Our advertising and public relations agency has a company iFlip camera to capture…well, those crazy moments we often have between serious bouts of creative thinking.

And because we all know that 45% of shared content online is video, I wanted to use the relatively basic gadget to capture video for our marketing blog. Easy right? Let’s just say that I’m pretty sure our advertising account director would have hired a hit man had I posted the “introduction video” I made of her when she was first hired.

But with no lighting or sound equipment, no tripod and no producing or editing knowledge, what’s one untrained PR professional to do? I turned to nifty twitter and asked my good friend @paulmbowers to see if he’d use his fabulous photography skills to teach me a thing or twelve.

With much thanks to Paul, here’s my first iFlip video:

More importantly, here are a few tips I learned from my first video production adventure:

1) Don’t use zoom
On the iFlip, the zoom feature is digital, not optical. This means that the zoomed sections of video will be lesser quality than the rest. More zoom = poorer quality.

2) Capture all sounds up close
The iFlip does not have a targeted microphone, which means it picks up all sounds in the room. And the same noises at different distances from the camera playback at extremely different levels. I took extra amounts of extremely up-close video with all sound effects that I wanted to include and then used editing software to overlay the sound effects onto the video where it correlated.

3) Gather voice overs in one shot
If you want a narrator to tell a story over several scenes, record all those pieces in the same location for a consistent voice throughout the video. Then use editing software to play the voice over on top of the proper video section.
When I recorded voice overs for my video, I had the narrator say each piece separately. This created a disconnect in tones. Next time, I’ll have her say it naturally as one piece and then use technology to divide it into smaller sound bites.

4) Plan your video on storyboard
Advertising creatives do this for a reason. It will make your video session more efficient if you already know what you want to do.

5) Pick your light source carefully
Most offices have horrible lighting for video. Try to record up close interviews near large, soft natural lighting sources. Fluorescent lights = bad.

What other tips do you recommend for entry level video production using a cheap camera?