Many times here I have seen posts asking what can one do to make his video look more "professional." The simple answer is "lighting."
Here something that should be of interest to those who want to improve the look of the videos--Enlightenment. I haven't seen this DVD, but from the web site, it looks pretty promising.
Jay. I got the DVD you mention. It was actually very well done and it gives you some good pointers. If I read correctly, this is the first DVD in the "enlightment" series.
Another good DVD series on lighting for Digital is at Elite Video. Here is the link: http://www.elitevideo.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=60
Amazing DVD. Well worth the money. We had all of our guys that shoot anything watch that and honestly the quality of the stuff we shoot has improved significantly.
Good lighting is of course important. That always isn't possible. Another thing that can make or break a project is proper color balance and levels. I sometimes spend endless hours breaking a project into events then applying very minor tweaks. I think the two most important FX filters in Vegas are Color Corrector and Color Curves. Which is why I'm written so many different tutorials on those topics.