How to shoot pro-quality video on your phone or tablet

You know those shaky videos with the muffled audio that you watch on Facebook or Twitter, usually because they have funny kids, cats, goats or some combination of the three?

Those aren’t the kind you want to shoot when the stakes are high, such as corporate or employee communications campaigns.

However, that phone or tablet that you carry around all day can do far more than shoot video of your dogs’ tricks or your kids’ soccer games. You can capture business-worthy video with your mobile devices, if you follow savvy advice from video experts.

Below are easy tips and tricks that you can use to create high-quality video for those times when hiring a video crew isn’t possible:

Hold device horizontally, not vertically: This tip tops every expert’s list, so you know it’s a must.

“Vertical video is useless for sharing on a corporate intranet or on a sharing site like YouTube,” says Drew Keller, owner of video content creator StoryGuide. “If you shoot video vertically, you get those black bars on either side of the image, which isn’t engaging for your viewers,” and can visually impair your video.