Ok, reality check time. You’ve gone out and purchased your $300 camcorder and you want to make the next Hollywood blockbuster? It ain’t gonna happen.
Domestic grade equipment is exactly that, domestic grade. It is intended to provide a minimum of hassle for you to go out and shoot your kid’s birthday party or your trip to Disney World Florida. In order to make it more accessible to its market, the cost of manufacture is kept down, which at the end of the day results in a loss of quality. It’s a compromise. If you want perfect images, you need to pay for perfect quality equipment.
Now while domestic equipment is getting better, particularly with the advent of DV and other domestic digital formats, the thing that will let you down the most is the lens. Good lenses are expensive to manufacture so in order to keep the cost of domestic equipment reasonable, cheaper lenses are used which are often made of plastic rather than glass, and generally a lot slower than their expensive counterparts. What this translates to is, you need more light to make your pictures expose properly, and there is a definite ceiling to the sharpness and colour quality you can achieve.
However, you can push your camcorder a little further if you spend time (and money) on properly lighting your scene. You’ll never be able to compete with the quality of 35mm, a truck-load of gaffers, and an experienced Director of Photography, but you will get better images than if you just point and shoot. Obviously the most key thing to focus your lighting on is your subject. But for overall image quality, you should also light your backgrounds appropriately. If you know nothing about film lighting, it’s definitely worth getting a good book reading up.
You might also find it a lot easier if you turn off the auto-exposure and auto-focus functions on your camcorder and do them manually – particularly if you are tilting/panning or moving the camera. If your camera does not allow manual exposures/focus, then you are making life extremely difficult for yourself and should really consider upgrading to one that does.
A good poor-man’s trick for taking the edge of low-grade video equipment involves raiding your girlfriend’s (or you own) pantyhose drawer… Stretch sheer stocking across the lens using elastic bands, as it helps with that electronic picture look a little grainier. Your best bet is with black stockings, but experiment with other colours for bizarre effect.