How to look and sound good on Zoom
We’re stuck at home for quite a time, better look and sound good!
You haven’t met your colleagues for months already. You switched your slack profile picture to your real photo so your colleges would not forget how you actually look. Personal interaction is important, these days like never.
How to make the best of Zoom/Skype/Google Hangouts and other online video calls, to be clearly seen and heard on your conference call.
Camera Set-Up
We trying to implement personal interaction here, so being able to see one’s face is important.
Set your laptop or webcam on your eye level. Try to make yourself in the center of the camera. This will help your conference call to look like an ordinary talk and not like they caught you unguard.
Do not move your laptop or webcam during the call so your colleagues wouldn’t catch seasickness. It’s really hard to concentrate and be productive on the long call when the image is constantly moving.
It’s my personal preference, but I don’t like it when people look straight into the camera all the time. You’ve probably seen each other before. It is not your first meeting, maybe even this day. Looking straight to the camera is the analog of looking eye to eye with another person. We rarely do that in real life. We can look at our phone, read our notes, or write something down.
My solution is to have two monitors one of which is reserved for the call, and the other one is for some work. I didn’t invent it, most streamers use the same technic. It’s much more comforting to look at people from some angle and not directly to their faces on these calls. You can still look at the camera when talking to people, or during more personal calls.
Light
Light is the most important thing! I can’t stress enough, how a small light source can help with your image quality. You can have a great camera but a bad light will ruin it. That’s why there’s so much light on photoshoots and movie sets.
Your face shouldn’t be dark. Try not to sit with a window behind you. Close the drapes at leas or additional light sources.
The best light is the natural light, so some experts recommend to sit in front of the window, to have this natural light. Yes, that’s true. But can be hard to do it in winter, or even in the bad weather. To have a good image constantly you can add some additional light sources as well. It can be a table light that will fall directly to your face, but it’s better to go one step further.
Relax, you don’t need huge light boxes. All you need is a simple ring light, which costs about 15 euros on Amazon. Yes! These circular lights that you saw on TikTok and Instagram influencers. Not for beauty bloggers anymore. Anyone who wants to have a clear image in almost any condition. You put them almost anywhere where you sit, change their level, or even change color warmth. They are also LED lights so they shouldn’t consume much energy.
Microphone
If we don’t count emails and Slack, your microphone is responsible for 100% of the information you trying to give your colleagues.
Everything that you want to explain, convince proof to people is going through your microphone first.
There are connection problems, people talking over each other, horrible headphones, and home distraction don’t add to it your bad microphone.
Headphones
I feel like I’m on a podcast stream when people wear huge professional headphones during a call. I’m trying to keep things simple and look as casual as possible. Like I would look in the office. It’s okay if you use these headphones every day anyway, but to buy it specifically for conference calls is overkill.
Doesn’t matter which form factor you prefer, you should invest in wireless headphones. I can’t count how often I could open a door for delivery or quickly get something from another room without interrupting a call. Wired headphones don't have this luxury.
Simple Airpods can take you from most of the calls. If you don’t have to spend more than 3–4 hours straight, in that case, you need something with longer battery life.
Camera
Again, we’re not trying to make you a professional streamer, so there’s no need to buy the best camera, or in most cases buy a camera at all.
A lot of current generation laptops already have what you need. Macbook’s 720p webcam should be enough even for some professional streams if you do your lights well (and turn on HD mode on Zoom settings).
If you don’t have a camera or need a small upgrade you can look at Logitech cameras like C922. Or even use your old smartphone with apps like Iridium or EpocCam That will turn your phone into a webcam.
Background
Some choose white wall, some prefer their beautiful bookshelf that coworkers can ask about, some just blur background or replace it with some cool video.
While it’s completely your choice, I would advise you to definitely think about it and try to choose a place where there are no background distractions for your colleagues or something that you don’t want them to see.
If you want to improve on your quality though, try to separate yourself from the background either with contrast color or with some light. You can do it with additional lights or just have a dark background and a white shirt.
OBS
It might be overkill, but why not have some fun in the end?
If you have a separate microphone, web camera, or even two cameras and want to have all the settings in one place, you will need something like OBS.
Usually used by streamers, it will give you the ability to have more than one scene that you can switch between without stopping the call. Add graphics for your video, gifs that can be shown as you additional emotions.
Or just add some noise filter to your microphone and do some color correction to your video yourself or with some downloaded filters.
Example Kits
I took some time to make these example kits for you:
Zoom Kit Lite — https://kit.co/ottercoder/zoom-kit-lite
Zoom Kit Medium — https://kit.co/ottercoder/zoom-kit-medium
Zoom Kit Pro — Help me make one, what would you put on your Pro Zoom Kit?
I may receive a commission from Amazon and other affiliate programs at no additional cost to you. I only recommend products or services that I use and love or that I think will be helpful to you.
