It has never been easier for anyone with a smartphone to capture and broadcast their own video footage to anyone.

Here are some ideas for making professional-looking films using a smartphone.

Don’t shoot vertical video

Landscape-oriented displays are found on computer monitors, TVs, and even web pages.

You wouldn't expect to go into a movie theater and find the screen tilted on its side. We live in a high-definition world.

Although there are applications to help with this, you can help the world and yourself by flipping your phone on its side and capturing horizontal footage.

Exposure and focus

Smartphones and digital cameras will detect it and automatically change exposure and focus. It's fine for fast shots, but while recording, you'll want more manual control and to lock things down so they don't alter and leave your movie over-exposed and out of focus.

Simply touch on your subject in the default app on your smartphone to manually lock exposure and focus in your clip. This may be changed during filming.

This tap feature is also available on most current digital cameras. If this is not the case, a 'half-press' of the capture button will sufficient.

Audio recording

Most of the time, recording audio directly from the camera's built-in microphone will be sufficient, but for professional recordings, such as interviews, you'll want to be as near to your subject as possible.

You may capture your audio using an external professional microphone connected to your computer or a memo recorder, but generally prefer to use a second smartphone positioned right above the subject and a voice memo software.

Later in the editing process, you would match this collected audio to the video footage.

Do not over-use Slow Motion

Slow-motion and timelapse functions are included in the default camera apps on most smartphones. These are wonderful for shooting some amazing footage, but there is a time and place for them.

Slow-motion films may be utilized to catch intriguing motions that our eyes tend to skim over.

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Why gadgets are important in our daily life?

Zoom gained huge traction in a short span of time as several people are working from home due to the coronavirus outbreak. The video conference app pulled in more than 200 million daily active users last month — significantly up from a maximum of 10 million users previously. Zoom app has been under fire over security concerns.

From schools/colleges and officials to various private/governments, various people have been using the app. Its key features such as being able to video-conference with up to 100 people for free (up to 500 participants in paid plans) and recording support make the Zoom app a great solution for virtual meetings using a desktop or smartphones.

Also Read: OVER 500,000 ZOOM ACCOUNTS SOLD ON HACKER FORUMS, THE DARK WEB

If you don't trust Zoom and are looking for capable alternatives, You can check out the top five free online meeting apps that are alternatives to the Zoom app to help with your video calling needs.

Top Free Online Meeting Apps

Cisco Webex Meetings

Cisco is offering free access to its Webex Meetings (highly enterprise-focused solution Cisco Webex) in all countries where it is available to support the work from home needs during the coronavirus outbreak. Despite being available as free, you'll get all enterprise features including unlimited usage with no time restrictions, support for up to 100 participants, and a toll dial-in in addition to Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) capabilities. All you need is to sign up on the Cisco Webex portal to get started with the Webex Meetings. The experience that's been offered by Cisco is nowhere limited when comparing with Zoom.

Google Hangouts

You can opt for Google Hangouts, which is also a decent, free alternative to Zoom. You can make video calls with up to 10 participants or chat with up to 150 participants at once. Google also allows you host video calls or talk with your colleagues through text messages using a mobile device. Further, being a Google product, Hangouts just needs your Gmail account to let you get started.

Skype Meet Now

Microsoft recently brought Skype Meet Now that serves as an alternative to Zoom. It works without requiring an account and supports up to 50 participants — all for free. You'll also get features such as the ability to record calls, blur background before entering the call, and screen sharing. Moreover, you just need to visit the dedicated webpage, to begin with, Skype Meet Now.

Microsoft Teams

If you don't want a solution just to make video calls, you can look at Microsoft Teams. It is also available for free during the pandemic. The free version brings unlimited chat and search, group and one-on-one audio and video calling, and 10GB of team file storage along with 2GB of personal file storage per person. If you already have an Office 365 account, you'll get real-time collaboration with Office apps for Web, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Discord

Discord has also emerged as a strong alternative to Zoom, its video conferencing capabilities that let you connect with up to 50 participants at once. The platform is popular amongst gamers, though you can use it as a tool to communicate with your office team or some friends. You can also download its mobile app to connect with your contacts using your smartphone. There are also features to share your screen or perform voice calls. Just like other free alternatives to Zoom, Discord provides video conferencing at no cost. You just need to sign up on the Discord site or through its app to get started with your virtual conferences.

You can also look as paid app an alternative to Zoom app as below:

You can get Google Hangouts Meet that is available for free for all G Suite users until July 1 and provides features such as up to 250 participants per call, live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain, and the ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive. There are also paid solutions such as Zoho Meeting and GoToMeeting that you can get for free under a trial.

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Back in March as the coronavirus pandemic gathered steam in the U.S., a largely unheralded video-conferencing service suddenly found itself in the spotlight.

And just as quickly as Zoom became a household name for connecting work colleagues, church and school groups, friends, family, book clubs and others during stay-at-home lockdowns, it also gained a reputation for lax security as intrusive “videobombers” barged into private meetings or just spied on intimate conversations.

On April 1, following a wave of lawsuits over privacy breaches, CEO Eric Yuan ordered a halt to work on new features and vowed to fix the service’s weaknesses in 90 days. That time is up, and Zoom is ready to take a bow.

The work on “security and privacy is never going to be done, but it is now embedded in how we approach everything we do at Zoom now,” the company’s chief financial officer, Kelly Steckelberg, told The Associated Press in a recent interview. Zoom hailed some of the strides that it says it has made in a Wednesday blog post.

The most visible changes included a switch that automatically protected all meetings with passwords and kept all participants in a digital waiting room until the meeting host let them in.

Behind the scenes, Yuan began meeting regularly with a council consisting of top security executives in the tech industry and brought in former Yahoo and Facebook executive Alex Stamos as a special consultant. He also conferred with other supportive executives such as Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who took the unusual step of posting a video hailing Zoom as an “essential service.”

(Perhaps not coincidentally, Zoom relies on Oracle and Amazon for much of the computing power it needs to handle an expected two trillion minutes of meetings — the equivalent of 38,000 centuries — this year.)

The biggest security leap is still to come. Zoom has promised to make it virtually impossible for anyone outside a meeting to eavesdrop by scrambling conversations via end-to-end encryption. The technique would lock up conversations so that even Zoom couldn’t play them back. Law enforcement generally opposes such encryption — already in use on apps such as iMessage, WhatsApp and others — saying it impedes legitimate police investigations.

Such a security feature would give the company an even bigger advantage over competing services from Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Facebook, said Rory Mir, a grassroots advocacy organizer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group.

“People don’t have a lot of great options right now, but Zoom is kind of leading the charge to make these improvements,” said Mir, who uses they/them pronouns.

Zoom hasn’t said when end-to-end encryption will be ready, but it’s already had to expand on its original plan to make it available only to paid subscribers. The day after its original announcement, faced with a backlash, Zoom agreed to extend the encryption to free plans as well.

It’s been a heady ride for the company. Its shares closed Tuesday at $253.54, nearly four times their value in December, creating $50 billion in shareholder wealth. The San Jose, California, company expects paid subscribers to generate $1.8 billion in revenue for the company this year, triple what Zoom pulled in last year.

If Zoom wants to prove it puts the privacy of its users first, Mir believes it will have to show it’s willing to fight requests from law enforcement and other government agencies trying to pry into the conversations on its service. The Zoom CEO has said he wanted to limit the use of end-to-end encryption so that the company could continue to work with law enforcement; the company later said he was referring to efforts intended to prevent Zoom from being used for child pornography. “Some activists now believe Zoom is like a cop,” Mir said.

In a familiar refrain among tech companies operating around the world, Steckelberg said Zoom complies with local laws in each of the more than 80 countries where its service is used.

More privacy issues could loom if, as some analysts anticipate, Zoom decides to start showing ads on the free version of is service to boost its profit. Steckelberg said the company doesn’t have any immediate plans to sell ads, but didn’t rule out that possibility.

If Zoom goes down that road, Mir believes it will be difficult to resist the opportunity to mine the personal information it’s collecting because, they said, “data is the new oil. But it also can be toxic.”