Most camcorders- even the least expensive ones- seem to be shipping with on board digital effects these days.

I have some great advice for using those in your own home movies.

Don’t use Digital Effects.  They’re not cool.

You may say:

Now, you’ve gone too far, Scott.  It’s cool to shoot stuff with the “Sepia” filter.

No.  No it’s not cool, faithful blog reader.

Here’s what you need to know about shooting with digital effects:

They only look cool while you’re shooting.

In reality, you want your footage to look as good as possible all the time.

Stop and consider that when you shoot with the “Sepia” filter turned on,

you have told your camcorder to throw away color information.

You can never undo a digital effect.  It’s permanent.

That’s color you’re never getting back, people!

Also, the cool sepia effect on the left will not look good when you edit it together with footage from another time that had no effects.

Other effects to avoid using:

• Mosaic – Do you really want Jr. to look like he’s in the witness protection program?
• Black & White – Go ahead, just throw your color away.
• Art – (It creates harsh contrasts in your image)  They call it art, because nobody understands it.
• Fade Transition – Dips to black and up from black every time you start and stop recording.  This is a great way to miss some action that you wanted full frame.  Please, just add fades with your editing software.
• Wipe Transition – See above.

So, avoid the noid, and keep shooting straight.  (You can always mess it all up in edit if you really want to.)