Build the perfect baby video

Once you've done your prep work, it's time to shoot--but you can't just point your camera at the kid and hit Record. You need to decide when to use a tripod and when to go handheld. You need to frame your shots so that they avoid that amateur look. And don't forget special effects--the good old-fashioned kind made popular by a certain Mr. Burns. Learn the ins and outs of using your camcorder before an important baby moment comes along and you find yourself fumbling with tapes and batteries.

Use a tripod
That shaky-camera look is fine for NYPD Blue, but it can absolutely ruin a baby video. Consider: the little one stays pretty motionless, at least for the first few months, so your camcorder should do the same. By mounting it on a tripod, you'll get rock-steady footage. At the same time, you'll free yourself to perform artistic pans and zooms--or just get in front of the lens. If you're planning to rely on your camera's digital image-stabilization feature, don't. All that does is lower the video resolution by cropping to the center of the frame.

Remember the rule of thirds
Photographers know this rule well, but it's just as applicable when shooting video. Imagine a tic-tac-toe board over your viewfinder. The lines intersect in four spots. Your goal should be to frame the action using one or more of those spots. Or, to put it another way, keep the baby out of the center square. That's Whoopi's square.

Avoid digital zoom
The same rule that applies to digital cameras applies to camcorders: optical zoom, good; digital zoom, bad. Although you may have been suckered into buying a particular model because it touted some astronomical digital-zoom number (240X! 300X! 800X!), you should never use it--unless you like grainy, pixelated video. Digital zoom is actually a big fake: as you increase the zoom level, the camcorder crops further and further into the center of the image, enlarging that cropped portion so that it fills the screen. As a result, your video looks, well, awful. Stick with your camcorder's optical zoom (usually you can turn off digital zoom from within the camera's menu system), which relies solely on the lens for magnification. If you need to get closer to the little ankle biter, follow the old photographer's maxim: zoom with your feet (or in this case, your hands and knees).

Skip the special effects
Lots of digital camcorders offer sexy special effects, everything from sepia to slow-mo. These can be fun to fool around with, but we recommend using them sparingly--if at all. Better you should start with pristine color video, then apply special effects using your editing software (a little maneuver the pros like to call postproduction). Likewise, skip the camcorder's autofade features; your editing software will give you far greater control over transitions, and greater variety as well.

Create on-the-fly Ken Burns effects
As noted earlier, for the first few months your baby isn't going to do much except lie there, making for some pretty dry video. Spice things up a bit by borrowing from documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who manages to make even 100-year-old still photos exciting. His best trick? The slow zoom. Put your camcorder on a tripod, make sure the baby is well lit, and shoot some very slow zooms. You can start wide and zoom in or start close and zoom out. Add a little simultaneous panning if you really want to get fancy. Sprinkling these shots throughout your movie can add some much-needed visual diversity.

Practice in-camera editing
It's always better to have too much footage than too little, but there's such a thing as way too much. Shoot images that tell a story. Shoot when something interesting is happening. If you just leave the camcorder running, you'll make the editing process more difficult because you'll have that much more fluff to trim away. Consider what you're filming as you're filming it and ask yourself if it's something you're likely to keep. If not, turn the camcorder off.

Mix in still photos
A baby video needn't be all video. Photos are a great way to add diversity--and to spotlight those memorable smiles, screams, nap times, and so on. With a video editor such as Ulead VideoStudio 8.0, you can even add Ken Burns-style pan and zoom effects.