How to Get Your Hands on Professional Video Equipment Without Spending a Fortune

If you're a student filmmaker or are focused on making a low-budget independent film, you're probably spending a lot of time thinking about your budget. After all, with so many people to hire and pay on top of finding locations, securing film permits, and getting the right equipment, it's easy for your budget to get out of hand quickly.

Especially for students or filmmakers just getting into the craft, this can be a major hurdle to overcome if you want to be taken seriously. Production value is often an important component of having your work accepted into film festivals or even being appreciated by friends and family members since so many people have seen professional movies and will hold you to a similar standard. That being said, by focusing on two key aspects of the medium of film—video quality and audio quality—it's possible to reign in your budget while still getting high-quality results. Here's how to go about doing it.

Focus on image first

Film is a visual medium, so it's important that the visuals in your production look crisp, clean, and professional. This can be accomplished primarily by two factors: having great lighting and having great lenses. Many people think that with expensive gear, they'll be able to get great shots that look good; however, this couldn't be farther from the truth. While it's true that good equipment is crucial to getting professional results (as you'll read below), if you aren't lighting your subjects properly, things will look flat or muted. Think about great films like "The Godfather"—the lighting in these movies is just as much of a character as Don Corleone!

Beyond having good lighting, it is important to have good lenses. Professional films have a wide range of camera lenses (including 35mm lenses, 70mm, 300mm, etc.) that help achieve that perfect "film" look, even if you're shooting digitally. That being said, investing in a few different lenses is an expensive outlay. Beyond that, as you upgrade your camera, you may find that your old lenses don't work with newer camera models. Thankfully, heading to a rental house can take what could be a $10,000 outlay for your feature film and make it cost less than 10% of that. Lens rental gives you access to pro photo lenses from makers like Nikon, Sigma, and Canon, without you having to worry about your lenses no longer interfacing with your camera equipment every couple of years. Pursuing lens rental instead of purchasing your lenses gives you control over how much gear you want to rent, the rental period itself, and if you're interested in any other camera gear a rental house may offer. This gives you the peace of mind that your film will look great and come in under budget, too.

Prioritize sound next

Once you've got your visuals squared away, it's time to focus on the next most important factor in filmmaking: sound. Your film can look as pretty as can be, but if it sounds bad or is hard to understand, you're going to be in major trouble. The last thing you want to have to do is redub all of your actors' dialogue after the fact since it's hard to run an ADR session and get actors to deliver their lines in the same way that they were doing on set.

The way to avoid this problem is to get professional sound equipment and microphones so that you're capturing high-quality sound on set. This generally looks like using an external recording device, like those made by TASCAM, and interfacing it with a professional boom microphone, shotgun mic, or lavalier. Thankfully, all of this equipment can be rented, too, saving you hundreds of dollars in the process.