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Every pro and semi-pro content creator should learn how to shoot video
and extract still photos if they want to make money in future, according to
expert Scott Robert Lim.
article here
“Everybody should get into video, everybody should start to become a
hybrid shooter,” he says. “There are a billion video views per day on Facebook
and 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. So if you’re not learning
how to do it, you’re losing out on money.”
Lim, who is
a certified educator and winner of over 70 international awards including Top
Ten Most Influential Photographers, details about how stills shooters can shift
into video in a masterclass presented by Sony and B&H.
This intensive session provides an overview of how stills photographers
can shift their skills into video and extract still frames so that they are
performing one workflow but expanding the range of platforms and publications
for their work.
“I wanted to show this concept of pulling frames because I believe that
this is literally the future,” Lim explains. “I know it’s a little bit early
for some people but in five years, this is going to be common practice,
especially as technology gets better and better.”
Every still frame in Lim’s hour-long presentation is a still pulled from
video. He says that he first started experimenting with the concept during
COVID and also because he realized that video is comprising nearly 100% of all
media online.
“It was totally amazing to me that I was able to get a frame and then in
Photoshop do my magic [and create] a totally usable image from something that I
just thought was a castaway video.”
He shows how he pulled a still from a video shot at 8K and increased the
resolution in Photoshop (using its AI tools) to a 32-megapixel file that any
leading magazine would be comfortable using in print.
Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that. While with stills
you might worry about resolution and format (along with composition and
lighting, of course), if you’re pulling frames from video there are multiple
parameters to juggle.
Lim deep dives great detail about frame rate, shutter speed, bit rate
and compression. He also discusses color bit depth and color sample rates.
“That’s the reason why video is difficult, because the quality changes
according to all these little things,” he says. “Your workflow [will mean] you
create the video and then extract stills from the video so it’s a much more
like the workflow is killing two birds with one stone.”
For instance, for social media the standard requirement is HD (2K) and
not higher resolution. So for video for social media you will only have to
shoot in full HD Or you can shoot in 4K and crop the heck out of it, he says.
“The pixel dimensions of an Instagram reel are full HD. So if I were
shooting a 4K video and let’s say I didn’t want to turn it portrait, I just
wanted to keep it landscape, there’s so much resolution there I could just crop
the middle and I would have plenty of resolution for the reel. Or I could flip
it and shoot it in portrait and then I could crop more than half of it and
still have enough resolution for an Instagram reel.”
The information can be overwhelming but Lim recommends just hitting
video record and see what comes out of it.
“Some of your greatest captures you’re going to find are not the ones
that are the sharpest, or the ones with the highest pixel count or megapixel
count. It’s the ones that you just feel when you look at them. So go out there,
shoot, have fun with it.”
Watch the video at the top of the page, where Lim reveals what he calls
his “magic hybrid settings” for doing both video and stills.
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