Lighting

While it's easy and fun to just roll the camera for an hour or so and let that be the video, editing can be a new dimension in enjoyment. You can take the best scenes from previous videos, or create a whole scripted movie of your own. Fantasy scenarios can make excellent premises for porno movies, and usually are. Shooting scenes that lead up to sex provides some lead-in to the sex, creating anticipation and excitement. And, if you shoot the sexy talk and fondling and kissing that often precedes actual sex, you will be doing more than most of the professional porno movie dreck-tors in that regard.

Video editing is a re-recording process, which can be done with two VCR's or a computer. With two VCR's, the selected part of the original video plays on one, and is re-recorded on the second. Then the next desired part of a video is recorded right after that and so on. Making the clips of video match without a momentary tearing of the screen is accomplished with the second (recording) VCR being one that has a "flying erase head", a common feature on higher end home machines. Many of the better machines have special editing features, described in their manuals. Some of them have special inputs for a separate edit controller box, which talks to both VCR's at once and coordinates their motions. With this kind of setup you can make smooth edits with time precision down to a fraction of a second, which is good enough in many cases.

Many computers now come with video inputs and outputs, or reasonably inexpensive expansion boards can be purchased to provide video connections. With this type of board, editing software, and a large internal hard disk or accelerated external disk array, you can precisely edit video, do visual effects, titles, fancy transitions, morphing, etc.. Watch out though, because a budding enthusiast can blow his or her savings very quickly on more and more "necessary" toys. Lower cost video inputs have lower image quality than you could get with two S-VHS VCR's. The advantage of lower quality is that you don't use up your hard disk space as quickly, as this is the primary limitation of this technique. Video represents a huge flow of data, as the typical data rates are several megabytes per second. A compromise might be to use the computer only for titles, fancy transitions (changing between scenes by overlapping them somehow), and morphing your dick to huge proportions, and use the VCR's for most of the running time in the video.

As you can see, you can get into shooting and editing your own sex productions as an occasional pastime or as a major hobby. You may even find that you can make better videos than most of the ones you can rent at the store. Don't forget that amateurs have had a major impact on the development of the porno industry. Plus, the equipment you can buy for a reasonable price is getting better all the time. With motion pictures being distributed on the Internet (in low quality now, but that's improving) as well as on video, you can share your images in new, accessible, low cost ways. Whether dive deeply into this field or just diddle, er, dabble, there will be the fun of creativity and a new way of playing with sex.

The lights used can be whatever you have in the room, but usually this is not enough for video. Bring in lights from other parts of the house, or go the extra mile and obtain some just for your productions. The more light sources there are, the more even the light will be, but you can also overload the outlets and blow fuses, not to mention the uncomfortable heat. (I've been on porn shoots where I wanted to take my clothes off, not to go fuck the performers, but just because I was sweating so much I steamed up the viewfinder and couldn't see.) Quartz lamps with a few hundred watts are very useful, especially the stand-up ones that light up the ceiling for a nice even light. Clip-lights with floodlamps in them are cheap and versatile and can go anywhere you need them. Most incandescent home lamps are more orange in color than quartz lamps, and you'll notice this quickly on the video. Quartz lamps are also more efficient, so one high power quartz lamp is better than several low power regular lamps. Fluorescent lights can work, but some have colors that look bad on skin, and worse on video. For very low light situations, a good color fluorescent fixture can be a cool, compact, broad area light source that's not too harsh when it's right next to people.

Harsh, direct light streaming from focused lighting equipment looks awful on human skin. All wrinkles, blemishes, hairs and zits stand out because they cast sharp shadows. You sometimes see this in photos of grizzled old people, when the photographer wants them to look grizzled and old. A more "flattering" light is called "soft" light, which filters through a diffusing cloth, or bounces off a nearby white surface. This is what you always see in glamour and fashion photos. The key thing is that the source of light as it would appear from the point of view of the actor's wrinkle, is a broad area like the whole ceiling, rather than a small point like the front of the floodlamp. A common way to light porno is to point powerful lights at the white walls, ceiling, or white cardboard cards near the actors, so that the light is even over the whole area where they'll have sex. That way, you don't have dark areas where there might be a precious genital and you can't see it. This technique wastes lots of light, so one either has to have tons of light power, or a sensitive camera (which most of the consumer cameras are).

Another nice thing to do for humans is give them light which is a little like their skin color already. This tends to even out the person's skin color, hiding the minute differences in tone that are hideous to those seeking universal perfect beauty. Also, the person's skin will reflect most of the light that falls on it, giving them more of a "healthy glow". Filter colors for skin colors from "white" to "black" usually range from light peach color to orange. You can get different colored plastic filters in theatre or cinema supply stores, with a wide range of colors. These are made to go over the face of the light fixture, and don't melt easily. Ordinary wooden clothes pins are used by film and video pros to clip the filters on their lights. Don't make the mistake of putting tape on a hot light, only to have to smell burning plastic the rest of the day.

Note that when you white balance (telling the camera "this here is white, OK?") you can either do it in the colored light, making the scene seem as if it was shot in white light, or you can balance with an uncolored light, to keep the sense of warmly colored light. Play with the light and the camera, looking at the TV connected to the camcorder on a tripod (hey! we've found a use for it!). Just hook the video outputs on the camcorder directly to the video inputs on the TV, or you may have to go through your VCR first. Then just see what looks good. But beware that film crews spend many hours getting the light right, and you should do this at a time when you don't need to maintain the erotic mood.

If you are going to use the TV as a monitor for setting the lighting, it had better be adjusted right. Otherwise you will make the camera and lighting wrong to get the image to look right on your wrongly adjusted TV. The most easily available good signal is a broadcast television show with a strong signal, or a cable show. Choose a variety of scenes, with faces in natural light, outdoor scenes, and scenes with some areas you know should be white. If you can adjust the saturation (or color), hue (or tint), brightness, and contrast to a setting where a variety of scenes look the way you know they should, then you are pretty close.

A video camera will make all the tones and colors more harsh than they are to your eye, so make things somewhat more bland and even than you think just from visual judgment. Again, looking at the TV while you set up will tell you the real story right away. Note that if you intend to copy the tape or edit it by a copying process, the color saturation and contrast (harshness) will get worse, so you might tone it down even more. A particular problem is the color of pure red, which makes scintillating smears in subsequent copies, and which is avoided by video specialists. Other super saturated (pure) colors can also be a problem.

Watch out for cloth material with closely spaced stripes, as these can approximately match the lines of the video image, creating magic rainbows that move and wiggle across the striped area. As with everything, play with this so you get the idea and know what to expect. Playing is learning.