Film and video experts—like cinematographers and animators—use hundreds of video production terms while planning, recording, and preparing videos for delivery, leaving those without filmmaking experience in the dark.
As with languages, you don’t need to learn all the terms to communicate. You only need a handful of words to communicate clearly with your team, freelance video creation experts, and stakeholders. Take a look at our 100+ list of video production terms to help you get up to speed:
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Pre-Production
Pre-production refers to all the activities and assets teams deal with before recording a video. The following is a list of terms you’ll hear during the pre-production stage.
Big Idea
The big idea refers to the vision you have for your video project—what you want to communicate or have your audience take away. It should also include things like runtime, target audience, and budget. This is the first thing that should be written before starting a project. It should be short and concise; a few sentences up to a couple of paragraphs at most.
Outline
An outline is a written idea of the characters, props, and events you’ll need to tell your story. You can use outlines to ensure that your future script and storyboard keep your goals and resources in mind. Generally, this comes after the big idea, but before the story is written.
Story
A story is the plot of your video. It can be told through a sequence of events (scenes), told by a narrator, or shown through characters. When writing a story, do not include dialog, this stage of pre-production is to focus solely on building your message and the world in which it happens.
Script
A script is a written document that contains your story’s plot alongside the characters, locations, and dialogue that are part of it. The script should be focused mainly on dialogue, with short descriptions of visuals if needed.
With a script, you’ll know the elements necessary to produce a video your stakeholders enjoy. You’ll also be able to assess whether an idea will benefit (aligned with the script) or affect (unaligned with the script) your story’s plot.
Draft
In pre-production, drafts are typically versions of the script that haven’t been revised or approved by the project’s stakeholders. They’re early versions, open to change.
Storyboards
A storyboard is a sketch of your story’s events: how scenes will look. They can also include descriptions for camera movement, character actions, and key dialogue.
Typically, you draw storyboards on a piece of paper. But you can also visualize them in animation software, like Vyond.
Animatics
Storyboards that use animation to sketch a story instead of a piece of paper, are called Animatics. However, they go a step further than storyboards; they include music and listenable character dialogue.
Dialogue
In pre-production, dialogue refers to the lines written in a script that actors or characters will say during the production stage.
Pacing
Pacing refers to the speed at which a video’s plot unfolds or the spacing between lines of dialogue.
Your video’s pacing comes mostly from the script. If your script spends too much time in a particular section, say, your introduction, the video’s pacing will be slow.
When scripts cram many events into the video but don’t give the viewer enough time to process them, the video’s pacing will be too fast.
Scenes
A scene is a sequence of continuous action on film. In Vyond, a scene refers to an individual portion of your video where a character or prop starts and finishes an action.
Location
In filmmaking, the location is the physical place where filming occurs. This can be out in real-world locations, or in a controlled studio environment.
In Vyond Studio, the location refers to the place where your characters will be and your stories’ events will happen.
Shot List
A shot list refers to a detailed list of the shots your crew must take (or animate) to tell your story. This can be done before, after, or in place of a storyboard depending on the way you like to work.
Shot
A shot refers to the framing of a subject or location. There are various types of shots, such as wide, medium, and close shots, as well as an array of many others.
Video Assets
Your video assets are all the elements you’ll use to produce your video. In Vyond, you can consider your characters, props, and soundtracks as video assets.
Production
Production refers to the group of activities you do while recording your video. The following is a list of terms you’ll hear during the production stage.
Camera Terms
A-Cam
Your A-Cam is the main camera you’re using to shoot your video. Many productions only use a single camera, but on multi-cam productions, the A-Cam is the primary camera, recording the most important footage.
B-Cam
Your B-Cam is the secondary camera to produce footage that supports or complements the A-Cam. For example, if you locate your A-Cam in front of the actor speaking, your B-Cam can capture another actor’s reactions. For large productions with many cameras, the next sequential letter in the alphabet is assigned to each camera in order of the importance of the shots it is gathering, i.e.: C-Cam, D-Cam, etc.
You can use the camera tool to move your shot in Vyond Studio. For example, you can zoom in on your shot by switching between the first camera (equivalent to A-Cam) and the second camera (equivalent to B-Cam).
A-Roll
A-Roll is all of your footage or animation that is the main focus of your video. Think people being interviewed or characters having a conversation.
B-Roll
B-Roll is anything that supports your A-Roll. In a single-camera scenario, B-roll is most commonly used to support whatever is the main focus of your video: detail shots, scenery, etc. If working on multi-cam shoots, B-Roll is the footage that came from the B-Cam.
Camera Lens
A camera lens is a camera component that concentrates light into your camera sensor. Without a lens, cameras don’t capture images.
F-Stop
F-Stop correlates to the size of a lens’s aperture. The larger the aperture opening, the smaller the f-stop number, and inversely, the smaller the aperture opening, the larger the f-stop number.
Example: f/1.4= large aperture, whereas f/16= small aperture
Aperture
Aperture refers to how much a camera lens’s diaphragm will open, impacting the amount of light that reaches the camera sensor, as well as having an impact on the depth of field.
More light enters your camera at larger apertures. So footage recorded at a larger aperture (e.g., f/2.8) will be brighter than a shot done with a narrower one (e.g., f/22).
The depth of field is shallower at large apertures – f/2.8 will have an out-of-focus background compared to a shot at f/22, where nearly everything will be in focus.
Depth of Field
Depth of field refers to how much of your frame will be in focus, both in front of and behind your main subject.
At a wide depth of field, cameras capture the elements within the frame sharply. So if you are recording a person in the park, both the person and the park behind them will be in focus. With a shallow depth of field, you are able to blur the foreground and/or background around your subject. In the previous scenario, the park behind our subject would be out of focus, but the person wouldn’t as long as they stay closer to the camera lens.
Field Of View
The field of view is how wide or narrow a space the lens can record at a given distance from the subject.
Focal Length
The focal length, technically speaking, refers to the distance between the light entering the camera lens and the camera’s image sensor. Most people, when referring to focal length, are referring to the millimeter (mm) marking of the lens. For instance, a 20mm lens is a wide focal length, 50mm is a normal focal length, and 100mm is a long focal length.
In Vyond Studio, you can add cameras and reduce the size of your frame to give the appearance of a longer focal length.
Prime Lens
A prime lens is a type of lens that captures subjects from a fixed focal length. They have wider apertures than zoom lenses, allowing them to intake more light and achieve a shallower depth of field.
Zoom Lens
A zoom lens is a type of lens that allows you to get closer to or farther from the subject without moving the camera or switching lenses. In general, zoom lenses have smaller apertures than prime lenses, thus allowing less light onto the camera sensor or film.
Wide-Angle Lens
A wide-angle lens is a type of lens that allows you to capture a broad field of view, allowing you to include more of a room or environment in your frame. You can use them to include large portions of your background in the frame. One thing to be cautious of with wide-angle lenses is they can sometimes cause unwanted distortion (warping/stretching of your image). It is best to not shoot people up close with wide-angle lenses.
Telephoto Lens
A telephoto lens is a type of lens that allows you to capture a narrow field of view, focusing on a specific subject and blurring anything around it. Telephoto lenses can also be used to see subjects that are very far away from the camera.
In Vyond, you can mimic the effect of a telephoto lens by first zooming in on a subject. Then, you can add an overlay at a lower opacity on top of your background to make it less visible.
Aspect Ratio
The aspect ratio is the width and height of your video. The most common aspect ratio for TV, movies, and web content is 16:9. Other common aspect ratios are 17:9, 2:1, 2.4:1, and 4:3. The most common aspect ratios for social media are 1:1, 4:5, and 9:16. Vyond studio has an aspect ratio tool that allows you to pick from a few common social media aspect ratios, or input your own values to create any aspect ratio you desire.
Frame
In production terms, your frame is what you see once you decide on your lens and camera placement. Your frame encompasses everything that you choose to be there.
White Balance
White balance is a setting in your camera that allows you to change how your camera reacts to the color temperature of light. This setting allows white objects to look white regardless of the location’s lighting conditions. Most modern cameras will automatically set the white balance for you, but it is best practice to manually adjust your white balance so the camera doesn’t automatically change while you are recording.
Gain or ISO
Gain, or ISO, is the camera setting used to adjust the exposure of your footage. The term ISO is most commonly seen in film, cinema, and DSLR cameras, whereas gain is generally the term used in broadcast cameras. However, they are the same.
The higher number your ISO or Gain is, the brighter your image will be. But you also run the risk of making the image noisy (a type of digital grain).
Frame Rate
Videos are sequences of images, or frames, assembled to create motion. The frame rate, measured in frames per second (fps), is the pace at which your video will show these images.
Vyond Studio exports every video at 24fps, the standard frame rate for movies. This is what most people would consider a “cinematic” frame rate. Higher frame rates, like 30fps, are used for much of television and sports.
Crane
A crane is a type of camera support rig that allows you to move the camera smoothly over larger distances. Cranes allow you to move the camera in all 4 directions – up, down, left, and right.
You can click here to learn how to do a crane, also known as a boom shot, in Vyond Studio.
Gimbal
A gimbal is an electronic camera stabilizer. It uses motors to keep the camera stable on 3 different axes. Gimbals can be used handheld, or even rigged to drones or vehicles. Camera operators can use it to record stable footage, even while they move.
Image Sensor
The image sensor is a camera component that transforms the light that passes through the lens into an image. It is the digital version of what film negatives are.
Camera Operator
The camera operator is the person who records the scenes and shots from the shot list.
Lighting Terms
Artificial Light
Artificial light comes from light sources that are controllable and off-camera. You can add artificial lights, like spotlights on top of the character, inside Vyond Studio.
Natural Light
Natural light refers to the light produced by the sun, moon, or any lighting that cannot be controlled, such as street lights or the lights of a city at night.
Practical Light
Practical lights are light sources that are visible in your scene, like a candle or lamp on top of your character’s desk. Ambient lights can be used to help light a scene, or they can be used with other light sources to add style to your scene. Cinematographers use them to influence the mood and ambiance of a scene.
Key Light
The key light is the main light source used to light your subject. Your key light can be the sun or artificial light.
Fill Light
Fill light is a light source used to fill in shadows. Generally fill lights are used when working with hard light sources, where diffusing the light isn’t an option, so fill light helps to fill in and soften the shadows created by your key light.
Backlight
Backlighting is a technique of lighting that cinematographers use, by positioning light behind, and above a subject to separate them from the background. This is also referred to as a rim light, as it creates a bright rimmed outline on your subject.
Hard Light
Hard light is a direct, undiffused light source like spotlights or the sun. This type of light creates defined shadows with hard edges, such as perfect outlines of people. Hard light is generally much higher in brightness and intensity as opposed to soft light.
Soft Light
Soft light is achieved by diffusing a light source which creates a gentle transition between light and shadow in your footage. It creates blurry undefined shadows and pleasing soft highlights. Soft light is ideal for lighting people.
Diffuser
A diffuser is any material used to scatter the light from a single-point light source, like a spotlight, flashlight, or the sun. Diffusers are mostly used to create soft light from hard light.
High Key Lighting
High Key Lighting refers to a lighting technique where everything in your scene is evenly lit, which produces a low contrast shot. Because of the even lighting, the images are usually more vivid and saturated and don’t have harsh shadows. Most sitcoms use high-key lighting.
Low Key Lighting
Low Key Lighting refers to a lighting technique where your scene is lit at different intensities to enhance or create shadows. This lighting technique produces high contrast shots where you can clearly distinguish the shot’s highlights and shadows from one another.
While Vyond Studio doesn’t let you create shadows on specific parts of a subject, you can reduce an overlay’s opacity to make some portions of your scene look darker than others—as if shadows covered them. You can also use a combination of light and dark colors to create more contrast in your scenes.
Street lights, lamps, and candles are examples of practical lights you can find inside Vyond Studio.
Color Temperature
Color temperature refers to the color of light that different kinds of light create. This is measured in Kelvin (K) and ranges from orange to blue (and everything in between). The color temperature of lights is important to know when setting the correct white balance on your camera. Mixing color temperatures is also a great way to create color contrast or complementary colors in your scenes.
Audio Terms
Dialogue
Dialogue is any audio that is spoken by actors or characters. It is usually the main audio in any kind of video or movie.
Ambient Sound
Ambient sounds provide the context of the scene’s location, like car honks in a highway scene or weights hitting the floor in a gym scene.
Room Tone
Room tone is the combination of sounds that naturally occur in an environment when no one is moving or speaking. Room tone can refer to sound from both indoors and outdoors.
Decibel (dB)
A decibel is the unit of measurement for sound. For example, a whisper is around 30 dB, while a movie theater can produce sounds of 90 dB.
Audio Level
The audio level refers to the volume at which you are recording, which is measured in decibels (dB). Generally, you want to keep your max level around -12dB to -6dB. Hitting 0dB or higher will cause your audio to clip, which creates distortion in your audio that cannot be fixed.
Clipping
Microphones and speakers can’t process the sounds at every audio level while maintaining their quality. Clipping is a distortion that occurs when your audio reaches or surpasses 0dB.
We suggest you keep your audio levels between -6 and -12dB to avoid clipping while recording.
Sample rate
Computers can’t understand the sounds the human ear captures. So they turn sound into digital signals they can process. These signals are called samples and are measured in hertz (Hz) and kilohertz (kHz).
The sample rate is the speed at which your recording device or software processes samples. The higher the sample rate, the more data from your audio sources you’ll capture, resulting in higher audio quality. For video, a sample rate of 48kHz (48,000Hz) should be used, this will ensure the audio stays synced with your video.
Another common sample rate you might see is 44.1kHz (44,100Hz) which is used primarily for audio-only applications (podcasts, music, etc.) This sample rate can be used with video but will become slightly out of sync over longer durations.
XLR
An XLR is the industry standard cable connection for microphones and recorders. These cables are robust and are able to not only deliver audio signals but also power the microphone, eliminating the need for batteries.
Mic
A mic, or microphone, is a sound capturing device. Most mics need to be plugged into an audio recorder, computer, or camera, to actually record your audio.
Polar pattern
A microphone’s polar pattern describes the directions (e.g., front, back, sides) from which the microphone can capture sound.
Boom
A boom or boom arm is an adjustable arm used to mount microphones, lights, or cameras. You can use them to get microphones close to sound sources, put lights directly above talent, but still out of frame, or get cameras into places that tripods cannot reach.
Condenser
A condenser is a type of microphone that is extra sensitive to sound, meaning it is easier to distort your audio if your voice or sound from your surroundings is too loud. On the flip side, they’re better at capturing delicate sounds and voices than dynamic microphones.
We recommend you use condenser microphones while recording the voiceover for Vyond Studio.
Cardioid
A cardioid microphone uses a polar pattern that mostly captures the sound coming from the front and sides of the microphone. So it’s ideal for shots where a single person is talking, and you want to avoid sound from the rear side of the microphone.
If you are recording a voiceover, we recommend you use a cardioid microphone to capture your voice without background noise.
Dynamic
Dynamic is a type of microphone that captures loud noises without generating distortion. They’re perfect for recording music and loud sounds.
Lavalier
Lavaliers are a type of small microphone that can be clipped to an actor’s clothing, or taped to their body under their clothing to be completely hidden. They are perfect for recording audio from moving actors when you don’t have a boom operator capturing audio, or if the frame of the camera is so wide that having a boom mic is impossible. They are also perfect for interviewing multiple people to ensure everyone’s audio level is the same.
Omnidirectional
Omnidirectional is a polar pattern microphone that captures sounds from all sides of the microphone. You can use them for scenes with multiple speakers or where you need to capture ambient noise or room tone.
Types of Shots & Camera Movement
Close-Up Shot
A close-up is a shot of your subject in which they fill most of the frame, hiding most of the background. You can use close-ups to highlight an important line from a character, to emphasize a character’s reaction, or to show important details of a prop in a scene.
In Vyond Studio, you can zoom in to a character’s face as it shows an expression in order to do a close-up.
Medium-Close Shot
A medium-close shot focuses on the character’s face but includes a portion of the background and the actor’s body—typically from the chest up.
Medium Shot
A medium shot is a type of shot that shows a subject, usually from the waist up, and a portion of the background.
Medium Wide Shot
A medium wide shot is a type of shot that sits between a medium and a wide shot. It includes a more significant portion of the actor’s body—from the knees up—and more background elements.
In Vyond Studio, you can zoom in to a character’s upper portion of their body to mimic the effect of a medium-wide shot.
Wide Shot
A wide shot is a type of shot that includes the entire actor’s body and a large portion of the background.
Ultra-Wide Shot
An ultra-wide shot is a type of shot that is commonly used for establishing shots of locations or environments. They can include actors, or just be the location itself.
Over-The-Shoulder Shot
An over-the-shoulder (OTS) is a type of shot where the camera operator frames a subject from behind another actor, with part of their shoulder and/or head on the side of the frame, with the main actor in the middle or opposite side of the frame.
Point of View shot
A point of view (POV) shot is when the footage shows what an actor sees. This type of shot lets viewers live the story from a character’s eyes.
Two-Shot
A two-shot is a type of shot where the camera operator includes two characters in the frame.
Pan
A pan is a camera movement where you first fix the camera in a position—like with a tripod—and then rotate the camera horizontally to capture left to right (or vice versa).
Tilt
A tilt is a camera movement where you first fix the camera in a position—like with a tripod—and then rotate it vertically to capture a scene from top to bottom (or vice versa).
You can click here to learn how to tilt in Vyond Studio.
Crane
In reference to a type of shot, a crane (or boom) is when the camera is physically moved higher or lower on a crane or boom arm.
You can click here to learn how to do a crane, also known as a boom shot, in Vyond Studio.
Pull
A pull is a camera movement where your camera operator moves the camera away from your subject without modifying the focal length.
You can click here to learn how to pull in Vyond Studio.
Push
A push is a camera movement where your camera operator moves the camera closer to the subject without modifying the focal length.
Zoom
Zoom in or zoom out is a camera technique performed with a zoom lens, where you get your shot closer to or farther from the subject without moving the camera.
You can click here to learn how to zoom in Vyond Studio.
Dolly Zoom or Zolly
A dolly zoom, also known as a zolly, is a camera movement where your camera operator first zooms and then moves the camera in the opposite direction. So if they zoom in, they’d have to dolly away from the subject to perform a zolly out, and vice versa for a zolly in. This creates the effect that your character stays the same size in your frame while the background shrinks or grows behind them. You can use dolly zooms to make your scene transmit unease.
Rule of Thirds
The rule of thirds is a technique where you use two horizontal lines and two vertical lines to divide your frame into thirds. You then position the most critical elements of your scene at the intersection of the thirds.
You can use the rule of thirds grid overlay inside Vyond Studio to position essential characters and props.
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Post-Production
Post-production, in the world of video production, refers to all the processes teams should consider or do after recording a video and/or audio. The following is a list of terms you’ll hear during the post-production stage.
Video Editing
Edit
Editing is done to piece together your final video after you’ve finished recording. In the editing process, you modify the image, story structure, and sound to get to a finished video.
Raw footage
Raw footage can refer to 2 things. The first can be footage no one has edited. Raw footage can also refer to footage shot in a RAW format, an unprocessed acquisition format that allows you to change things in editing, like your ISO and White Balance. RAW formats for video require high-end computers capable of handling the processing power for editing.
Cut
A cut occurs between one shot and another. It’s when you go from one scene to the next, without a transition.
A cut is also the action of dividing a single clip into multiple clips on your timeline.
In Vyond Studio, you can’t cut scenes, however, you can cut audio by hovering over the audio clip on the timeline, right-clicking, and then choosing cut.
Dissolve
A dissolve is a transition effect that can be used to fade to or from black or another color. You can also use the dissolve effect to transition from one scene to another.
Timeline
The timeline is a horizontal area in animation and video editing software where you build your video. You can add, delete, cut, rearrange, and preview visual and audio assets during the editing process.
Vyond Studio offers a collapsed and expanded timeline where you can control the timing of your project’s assets.
Sequence
A sequence can be a few things.
- In animation, a sequence is a combination of still images that produce an animated moving one.
- In video and film, a sequence is the assembly of multiple shots to create a scene — a sequence of events.
- In Adobe Premiere Pro, a sequence is their term for your timeline, the working space in which you edit your video.
Color Correction
Color correction is the process of adjusting your video’s colors to get to a neutral point – the goal is to remove any strange color-casts and have anything that is supposed to be white, actually look white. This process is vital, as the location and lighting you record with can affect how your camera captures color.
Color Grade
Color grading, which takes place after color correction, is the process of adjusting your video’s colors to create a specific aesthetic. In color grading, the goal isn’t realism, but style.
Vignette
A vignette is a visual effect where the video’s frame is darkened around the edges. Vignettes are used to bring focus toward the middle of a screen and are generally applied during the color-grading process.
Freeze Frame
A freeze-frame is when you pick one frame—a still image—from your video and extend its length so your footage is motionless.
Graphic
Graphics are visual assets you add on top of your footage, or as stand-alone images in your video.
In Vyond Studio, you can choose from over 2,000 props to visually support your message, as well as the ability to upload your own graphics in the form of .jpg and .png (.png allows for a transparent background – perfect for logos!).
Motion Graphics
Motion graphics are visual assets—like text or shapes—that move. The term encompasses moving elements from a scene that don’t tell a story but support it.
In Vyond Studio, you can use motion paths to animate props or text.
Special Effects
There are 2 types of special effects in video production.
Practical effects are effects that are real and done at the time of filming. Think real explosions or a car flying through the air.
Digital effects or CGI (computer-generated imagery), are visual effects that are done in the post-production stage. Think of a spaceship flying through hyperspace or a dragon breathing fire.
Multimedia
The term multimedia refers to a communication format that results from mixing several communication formats into one.
In the case of Vyond Studio, the end product would be a multimedia format that results from mixing video, audio, images, and animation.
Proxies
Proxies are lower-resolution versions of your camera’s footage that video editing software creates so you can edit your video despite not having a professional video editing computer.
Rendering
Rendering is a way of processing your video files inside of your editing software so you can see a real-time preview of how your edits look. This is an alternative way to preview high-resolution video files on a computer that is not fast enough to play the footage on its own.
Rendering Time
The rendering time is the amount of time it takes your computer to render your video.
Export
Exporting is the process of processing your edited footage or animation into a format others can see, like .mov or .mp4.
In Vyond Studio, you can export videos in 720p HD, 1080p Full HD, or as animated gifs.
Compression
Compression is the process of reducing an audio or video file size while maintaining quality. The more compression you apply to your files, the smaller the file size will be, but you run the risk of lowering your quality as well.
You can compress audio and video files to reduce the amount of storage space necessary to save your files.
For importing video, audio, or images into Vyond Studio, it’s helpful to know how to compress files to the required size – 15MB for audio and images, and 100MB for video files.
Captions
Captions are words displayed on a video that allows people to read what actors are saying. Captions can also add context to a scene’s sound—like mentioning that a song is playing, or calling out specific sound effects. Captions are meant to make the video more accessible for those with hearing impairments.
When videos include subtitles in the same language as the spoken words, they are called captions—not subtitles.
Closed Captions
Closed captions allow the viewers to turn the captions on or off. Often you will find subtitles for other languages other than the primary language of the video available as closed captions.
Open Captions
Open captions are captions viewers can’t turn off. Open captions are a great option if you want to stylize your captions to meet brand standards, or if you know people might be watching your video without the audio turned on, like while scrolling through their social media feeds.
Subtitles
Subtitles are words displayed on a video that translates the video’s original language into another. The most common use for subtitles is translating dialogues, but you can also translate audio descriptions that describe other audio in a scene.
Thumbnail
Thumbnails are still images for your video that appear on video hosting platforms and streaming services before a person plays your video. You can use thumbnails to introduce a potential viewer to your video’s content.
Audio Editing
Audio Mix
The audio mix is the level at which individual audio tracks are mixed together in the editing process. It is the balance between dialogue, room tone, music, ambient noise, and sound effects. In Vyond Studio, you can look at and reassemble the audio mix using the timeline at the bottom of the interface.
Equalization
Audio files are composed of sound waves that have different frequencies from across the audible spectrum. Equalization is the process of adjusting the loudness of these different frequencies to change how an audio file sounds.
Voiceover
A voiceover is a dialogue audio track that is only heard in a video or film, but the person speaking is rarely, if never seen. Voiceover could be coming from the narrator of a story, or it could be that we are hearing a character’s thoughts. Voiceover is also perfect for tutorial and onboarding videos where seeing examples of what the voiceover is saying is more important than seeing who is speaking.
While voiceover actors typically record voiceovers, you can learn how to record one in this article.
Automated Dialog Replacement (ADR)
Automated Dialog Replacement is the process of re-recording an actor’s dialogue scene after the footage has already been recorded. ADR is usually done to record a higher-quality version of an actor’s lines to replace their original audio in the editing process. This is done by having the actor listen to their original lines and repeat them at the exact same pacing and tonality as the originals while re-recording.
Foley
Foley is the technique of creating sounds during the post-production stage to include in the video—like recording the sound of footsteps on a sidewalk, or someone knocking on a door. In a controlled recording studio, foley artists watch the video or film in real-time and perform the actions at the same speed as the actors to create sound effects that match up perfectly to the action on screen.
Lip Sync
Lip sync is when an actor or animated character’s mouth moves along with the audio that someone else (e.g., voice artist) has recorded.
In Vyond Studio, you can have any character lip-sync to your voiceovers.
Non-synchronous sound
A non-synchronous sound is any sound that occurs at a different time than the visual asset it’s trying to accompany. Out-of-sync sounds and visuals can produce a jarring effect that destroys the realism of a video but can be used for the effect of unease or disorientation.
In Vyond Studio, you can drag and drop audio files on the timeline to ensure they occur at the same time as your visuals.
Sound Effects
Sound effects are audio tracks you add on top of your footage to enhance or support the mood or message your video is trying to convey.
In Vyond Studio, you can choose from 318 sound effects to enhance your story.
Soundtrack
A soundtrack usually refers to a compilation of every musical audio track in a film.
General Terms
The following is a list of terms you might hear during any stage of the video-creation process.
Signal
A signal is a sound data-carrying electric current that passes information from one device to another.
Analog Signal
An analog signal is a type of signal that continuously varies in voltage. For example, earthquakes, humans, and audio recording devices produce analog signals.
Digital Signal
A digital signal is a type of signal that doesn’t have a continuous variation in voltage. For example, computers and digital phones produce digital signals.
Footage
The footage is the multimedia material cameras capture. The term typically includes all the individual videos the crew recorded.
Animation
Animations are rapid sequences of different drawings that move when combined.
Thanks to today’s technology, animators no longer have to draw frame by frame. Instead, they can use built-in features—like Vyond’s motion paths—to give life to still graphics.
Format
A format, or file format, is a form of data storage. The format of your audio and video files influences their size, quality, and the devices that can play them.
Video Resolution
Video resolution is a measurement of a video’s image quality based on the number of pixels used to produce a video. Pictures and frames with more pixels have a larger resolution, file size, and overall better quality.
SD – standard definition (480p)
Standard definition is an older video resolution made with 720 pixels of width and 480 of height. Because of this, it has an aspect ratio of 4:3 (for old square televisions) as opposed to modern wide screens with an aspect ratio of 16:9.
HD – high definition (720p)
High definition is a video resolution made with 1280 pixels of width and 720 of height, with an aspect ratio of 16:9.
In Vyond Studio, you can download videos in a 720p resolution.
FHD – full high definition (1080p)
Full high definition is a video resolution made of 1920 pixels of width and 1080 of height, with an aspect ratio of 16:9.
In Vyond Studio, you can download videos in a 1080p resolution.
UHD – ultra high definition (4K)
Ultra high definition is a video resolution made of 3840 pixels of width and 2160 of height, with an aspect ratio of 16:9.
Storage
Storage refers to a software or device where you save images, sound, or multimedia assets for future use or reference. File sizes are most common in Kilobytes(KB), Megabytes (MB), Gigabytes (GB), and Terabytes (TB). Thanks to the metric system, these sizes are easy to remember!
1,000KB=1MB
1,000MB=1GB
1,000GB=1TB
HDD – hard drive disk
A hard drive disk is a data storage device that saves data on a platter—a spinning “plate” of magnetic material. HDDs are now inexpensive and widely available; however, they are less reliable and much slower than SSDs.
SSD – solid-state drive
A solid-state drive is a data storage device that saves data in integrated circuits instead of a disk. As a result, solid-state drives are smaller and more expensive than HDDs. They’re faster, too, making them a better storage device than HDDs.
Asymmetry
Asymmetry refers to a situation where, if you divide a scene into two side-by-side halves, your scene’s right and left sides look different.
Background Noise
Background noise is any undesired sound that makes it into the footage, typically without the film crew noticing.
Branded content
Branded content is information a company or individual creates so another person can consume it and link it to its creator.
In Vyond Studio, you can brand your video by including your logo, commonly used fonts, and your companies’ brand colors.
Content
Content is information a company or individual creates so another person can consume it.
Contrast
Contrast is the design principle of varying your visual asset’s colors, brightness, textures, shapes, and sizes.
Disney Animation Principles
Disney animation principles refer to 12 principles some of Disney’s most renowned animators shared to help others create lifelike animations.
You can learn about each principle and how to apply them in Vyond here.
Overlay
An overlay is a visual asset placed on top of another visual asset. You can include overlays in your video to make it less monotonous.
Pixel
A pixel is the tiniest part of an image, making images a combination of pixels.
Symmetry
Symmetry refers to a situation where, if you divide a scene into two side-by-side halves, your scene’s right and left sides look the same. You can use the term when talking about the framing of a scene.
Three dimensional (3D)
Three-dimensional (3D) is a term to describe visual assets that have breadth, length, and depth. Objects in 3D can be moved on the X,Y, and Z axes.
Two dimensional (2D)
Two-dimensional (2D) is a term to describe visual assets that have breadth and length. Objects in 2D can only be moved on the X and Y axes.
Test yourself with Vyond Studio
Now that you are more familiar with the video production jargon, how about testing your knowledge with Vyond Studio? Our dynamic and powerful tool can be used to apply your style and your vision to some of the concepts covered in this article, particularly those related to camera movement and viewable aspect ratios.
Get creative and start your film project with a free 14-day trial of Vyond Studio by clicking the button below.
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