and feel down, that's where the conversation about AI comes back in. It's great to get the practice and the look down in pre-production, because it gives layers of depth for anything downstream to work with, so it doesn't look flat against a green screen, for example.

Phones have come a long way with things like night vision, but all of that is algorithms. If you capture raw data, it's only processing what's there, and every time you process it, it's not making it better, it's losing more of the core, because light in its pure form is where the real information is.

Exactly. It's just like anything else with AI, or with any storytelling mechanism: you want more information, and that's what light provides you within a shoot.

Let's talk editing. I remember you needed a fifty-grand Avid system to do basic rudimentary stuff. Now your phone is more powerful than four Avid systems put together. Talk about the evolution of the editing suite you use.

You really can edit anything on your phone now, shoot everything on your phone, all built into one, and it makes it easier for the user to accomplish the story they're trying to tell. What's great about the workflows now is it's easier to be specialized than ever, you can specialize in just color, or just composition, and it's important to find what works for you.

You bring up DaVinci Resolve, which started as basically a coloring tool. It's built such a great interface it's overtaken a lot of other systems, partly because it's affordable, and Black Magic has kept investing in it continuously.

Black Magic has created such a great system that it's hard to leave, especially if you're doing broadcast. I've had Black Magic the past twelve years, and if you know the right tools to go with it, it's great, though I never imagined I'd have to become a data scientist to work with raw footage. Raw files are just more raw data, less compression, less that can go wrong, every pixel gets filled individually as its own unique piece of color.

It's wild how far compression has come. I worked at DivX when I was twenty-one, one of the first video compression codecs that ever existed. To see how important those codecs have been to how we consume music and movies is wild.

And that's the difference between codecs and containers, and it all goes back to pre-production, knowing exactly what you need to get. Every tool takes your inputs and creates outputs. It doesn't matter if it's AI or a film shoot. We did four concurrent shoots today and got it done in three and a half hours because we had the scripts, the teleprompter and the shot list ready. We had enough fundamental understanding of the inputs.

So let's help people with the inputs. What should someone own if they want to shoot a podcast or content for social media, and what should they go find an expert for?

Honestly, you could do it with three things: a light, a camera and a mic. And ultimately you don't even need those, the sun gives you light, so you can shoot with natural light at the right time of day.

Let's talk real budgets. A brand-new beginner spending $1,500 to $2,000, then $5,000, then $10,000. What kind of camera, what kind of audio, what kind of lighting?

I'm a Canon guy, mostly because my background is photography and their DSLR line is great. Image stabilization matters so the frame doesn't shake, and quick autofocus matters a lot, that's a big reason I recommend Canon, their proprietary facial recognition and focus are excellent and the controls are familiar if you've ever used a camcorder.

Talk a little about lighting. Cheap lighting used the right way, and matching or countering the temperature of the room.

There are great companies like Lume Cube for an entry point, and then a medium tier like GVM with panel kits, and at the top of the line, Aperture or ARRI if you're really trying to make your studio look great. We run Aperture systems ourselves. And you're trying to remove shadows, because nothing looks cheaper than a hard shadow across someone's face. There's actual psychology behind it, studies show a shadow falling across one side of a face reads as less trustworthy, which goes back to Rembrandt lighting and how information is presented through light.

That's fascinating, and we now have the science to back up what painters were doing intuitively centuries ago. What's your advice as someone starts this journey?

Don't be afraid, and know there are more tools out there than ever. I dropped out of college, I've been running my own business and I'm completely self-taught. I'm by no means the expert on everything, but I know a lot about everything, and I bring in experts, that's the role of a producer or director, to bring in the people who get you the best product. Anyone can be self-taught now because there's more than ever enough resources for creatives to create, and it doesn't matter about quality sometimes, a story just needs to get out there.

Fundamentals haven't changed since the dawn of photography. Lighting hasn't changed. Sound, the gear gets smaller, but you still don't want background noise, and you want to understand how a wavelength works so you know where the interference is.

Those things haven't changed. Learn as much as you can, go into a project giving good inputs so you get good outputs, and it doesn't have to be perfect quality to get your point across, but it has to be deliberate and thoughtful.

Tell everyone about the company real quick.

My company is Network Frequency. We've been in business fifteen years as of this year. We specialize in event storytelling more than anything, conferences, trade shows, major sporting events, anything that moves, we capture it. It's not just about capturing the event, it's about helping capture the pre-production for it too, so we work with pretty much every vertical within a brand to make sure each channel has what it needs to share its story.