To successfully promote your videos to your audience, it’s important that your videos meet a certain quality standard. But don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it may seem!

Various Factors Determine the Quality

The quality of a video depends on various factors:

• The location of the recording – is it aesthetically pleasing?
• The lighting at that location
• Is the location quiet?
• How is the decoration of the scene where yoga is recorded?
• Camera
• Microphone

Location of the Recording

Make sure you record in a quiet place. There is nothing worse than having a great recording in progress, and suddenly the dog, a child, or the robotic vacuum cleaner enters your frame, or someone starts making a huge noise with a drill.

Therefore, choose carefully where you make the recordings. It may even be worth choosing a location outside your home, such as a yoga studio nearby.

Also, make sure you decorate thoughtfully. The scene of your recording should appear calm and appealing. A plant, a beautiful yoga mat, or even a nice rug, a subtle background image—all contribute to conveying tranquility and creating good energy.

The Right Equipment

Very important for the proper quality of a video is, of course, the equipment you need.

We sought a good compromise between price and quality for our equipment, but one that also allows us to remain mobile, not burdened with bulky equipment.

Camera:
We used two smartphones as cameras, both modern Samsung Galaxy smartphones (Samsung Galaxy S20+ and Samsung Galaxy S10+). A modern smartphone with a good-quality camera is usually sufficient for normal recordings. Whether it’s an iPhone, Android, Samsung, LG, Sony, or whatever.

We used two to have a fallback in case something doesn’t work. Next, we want to work with two different angle settings. We will describe that in another article.

IMPORTANT: The smartphone has autozoom enabled by default! This blurs the image if you move. For this reason, we had to discard two recordings. So check your phone to see how to turn it off. The Samsung Galaxy S20+ was recorded in Pro Video mode, the Galaxy S10+ in Normal mode. The Normal mode of the S10+ handled the lighting better.

It’s also crucial that you place the smartphone on a tripod. Quality is important in the sense that it should not shake, so it must stand stable (so don’t use those cheap China tripods!). Further in the article, you will find a list with our items and links on where to buy them.

Microphone:
We opted for a solution from RØDE. No, we are not sponsored by RØDE, nor do we earn anything from it 😉

We need a super small microphone that clips to the collar, with a transmitter and a receiver on the phone. The combination has proven itself to us. The microphone is so small that it hardly bothers and the quality is awesome.

Light:
In our videos, we used two ring lights from Kodak that illuminate from the front. These are not very powerful, but we had a very well-lit room. Behind us was a salt lamp, which gives very warm light, and another lamp, also with warm light.
We set the Kodak ring lights to bright, white – almost tending towards blue – light.
The Kodak Ring Light lamps were cheap but a bit wobbly and not very powerful. There are certainly better and also stronger alternatives.

Equipment List

Microphone:
RØDE smartLav+ including SC3 Adapter (be sure to take the SC3 Adapter, as you cannot plug the microphone directly into the phone).
Germany
Switzerland

Adapter for your phone if you no longer have a direct 3.5mm connection.
Samsung Adapter:
Germany
Switzerland

iPhone Adapter:
Germany
Switzerland

Transmitter/Receiver:
RØDE Wireless GO (or GO II):
Germany
Switzerland

Tripod:
Rollei Smartphone Tripod Traveler
Germany
Switzerland

Light:
There are several providers on the market. Ring lights are very good, but it depends heavily on the illumination of your space.

Wiring of Microphone, Transmitter/Receiver, and Smartphone

To make it easy, you can see in the next photo how the wiring works. You don’t need to do anything to the transmitter/receiver except adjust the volume. There are three volume settings – Low, Medium, High. We recorded on Medium.

I want to mention something briefly here. Sometimes we had noise in our recordings. We solved this by increasing the distance between the smartphone and the receiver. We added an extension cable from the RODE SC7 to the smartphone adapter. This eliminated the noise.