Video Production Basics - How to set up a tripod

Hi I'm Christopher Rokosz, actor, director, producer, and I'm going to show you the proper way to set up a tripod, the most basic of all camera stabilization tools and even if there is a right and a wrong way to do it and believe me I have seen, I should have blooper reels of people setting up a tripod. There is a simple and easy way to do that. First what you want to do is you we've got this tripod here a Prosumer Sony Tripod in its stowed and closed position. The first thing you want to do is to loosen it up a little bit at the tilt here so you can bring the panhandle and the head roughly even and out of its way. Then here it has got to crank up on the pedestal and you want to move that out of the way. Now people a lot of times want to start by spreading the legs of all three legs here to get the pod action happening and the easiest way to do it is to extend the bottom of the legs one here and lock and here it is a tension lock, some are twists, two and three and this way I can do it easily. If you set it up then you are on the ground, you are fighting with a tripod. At this point you can say that it is close to where we want it to be and if not and we need some more height then we want to go ahead and release the second ones, down here, one, two, and three. Now if you do have to use it shorter you want to have these extended last almost the back way of the way I was showing you because I knew we were going to full extension. The reason is is that these legs are bigger and these are smaller. The bigger ones offer you a good bit more stability. Now that we are locked and we are roughly in the position that we want to be with the full extension on all three then we can pop it open, extend both of them and sit them down. The fine tuning now comes into play where and I am going to spin this around here and there is a bubble level right in here and this tells you that your legs are even. You want to make sure that you want to have an even shot so what we are going to do here is I'm going to take a peek and I'm going to adjust it down just a bit here and great we're at dead bubble. Now notice I've got the leading leg away and then I can come in behind the spreading of these two legs right over here and it gives me room to get in close and not in the way and that way you are not straddling one of the legs. If you do need to go higher then we can release here and then use this to pedestal up just a little bit. If there is any other way you want to avoid doing that simply because the farther away you can get from here the more the camera can move around so I hope that was helpful. I'm Christopher Rokosz. We'll see your film on T.V.