People love their iPhones, so it’s no surprise that we have been asked, as Atlanta’s most respected video production company, about the viability of using a personal iPhone to shoot a company video.  It might sound like a good idea.  After all, you have an HD camera built right into your smartphone and the image quality can look great.

But if you are a professional organization, and you offer quality products and services, we strongly advise you NOT to go this route.  You’ll get nowhere near the professional look that your company needs.  In fact, it’s a downright terrible idea because the results will look amateur and cheap.

To start with, think about audio.  It seems like a minor detail, but it’s huge.  If the speaker is more than two feet away from the iPhone, the audio sounds terrible.  You’ll also come across problems with background noise interfering with the sound you intended to record.

If you were to shoot a video outdoors on your iPhone, this is what you could expect — your audio track would pick up birds chirping in nearby trees, an airplane passing overhead, a neighbor’s distant lawnmower, and wind rushing over the internal microphone.   It’s not that easy to fix bad audio.  Even if the audio is just a little bit off, viewers will know there’s something not quite right.

Add in the harsh lighting outdoors during your impromptu iPhone shoot . . . and you might as well shout “I am a cheap company!” The last thing you want is to convince clients that your products or services are also substandard. The end result is that the video will hurt, rather than help, your company’s image and brand.

And what about that nice HD image that your iPhone is able to capture?  The problem is that the whole product has to come off well.  It’s not about what the camera can do; it’s the ability of the person behind the camera to use the equipment properly.

Consider all the details in a professional video that make a world of difference — things like proper lighting, makeup, and the ability to stabilize footage.  If you’re not using a tripod, the image will shake, and even a little shaking will look bad.  A professional video production company will nail down these important details.

After viewing a cheap iPhone video, a prospective customer could then view a competitor’s video that’s been professionally produced, and whose company do you think he or she will choose?  Your competitor may have an inferior product, but a professional video will always win over customers who make decisions based on what they find online.

Just think back twenty years ago when the internet was not part of the marketing world.  Let’s say you’re looking for a store, and you find it in an area of town where the buildings are covered with graffiti.  When you approach the store, you see that the windows are dirty and the carpet is tattered.  The overall impression makes you want to go elsewhere.  So you go to another business that has a well-maintained lawn, pretty flowers, and a professional and attractive sign.  The interior of the store is nice and clean.  This is where you want to do business, even without having seen the products sold there.

The same quick judgments happens online, but they happen a lot faster — at the click of a button.  A person decides right away from your online content (1) who you are and (2) what kind of business you have.  When a viewer clicks on that video, you don’t want to disappoint them and leave them feeling that they just wasted even three minutes watching a poor quality iPhone video.

 

 

Related posts:

No related posts.