I’m a professional cameraman/Director of Photography. The advice to use iMovie, or a similar simple software package is fine. Let me address some of your other questions.
There are some basic things to keep in mind, and if you can do so, you will likely wind up with an excellent looking/sounding video. I’ll break it down by area of Production.
- Pre-Production. Write an outline. You are doing an instructional video, you know your craft. DO NOT write a word for word script, it’ll hang you up, you will obsess over it and it will make for a wooden and unnatural presentation. You’re the expert. You can talk to a visitor to your home for hours about cabinetmaking. So, go with what you know. The outline will become the Shooting Script ( Opposed to speaking script ). That is very helpful.
What do you wish to do the video on? Chose a project where you can either A) Take weeks/months, and slowly shoot tape as the project unfolds, or B) a project where you have access to various versions, in various stages of completion, at the same time. You know the cooking shows? Those lovely brown turkeys, they’re pre-baked. Same idea. Nobody wants to watch paint dry, so have each major step ready to shoot, or as I said, shoot it slowly over time.
Find just a few people to help. Too many people on a small shoot begats a lot of chiefs and no workers. Nobody likes moving furniture, setting lights or adjusting angles ( well, I do…
). They all wanna tell you how to do it. Be firm in what you want, and before the shoot day, you will meet with your cameraperson, and plan out how to shoot the pieces. Find somebody with experience. What city are you in, I may be able to help you there. Email me, ok?
On the shoot day, find a separate area from the workshop, to stage the shoot in. Camera, lighting gear, food, accessories, people’s personal stuff. Regard your workshop as a t.v. studio, and respect its lack of space. Every inch of it will show on camera.
When sitting with your D.P., make shot lists. Organize shots and angles to cover every aspect of each step. I dunno cabinetry, but I can take a shot at this, having done a lot of home wood furniture repairs. If my details are bullshit, the idea will come across anyway, ok? I’ll do a sample outline in a bit.
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Lighting. Your workshop likely has either a mixed source of daylight and fluorescents, or all fluorescents. Maybe the odd bright Tensor or something. Remember that normal fluorescent lights are NOT the color of daylight. While your video camera may be able to resolve something approaching decent color, it is a lovely idea to go to Home Depot and buy Full Color Daylight fluorescent tubes for all of your units. The colors will all look better, and are easier on the eyes and brain anyway. ( Truth ). Don’t turn them on for the first time on the shoot day, they will hum for 3 or 4 hours as they set in. Run them for a few days first.
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Camera. There are people out there with good looking 3- chip Mini DV Cameras that deliver an amazing image, if well-lit. Your video will be well-lit. In addition to the overhead fluorescent units, buy a ready-made workshop light. You know, 2 bulbs, 4 feet long. find a way to have it standing , facing you. Mount it on a stand of some kind, at eye level. You will need this, to light yourself and the work from in front. The overheads won’t cut it, you will look ghoulish and the work will not look nice. If you have to go with a consumer grade camera, then make sure your cameraperson understands how to use it fully. Manual focus for every shot. How to adjust the sound input levels, and so on. Make SURE you play back each scene after taping it, so that you A) Know the images stuck, and B) Feel you have covered it well. Sometimes it’s a verbal mistake, and you can cover that by just re-speaking the lines and know you have B-Roll to cover the edit. Always check your work before saying you’re done with a scene.
3A. Sound. Your cameraperson should have a good microphone. Now, if you are given a so-called lavalier ( A body-mounted mike ), you need to know that any scratching, banging against it or heavy breathing towards it will ruin the sounds. If you are moving around a lot, this is still a best choice for sound. If you have a boom mike, and just position it aimed at one area before you start, and you are moving around a plane, table saw or piece of furniture, you risk moving “off-mike”, and having hollow or uneven sound. A body mike is fine, just have it clipped so it is seen. Don’t worry, this isn’t a movie. Having it on TOP of your clothing eliminates the risk of having clothing rustle ruin a take. Trust me, many great moments are re-done because of a mike rustle.
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Do some dry-runs with somebody’s home camcorder, just so you can get a feel for how it feels to DO this. Get comfortable with talking to the camera, it’s a very odd thing to try to do well. Do it over and over, with the same basic speech about how you start out with the wooden planking, or whatever. NOT to memorize, but to get a patter and rhythm down that works for you. Play it back, don’t be nice to yourself. Be hypercritical, find the elements that don’t feel right in terms of your speech and presentation and fix them BEFORE THE SHOOT DAY. Saves a lot of exhaustion and time, and on the shoot day you will be fresh and confident about how you will appear, scene to scene.
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Just as you prep a woodworking job, prep this job. Do you have more than enough supplies? Duplicates of ALL tools you will need, in case something fails?
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The shoot day. Turn off the phones, doorbell and cellular/beepers. You want it quiet in there, with no aural distractions. Breakfast is nice. 
Get someone you trust to watch everything on a t.v. set. The camera you are having used will have a video out jack, run the cable off to one side, or into the next room. That way, this person is not staring at you as well as the monitor. They will watch for content as well as how smoothly you work.
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If you are forced to only use one set of materials, instead of duplicates, then you are going to have to plan really carefully, and it will take longer to shoot it properly.
Here’s what I mean. You can take a door to an armoire. It’s a split door, two panels hinged vertically along the outside edges with hidden hinges. The two doors are beautiful and have much engraving and moulding. There are layers to the undercoats, color coats and glazing.
If you have a few sets of that door, you can show it raw, then with the woodwork done, then with the paint and glazing done- all in sequence, but not with the added wait time for you to DO the work, allow it to dry, etc. This is idea.
If you have just one set of doors, then shoot in sequence, there is no going back. Plan to do something, but not ALL of the step. If you are planing the edges, plane in a wide shot to show how you clamp down the work vertically, then you will have to get several angles of B-Roll ( cut away shots ) shots showing how you apply the plane, hold it, how the plane can move smoothly with the right motion, etc.
If you plan out each sequence of the show, you will wind up anticipating where you will want lots of B-Roll shots, and then will know where and when to stop doing a task, and reset the camera for a new angle.
It is sometimes helpful to use an overhead view. With woodworking this may not be strictly necessary, however it is a nice idea before the shoot day to either prep an overhead shot, OR get an A-Frame ladder and figure out how to attach the camera securely to it, so you can do fairly high-angle views of your work. As you brush on the pain to the door sections, if the door is laying flat, a high angle works nicely.
A cheap good way to get the true overhead view, is to mount a mylar mirror panel off the ceiling of the work room. You can buy this at Home Depot, it is a good mirror, but not dangerous like glass mirrors are. Then, you can zoom INTO that while standing on the floor, and get a bird’s eye view of the work happening below. Fair warning- the mirrors used for Martha Stewart and the likes are roughly 4 feet long, and 3 feet wide. ( I used to work that show. ).
Take breaks. This isn’t a music video shoot ( yech ). Pace yourself, you are doing the work, and need to make sure you look awake and happy, and focused at 8pm, just like you did at 8 am. If you can afford to, do it over a two day weekend. This will allow paint to dry, and allow you and your crew to rest.
If you are using an inexperienced cameraperson, there are a few good things to keep in mind. The difference between amateur and professional isn’t just in the gear, it’s in the presentation and the pacing. Don’t rush your words, and don’t rush your hands. When your cameraperson is shooting you speaking and doing, make sure you BOTH silently count to five after you finish a sentence. Believe it or not, get used to holding your gaze as you finish talking to the camera, or as you finish, return to the task at hand and keep going for at least 5 seconds before the camera is cut, and before you stop doing the task. This allows videotape for the edit process, you cannot just finish a thought and say "Cut ! ". And yes, get into the habit of saying “Cut!”. It helps when scrolling highspeed through the video later, to hear that word as it flies by.
The B-Roll shots will make or break your show. If you watch a show, and try this today- find a home craft show similar to what you want to do. Video tape a segment. It’ll run 5-8 minutes if the show is on network t.v. Then, with the sound off, count just the B-Roll cutaway shots, not the ones where you can see the craftsperson doing their thing.
We are used to being shown great detail when we watch t.v. We lose interest fast. You will need many angles, and lots of minutes of B-Roll for each segment. Make sure your cameraperson understands this. If they are new to it, make them practice locking off the camera. Totally. A jiggle image will make people lose interest, and looks cheesy. If the tripod and head are not quality, then work around it, and just lock the shot, and do a little slow zooming. Don’t zoom in every shot, it’s nauseating after a while.
Don’t be afraid to shoot VERY close. That means the tripod will move around a lot. Make sure it’s not just zoomed in or out but left in one spot- that’s deadly. Different angles and shots are key. For a one-minute segment, you could literally need 20-30 different shots to chose from. 10 will not work for some reason, that leaves you 10-20. You will use them all, and wish you had even more.
Depending on the cost of the camera/cameras, it is HIGHLY advisable to use two cameras. One is shooting you, one is going for tons of B-Roll shots. That B Roll camera cannot be moved around while you are talking, it will need to be pre-set for each segment, but it has the advantage of being able to zoom in and out, and pick off great shots AS you do them, instead of recreating the moment again a few minutes later for close-ups.
As you finish up one videotape, push the Record Tab out, so there is zero chance of recording over it by accident. And, label everything well. The main camera is A, the B-Roll camera is B. So, you will have a pile of A-1, A-2, A-3 and B-1, B-2, B-3 and so on. Before the shoot day, you will have taken more than enough videotapes, and blacked them. That is to say, you take a brand new videotape, and put it into the camera, and roll record. Let it record through the ENTIRE videotape, with the lens cap on. Insane you say? Nope. Almost all computer-based edit systems have fits and starts, if there is a “break” in the electronic timecode that is laid down when you shoot videotape. That can happen if you take a virgin tape, and start and stop a lot. To prevent this kind of computer headache, you Black your tapes before shoot day, thus having made a black image ( or, whatever the camera is looking at as you roll it. I do it with the lens cap on, so there isn’t an image there to confuse me later ). Since you have now recorded video end to end–and rewound each tape back to the head !!!–, you can start and stop the cameras on the shoot day, safe in the knowledge that there are no timecode breaks in the videotape to make life hell later on.
Don’t edit your own work, it’s hard not to be in love with every shot. I edit my own demo reels, and am mercilessly cruel about my footage. Something I adored on Monday becomes total crap by Wednesday and is cut. That’s hard to do, when you’re new at it. Sit with your editor, and work through the footage. He or she will have edited before ( this is a complex project, and NOT one to be done by a novice editor).
If the goal is a one-hour show, then you must know this before hand. Can you MAKE a cabinet show in an hour, end to end? Do you need more time? Will it drag, if you allow an hour- is it a 30 minute show instead? Only you can say.
That’s about all I can think of right now, I know I threw out a lot at once. Print this out, read through it as you prep your shoot and feel free to email me with any other questions.
Oh- have fun with this. I bitch and whine incessantly when at work, it’s awful and a bad habit. The truth is that I adore being a cameraman, there is almost always SOMETHING new and cool to see or try, for each day of work. I bet you’re going to do great.
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