DIG2030C – Digital Video Fundamentals is a 3-credit course covering the production of digital video from planning through finished export. Institutions title it Digital Video Fundamentals (Seminole State), Fundamentals of Digital Video (Florida Gateway), Digital Video Production (Tallahassee State), and Survey of Digital Video (St. Petersburg). The C suffix reflects a required production laboratory.
The course covers the full pipeline rather than any one craft: pre-production, production, and post-production. Students plan a project, shoot it, and edit it — and discover that most problems in the edit were created on set, and most problems on set were created in planning. That sequence of realizations is the course's real lesson.
Content covers pre-production — concept, script, storyboard, shot list, scheduling, locations, and permissions; the camera — exposure, focus, white balance, frame rate, shutter angle, and resolution; composition and framing — shot sizes, the rule of thirds, headroom, lead room, and the 180-degree rule; camera movement and support — tripods, gimbals, and handheld technique; lighting — three-point setup, quality, direction, contrast ratio, and available light; audio — microphone types and placement, levels, room tone, and why audio is the more common failure; continuity and coverage; editing — assembly, rough cut, fine cut, pacing, and the grammar of the cut; transitions and their appropriate use; titles and motion graphics at an introductory level; color correction and grading; audio post — mixing, music, and sound effects; export and delivery — codecs, containers, and platform specifications; asset management and backup; and copyright, licensing, and releases.
Offered at approximately 10 Florida institutions.
Florida supports a real production economy: theme park and attraction media, a large corporate and convention video sector in Orlando, Spanish-language broadcast production in Miami, and steady demand for event and real estate video across the state.
The most reliable prediction about a first video course. Audiences tolerate imperfect images and will not tolerate bad sound — a slightly soft shot passes unnoticed while echoing dialogue or a buzzing air conditioner makes a piece unwatchable. Students routinely invest their attention in the camera and treat audio as an afterthought, then discover in the edit that unusable audio cannot be fixed. The practical habits: use an external microphone rather than the camera's, get it close to the subject, monitor with headphones while recording, set levels with headroom, and record thirty seconds of room tone at every location.
The second predictable failure is returning from a shoot without enough material to cut. An editor needs options: a master shot, closer coverage, cutaways, and matched action from more than one angle. Beginners shoot each moment once, from one position, and then cannot trim, cannot fix a fluffed line, and cannot compress time. Building a shot list in pre-production and shooting deliberate coverage solves it, which is why the course insists on planning before production.
Using commercial music without a license is copyright infringement, and platform detection systems find it automatically — producing muted audio, removed videos, or claims against the account. Fair use is far narrower than students assume and does not cover "I credited the artist" or "it's not monetized." The professional practice is to use properly licensed music: the YouTube Audio Library, Free Music Archive, Creative Commons sources with attribution honored, or paid libraries. Students should also learn that releases are needed for identifiable people in commercial work and that many locations require permission or permits — including some Florida public properties and beaches.
Worth naming explicitly: DaVinci Resolve is free, professional-grade, and includes editing, industry-leading color grading, and a full audio suite in one application. Students without an Adobe subscription can do everything the course requires and keep working after the term ends. Learning both Resolve and Premiere is ideal, since employers use both, but no student should be blocked by software cost.
Video files are large and irreplaceable, cards fail, and drives fail. The professional standard is redundant copies made at ingest, before the card is reformatted — students lose entire shoots every term by reformatting a card after copying to one drive. External storage is effectively a required course material.
The same edit exported wrongly looks soft, banded, or out of sync. Students should leave understanding codecs versus containers, the difference between a delivery codec and an editing codec, and how to read a platform's specifications. Delivering to spec is what separates a professional handoff from an amateur one.
The course appears as DIG2030 and DIG2030C under at least four titles. Related DIG numbers cover distinct content — DIG2500C interactive design and other numbers for imaging, animation, and web — and are not interchangeable. Film and broadcast production also appear under FIL and RTV prefixes, which are different course families. SCNS equivalency applies to the same number at the same level, never across numbers.
Generated August 31, 2026 · Updated August 31, 2026