Video Terms Explained, in Plain English
Every filming tutorial assumes you already know the vocabulary, and then spends ten minutes using it. This is the page that goes the other way: the words, in plain English, with the thing you actually need to know about each one.
Two sections. The first is the words people use around you. The second is the labels on your own camera screen, which is where most of the confusion actually lives, because nobody ever explains those at all.
The words nobody explains
| The word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Bitrate | How much data the file spends per second. More data, more detail preserved. It is the number that actually decides whether footage looks crisp or mushy |
| Codec | The method used to squash the video down. H.264 and HEVC are the two you will meet |
| HEVC | The newer, more efficient one. Smaller files for the same quality, and fussier about what will open it |
| Log | Deliberately flat, washed-out footage that keeps more detail in the brightest and darkest parts, meant to be coloured later. It looks wrong straight out of the camera, on purpose |
| LUT | A preset that un-flattens log footage. Think of it as the recipe for turning flat back into normal |
| B-roll | Everything that is not the main shot. Hands, details, the room, movement. It is what you cut to when the main clip needs a break |
| Handles | The spare seconds at each end of a clip. Start early, stop late, and you have somewhere to cut |
| Key light | The one light doing the actual work on your face. Usually a window |
| Fill | Whatever softens the shadow on the other side. A white wall counts |
| Depth of field | How much of the background is in focus. Shallow means the background is blurred, which is what most people mean when they say cinematic |
And the labels on your camera screen
| On screen | What it does |
|---|---|
| AE/AF Lock | Focus and brightness are frozen where you tapped. Without it, the phone re-meters every time you move, which is the pulsing you see when you turn toward a window |
| The little sun | Manual brightness. Tap once, then drag it up or down. It is the most useful control on the screen and most people never find it |
| 0.5x / 1x / 3x | Which physical lens you are on, not how much you are zooming. They are genuinely different cameras with different sensors |
| 4K 60 | Resolution, then frames per second. Two separate decisions displayed as one label |
| HDR | A wider range between the darkest and brightest parts. Looks excellent on the phone that shot it, and behaves unpredictably once something else has to play it back |
| Stabilisation | Software cropping into the frame and shifting it around to hide your shake. It costs you some of the edges of the picture |
| Cinematic mode | Software-simulated background blur, decided after the fact. Not the same as real shallow depth of field, and it shows around hair and glasses |
| Macro | On most phones this is the ultrawide lens switching to focus very close. That is why the image quality changes when you move in on something small |
| ProRes | A very lightly compressed format for serious editing. Enormous files. Almost nobody posting to social needs it |
| Action mode | Aggressive stabilisation with a heavy crop. It needs a lot of light to look good |
The four that actually change your footage
If you only take four things from the tables above, take these.
Bitrate is the one that decides how it looks
Resolution gets all the attention and bitrate does the work. A 4K file starved of data will look worse than a well-fed 1080 one. It is also why the same video looks different after you post it: platforms re-encode what you upload to their own budget, and anything with a lot of fine detail, grain or fast movement has more to lose in that process.
Log is not a filter
People turn log on because they have heard it is what professionals use, then post the flat grey result. Log is a container for information you intend to shape afterwards. If you are not colouring your footage, it is making your video worse, not better.
Locking is free and almost nobody does it
Tap and hold on your subject until the lock indicator appears. Focus and brightness both freeze there. Everything that reads as amateur about auto exposure, the breathing brightness, the hunt for focus mid-sentence, goes away in one gesture.
The lens number is not a zoom slider
0.5x, 1x and 3x are separate cameras with different sensor sizes and different apertures. The main one, 1x, has the biggest sensor and handles low light best. Pinching past the lenses you physically have just crops and softens the picture. Step closer instead, or switch to the telephoto if the phone has one.
Two more that come up constantly
"Why does my video look worse after I post it?" Because it was compressed again on the way up. Every extra export before that compounds it, which is why editing once and exporting once matters, and why downloading your own post and re-uploading it somewhere else is the worst thing you can do to a file.
"What is safe zone?" The part of the frame that will not be covered by interface. Captions, your handle and the buttons all sit over your video. Anything you need a viewer to read has to live away from the bottom and the right-hand edge.
The vocabulary that is actually missing
There is no good word for the thing most creators run into: you filmed something vertical, and now you need it horizontal too, and cropping between them never quite works because the composition was not built for both.
That is what ContentCam does. It records vertical and horizontal simultaneously from one take, so the wide version is a real wide shot rather than a crop of a tall one. More on why the crop rarely survives, and on recording both at once.
If there is a term you keep hitting that is not here, email me and I will add it.
Common questions
What is bitrate? How much data the video uses per second. Higher bitrate holds more detail and makes bigger files. It is the setting that most affects whether gradients band.
What is the difference between a codec and a file format? The codec is how the video is compressed, like H.264 or HEVC. The format is the container it sits in, like MP4 or MOV. One file format can hold different codecs.
What does shooting in log mean? Recording a flat, low-contrast image that preserves more range in highlights and shadows, so you have room to grade it later. It looks wrong straight out of camera, and that is expected.
Do I need to shoot in log? Only if you are going to colour grade. If you post what you shoot, a standard profile gives a better result with no extra work.
What is a LUT? A colour lookup table. It maps one set of colours onto another, most often used to convert log footage into a normal-looking or stylised image.