Shaky hands? Don’t let it come in the way when creating high quality videos, especially videos of yourself talking to your followers or customers in selfie mode. Read on to learn three easy techy hacks to take better videos overall.

Using Gimbals to stabilize your videos 

The best inexpensive tool that you can use to reduce shakes in your selfie videos by a mile is a Gimbal for your smartphone. A 3 axis motorized gimbal allows the smartphone camera to be stable to reduce the effects of unwanted movements. A gimbal will make sure you get the best possible output while making the most of your smartphone features. 

Practically Gimbals are the best when it comes to fighting extreme sudden movements. You can run all you want but a good gimbal will make sure that your selfie video is aligned with the horizon. It is great for capturing adventures, sports, travel, and tourism videos, and vlogs. 

Apart from stabilizing you get a ton of utility to create beautiful selfie videos using a Gimbal. You can create a mind-blowing hyper-lapse without a jitter. Some quality gimbals include DJI OSMO 4 and the Zhiyun smooth 4.

Adjusting white balance and aperture

Sometimes when you do not have a gimbal handy you need to tweak the internal settings of your smartphone’s camera. In this case, you need to check the white balance of your selfie video and the aperture of your smartphone’s camera. First, let us know how white balance affects shakiness. Let’s suppose there is an imbalance in the light you want to light up the dark areas without hampering the color tone of the selfie video. You can adjust the white balance to match up to the external light source to cut away noise and grains. 

When your smartphone’s camera is shooting in manual mode you can adjust the aperture to allow more light on you and reduce the shakes. Aperture decides the amount of light that enters your camera’s lens. It also influences the focus on the subject thereby reducing the shaky effect. 

Using a footcandle 

There are a lot of ways to fight shaky footage with grains but what if you could prevent them altogether? Why do we hardly get any noise in professional films? 

You too can achieve the same results in your selfie video by using a footcandle. 

Footcandles measure the amount of light hitting a surface. It is an essential tool to help you ace your light design while recording a selfie video. To use a footcandle you need to bring the device closer and point it to the light source. This will give you three measurements- ISO, the aperture, and the shutter speed. 

Adjust these settings in your smartphone and balance them with the footcandle readings to attain a perfect tone. 

Bonus Tips 

Image stabilization 

Most modern smartphones are either equipped with Electronic Image Stabilization (EIS) or Optical Image Stabilization (OIS). These features help you to achieve stable selfie videos on output.

Optical Image stabilization works by using the smartphone’s gyroscopic sensors to offset the movement of the phone. It moves in response to the movements of the user and is great for low-light conditions. Whereas, Electronic Image Stabilization uses electronic processing to correspond to unwanted movements. 

So the next time you use your smartphone to record selfie videos, you might want to turn on the image stabilization in the camera settings.

Avoiding Zoom 

The most rookie mistake that we usually make is that we often zoom in on our footage to get a tighter frame. This makes the video appear distorted and shaky as the movements magnify. You can crop your video later using a video editor. However, it is advisable to keep a native resolution to get the best quality output. 

Keeping a stable posture

Apart from having fancy tools at our disposal, you need to abide by some basic body postures to keep your selfie video stable. For starters, you need to keep a stable posture while holding a tight grip on your smartphone and while restricting arm movements. If you’re walking you must try and avoid sudden jerks to get the perfect footage. 

Ready to record!

Now that you know all about stabilizing your footage, go on and try implementing the hacks to get the best selfie videos. We assure you that your videos shall receive a higher engagement and you will notice an enhanced video quality.