What is a good way to improve the lighting in videos?

What is a good way to improve the lighting in videos?

I have a panasonic pv-gs31 and the it seems like it is always dark in my videos. Any tips? (i tried getting a crappy little light for it but it didn't help)

tweak the aperture, shutter, brightness controls etc. whatever you have on the 31 thats manually adjustable. dont go for video lights that attach to the camera as they are usually worthless. make sure your zoom isnt too zoomed in, and also, when possible, use reflectors to reflect sunlight (this is usually for brightening up shadow areas on peoples faces, and its not really as important in home video). also, when you are shooting inside, you could always replace lower wattage bulbs to higher wattage ones, or get florescent ones and set the white balance (might not work as good sometimes). Use more lights get lamps that havr necks that can be bent so that you can piont it in the areas that need more light Based on the reviews I've seen on this camcorder, poor low light performance is a common complaint with this camera. If you haven't had it very long, take it back to the store and buy a Sony MiniDV. You'll never look back. My Sony MiniDV has given me 100's of hours of great performance in all kinds of poor light conditions and in dusty environments that would have killed any other camcorder in a single day. Sony - the Mack truck of camcorders! One practical thing that you can do, other than the obvious of providing more light, is to shoot at wide angles. When you zoom in you reduce the amount of light available to the active portion of the image sensor. This function will change with the square of the zoom ratio. For example, when you go from full wide to full 30X optical zoom on the PV-GS31 you will increase your light requirements by 900 times. Stand closer to your subjects and shoot wide angle. A wide angle lens can also help in some situations.

WK Turn on the lights when recording