Light: a window is your best light
- Face the window: daylight from the front or slightly to the side is soft and free.
- Never sit with your back to a window: you turn into a dark silhouette.
- Avoid overhead light on its own: it puts shadows under your eyes and nose.
- In the evening: a shaded lamp or a cheap ring light in front of you, not beside you.
- Don't mix colours: daylight plus warm lamp light makes your face blotchy. Pick one.
Sound: more important than the picture
People forgive a slightly soft picture. They don't forgive bad sound. The room makes the biggest difference: small rooms with carpet, curtains, a sofa or shelves sound warm, while empty rooms with tiles and bare walls echo.
Keep the phone at about arm's length. Closer sounds muffled, further away sounds echoey. Turn off the washing machine, fan and music, and silence notifications. A cheap clip-on microphone does more than any post-processing. Volume can be levelled afterwards, but echo and background noise are very hard to remove.
Mount: steady and at eye level
- 1
Tripod, not hands
Even a basic tabletop tripod keeps the picture steady. A stack of books works in a pinch.
- 2
Lens at eye level
From below looks unflattering, from above looks like a lecture. The lens belongs level with your eyes.
- 3
Vertical for social media
For Reels, TikTok and Shorts, stand the phone upright so no picture is lost.
- 4
Frame it
Head and shoulders in shot, a little headroom, face in the top third.
Background: calm, with some depth
- Step away from the wall: a metre or two of room behind you looks deeper than a wall at your back.
- Tidy up: laundry, cables and cluttered desks pull attention.
- One personal detail: a plant, a shelf, your workshop. It shows who you are.
- No windows or screens in shot: they blow out or reflect.
- Check for anything confidential: whiteboards, mail and screens before you hit record.
Camera tips people forget
- Clean the lens: one fingerprint makes the whole picture hazy.
- Rear camera when you can: on most phones it's better than the front camera, but it only works if you don't need to see the screen.
- Full HD is enough: plenty for social media. 4K pays off if you want to zoom in a lot later.
- Check battery and storage: nothing's worse than the phone giving up mid-take.
- Airplane mode: no calls, no notifications while you record.
A pre-shoot checklist, and where the app helps
Light from the front, a quiet room, phone at eye level and upright, background tidy, lens clean, notifications off. Then record ten seconds and listen back on headphones.
Teleprompter Cut records natively through the phone's own camera stack, not the browser. When rendering it levels the volume and limits peaks. There's no noise reduction, so the quiet room still matters. The app brings your video to 1080 × 1920 pixels and shows each platform's safe zones, and the teleprompter lets you read your script right over the camera view.