Whether you’re capturing holiday memories of your trip, or you secretly want to launch a career as a travel videographer, simply tapping the record button on your iPhone isn’t going to guarentee a high quality video.
For budding phone videographers, there are two main factors that are going to dictate how good your videos are. The first is the quality of footage.
The newest technology will always be the best way to guarentee you’re shooting the highest quality footage, but anything that is capable of shooting in 4K, 120fps/240fps high speed or slo-mo videos will work well.
The second is the quality of editing that goes into your video after it’s been shot. With these two points in mind, we’ve put together the following tips for making and editing awesome travel videos on your iPhone.
How to Make and Edit Awesome Travel Videos on Your iPhone
Think About What You’re Going to Film
It’s important to think about what you’re going to film in advance. The best travel videographers have a plan in place, and an idea of the story they’re trying to tell before they actually land.
Getting home with hours of footage and no idea of what you wanted in the first place means your video is going to lack focus and you could have missed really key angles or shots that would have told your story.
Think about the types of of video you often seeing on YouTube: the tasty food, beautiful scenery, people doing fun activities, or hot locations. These often have a focus and a story, and it’s usually been planned and researched in advance.
Deciding what you’re going to shoot also allows you to film multiple angles of one scene. This gives you options when it comes time to edit, and you can choose the best scenes which tell a more vivid story.
Take Full Advantage of iPhone Features
Simply tapping the record button doesn’t mean you’re producing a video that holds anyone’s attention. There are a huge range of features on the iPhone for making video footage more interesting (timelapse, slow motion etc), so take full advantage of these.
There are also a huge range of external accessories that allow you to improve or alter the footage you’re shooting, so experiment with different accessories and see if you can find a unique style.
That said, you can definitely over-do it with features too, so it’s important to keep a good balance, and not go crazy with effects or trying too hard to be creative. Here are some shooting tips:
When shooting with your iPhone ...
➡ Don’t film in portrait. If you want to be able to use your footage in other projects, it’s important to shoot your videos horizontally. Whether your video is finally displayed on a TV, computer or YouTube, it will be viewed in landscape.
➡ Don’t use zoom function. The zoom on your iPhone is digital zoom instead of optical zoom, which is going to cut out the details and lower the video quality.
➡ Remember to lock your exposure. To make sure your shot is sharply focused, frame your shot, tap the screen on the area you want focused and hold it until AE/AF lock box appears to lock your exposure.
This will ensure that your final video isn’t blurry and out of focus, even if it’s continuously adjusted according to the movement.
➡ Make use of time-lapse and slow motion. A little bit of time-lapse or slo-mo footage added to your video can give it a professional touch. But it depends on what you’re filming, for example, a shot of someone surfing will be super great in slow motion, but will be too quick for a timelapse.
➡ Try a tripod and external lens. If you’re aiming for a professional look, try to shoot with a tripod to keep your iPhone steady, and attach a variety of lenses like a fisheye, macro, telephoto or wide-angle lens to amplify your creativity and achieve a larger variety of shots.
Edit Your Footage Down to Around 1-3 Minutes
No one (except maybe your mom) wants to watch hours of footage of you traveling. Most travel videos include a variety of splendid scenes, which only lasts a few seconds, and the total length won’t be longer than 3 minutes.
This requires a lot of editing skill, not only trimming, cropping, and merging, but also more advanced video processing skills like stabilizing, compressions, adjusting, and applying effects.
To that end, VideoProc is a nice choice which edits, converts, resizes and adjusts iPhone videos, as well as footage shot by GoPro, drones, and DSLR cameras.
The name VideoProc is derived from “video processing”, to suggest that it covers a whole workflow of video decoding, transcoding, compressing, adjusting and encoding.
It’s never been easier to edit your footage; you have editing options like trimming, cropping, rotating, applying effects, stabilizing, de-noising, syncing audio and video, adjusting color, and speeding up or slowing down the video from 0.1x to 16x etc.
And VideoProc also allows you to convert iPhone video into any format and resize 4K/HD iPhone video by up to 90% without quality loss. With the support of hardware acceleration, you can even achieve a 47x real-time faster speed for 4K video processing.
Add Music to Your Video
Nothing polishes up and take a new look of your video than music. It really can make or break the end product.
Yet the thing with music is that you can’t use your favorite song without permission from the creator.
So if you don’t want your travel video taken down from YouTube because of a music copyright violation, you can go to YouTube Audio Library to get free music to add to your video.
It’s Time to Share Your Travel Video
When you’re happy with your polished travel video, it’s time to share it to your audiences.
Don’t let it sit on your hard drive, just upload to either YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or Vimeo to tell everyone how amazing your holiday was (in 3 minutes!!).
CAMERA GEAR WE PERSONALLY USE FOR VIDEO. CLICK PHOTO ↓
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Megan is an Australian Journalist and award-winning travel writer who has been blogging since 2007. Her husband Mike is the American naturalist and wildlife photographer behind Waking Up Wild; an online magazine dedicated to opening your eyes to the wonders of the wild & natural world.
Having visited 50+ countries across all seven continents, Megan’s travels focus on cultural immersion, authentic discovery and incredible journeys. She has a strong passion for ecotourism, and aims to promote responsible travel experiences.
4 Comments
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Glad you enjoyed the post :)
I am planning to level up and up videos on my Lets Talk Madrid blog. Wish me luck. Hope to create beautiful videos after taking all your advices in this article.
Glad the post was helpful for you Ernesto :) Good luck!