When direct sunlight hits your camera’s lens, the result isn’t nearly as magical as you might hope. What you end up with is known as lens flare, and it can wreak havoc on your footage. How to avoid it? If your camera accepts a lens hood, that’s the best solution, but you can always shade it with your hand or a piece of cardboard. Just make sure that whatever you use doesn't end up in the shot.

Establishing shots do exactly what their name implies – establish a scene’s setting. Many scenes begin with such shots to show the audience where the action will take place. For instance, before showing a student and professor speaking after class, you might want to establish the scene with a shot of the particular building or university. Due to web video's inherently short nature, establishing shots are becoming less and less common in made-for-the-web productions. But if the setting of a scene is unclear, you still might want to throw one in to clarify – that is, unless you want to keep your audience deliberately in the dark.

Using a neutral density filter can make your life significantly easier if you find yourself constantly shooting outdoors in strong sunlight. The beauty of these filters is that they reduce the amount of light coming through the lens, but don’t require you to change your iris setting. This means that you can play around with your aperture to change your depth of field while still getting ideal light levels.

Put simply, the microphone on your camera sucks. You won’t get good sound from it. Even if you shoot in an acoustically perfect recording studio, the built-in mic on your camera will pick up the grinding of the camera motors. If and when you decide to step up to the plate, get a separate mic. Ideally get a shotgun mic because it’s great for recording voices without picking up background noise, but any mic will be better than your standard on-camera microphone.

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.