Tony Wood of Smoking Monkey Productions shows how to make sure your DV productions can pass muster at even the most persnickety broadcast TV station. We watched his process carefully, from lens to screen. Here's our peek at the Secrets of the Smoking Monkey.

Normally here on digitalvideoediting.com, we write only about editing. But here, we'll make an exception, because Smoking Monkey Productions make things easier for themselves in the edit suite while still on the shoot. There’s a setup on the Sony VX-1000 DV camera that Smoking Monkey's Producer/Videographer/Editor Tony Wood likes to use that softens and lowers the contrast of the image. The fact that it’s actually a setup used to optimize the shooting of DV transferred to film suits him fine, because the closer the footage looks like film, the better his clients like it. This setting helps to get away from that hard-edged look of standard video while almost maintaining the high resolution of the three-tube Sony DV camera.

OK, OK, this technique does slightly lower the resolution, but to compensate for that, Wood pays special attention to lighting his subjects. Here's his rule of thumb: "Just because a camera can shoot under low light, doesn’t mean you should," intones Wood. He always uses a reflector, a two-sided one with a silver side and a gold side. The silver side is used as a catch light in the eyes – adding sparkle to the "windows to the soul." In addition to that, the extra light also fills in shadows on the darker side of the subject’s face. The gold side of the reflector is used in much the same way, but adds a warmer, more romantic feel to the shot. Wood ends up using the gold color for most exterior, sunlit shots. What kind of lights do you use, Tony? "We use very small 250W Fresnel lights with soft frost diffusion gels for a nice evenly-lit texture indoors," explains Wood. "Usually we use two, one as a key light and another as a back or rim light. We’re also not afraid to hand-hold the Sony VX-1000, especially because of its superior Super SteadyShot technology – we haven’t been able to find any fault with it whatsoever," Wood said.

For audio, the team uses an Asden wireless lavalier plugged straight into the camera. "Too bad it’s not PCM 48 kHz, but at 32 kHz it’s fine for voices," added Wood. "If we need external nat sound, we’ll record that on a minidisk, which synchs perfectly with the camera." Hey, it’s all digital, right?

Turn to Page 2: Now it's time to edit!