When shooting video, try to use one type of light source per shot. While this generally isn’t a concern – especially if you’re shooting outside – problems can arise when filming indoors near windows. In such cases, the camera picks up both sunlight and indoor lighting (fluorescent, incandescent, etc.) and the resulting picture looks abnormal. The two types of light have different color temperatures, each affecting your camera’s exposure differently. If possible, use either sunlight or artificial light, but not both unless you know what you’re doing. And remember, always white balance when shifting locations or light sources.

When it comes to dialogue, there’s nothing like a boom mic for clarity of sound and unobtrusiveness. Boom mics are those fuzzy, often battery-powered microphones that you may have seen drop in frame in a bad video. They are directional in nature, meaning that they only record sound coming from a particular direction – making them ideal for picking up voices. The problem with boom mics is that they require a boom pole to hold them, which can be very expensive. For producers on a tight budget, however, there is a solution. If you have a shotgun microphone, wrap its cable around a long pole or broomstick, tape the end so that the mic doesn’t fall off and dangle it out of frame directly above your actor(s). You’ll get great sound and won’t have to spend much either.

Although you’ll probably want to avoid it, there is a fairly easy trick for shooting daytime scenes at night. The technique, which was employed in the earlier days of the motion picture industry, has you lower the exposure and add a blue filter to your camera. While the effect will reasonably simulate daytime, you still have to worry about dead giveaways like birds flying through shots. Make sure that street and house lights are on where necessary (it is “nighttime” after all).

No matter how short your final video ends up, you should always shoot multiple takes of key scenes. There are a number of reasons for this, but the most basic is that you can’t always tell in the viewfinder if the shot looks like you want it to. If you get a few takes, you’ll have a much better chance of success. In addition, shooting a scene in one take means you only have one type of shot. It’s very possible that the scene would look better at a slightly different angle or with the actor stressing a different syllable in one of his lines. Of course you shouldn’t shoot every shot multiple times, because that would waste time and tape. But if you have a complicated scene with a lot of room for error, multiple takes can save you from reshoots later on.

A pan is a basic camera movement that involves swiveling the camera horizontally around a central axis (usually a tripod). Pans are ubiquitous in all forms of video, and are often used to establish a setting or simply track some action. Although pans are very simple to achieve, they require a tripod or at least a steadicam for a stable picture (particularly at night). Here's a good resource for building your own steadicam for $14.