Social distancing is having us all do video calling everyday. But we can always stay connected virtually. There are some simple tips and tricks to drastically improve your video calling experience for yourself and others.
Here’s an opinionated guide to a premium AV setup to better connect with work, friends, and family.
Free Hacks / tl;dr
- Use a headset instead of the onboard mics. Great audio is imperative to an immersive meeting.
- Use your phone to join the video conference in addition to your laptop. Your phone has a better camera + mic placement, while you can watch the remote folks on the laptop at the same time.
Bonus: On the phone, join with LTE to take load off your home Wifi. - Sit with a window to the side or in front of you, lighting yourself up.
Raise your camera to be at eye level. Get creative, use books to raise the height! - Use Ethernet (wired internet). Or periodically restart your aging WiFi router.
Internet
Most home internet is optimized for download speeds. The number they advertise is also the download speed. But it is your upload speed that ensures you look and sound great to your recipients. You need ~5mbps upload for HD video.
On Fast.com, if your Loaded Latency (53ms in the screenshot above) is high, it’s likely due to a cheapo WiFi router. I use Nest WiFi for its ease of use and mesh robustness. Ubiquiti Amplifi also works, but it’s way more expensive and not-so-easy to setup.
When video calling, it is your Loaded/Busy Latency which should remain mostly constant. If it isn’t, you’ll see video stuttering, audio-video out of sync, and pixellation as your video software is forced to lower bandwidth consumption.
If you can, switch to wired internet. Ethernet is your friend. Ethernet will usually lead to Unloaded and Loaded latency being much more similar, like in the screenshot on the left (3.5x on Wired vs 7.5x on WiFi). This means the router is performing well even under stress.
If you have multiple people video calling simultaneously, get creative and think of using your cellular signal for video; if not, at least for audio (most VC software allow connecting with a phone call). This will reduce the load on your WiFi.
Outgoing Audio (your speech to your recipients)
There’s a reason this section is the first thing to look to improve. It’s overall cheaper to fix and much more important to a meeting.
If you improve one thing, focus on your audio.
Why not the inbuilt laptop mic? Laptops have echo-cancellation logic so that the remote recipient doesn’t hear themselves. Even high-end laptops, when in an HD video conference with 4+ participants, have to spin up their fans to cool the machine. These loud fans mean that the laptop has to be aggressive at doing that echo-cancelling to circumvent the fan noise. In a such a noisy machine, it can chop off the first few milliseconds of your audio, so some short sentences like “so”, “kay”, “hmm”, “but” will likely not make it to the recipient. A headset works around this by being naturally bi-directional.
After testing many solutions like inbuilt laptop mics, tabletop mics, wireless mics and balancing with cost, bulkiness, ease-of-use and portability, I recommend:
$35~70 Plantronics Voyager 5200 for a versatile option (including quiet rooms). It’s a 4 year old product, but the 4 noise cancelling mics + algo allow you to talk even in heavy wind (albeit you’ll sound a bit tinny). I have done calls while bicycling in wind and in noisy trains with my recipients hearing me loud and clear. (Here’s how it sounds amidst really loud noise)
This headset also works well for those times where you’re doing a VC while doing yoga, workout, or the dishes and errands.
If you don’t want a headset and have the luxury of a quiet room: $60 RØDE VideoMicro (audio sample) + SC7 adapter to connect to your laptop.
If you want something better still, you’re now in podcasting and pro category and here’s an excellent post comparing some going up to $1000 (!): Don’t mute, get a better headset!
In summary, the overall pecking order is:
- Plantronics Voyager 5200
- The RØDE VideoMicro (Only if you have an always quiet room)
- Your phone’s inbuilt mic (join the meeting with your phone in addition to your laptop)
- Last resort: Laptop inbuilt mic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Combine this with Krisp’s noise-cancelling on MacOS/Windows/Chrome to help there.
Note: High end noise-cancelling headphones from Bose, Sennheiser et al as well as earbuds from Sony, Apple (incl Airpods Pro), Samsung are optimized for your listening experience and carry a sub-par mic. Listen to how they sound by searching for “<headphone name> call quality test” on YouTube.
Incoming Audio (hear the remote folks well)
Don’t use a speaker unless there are multiple people in the room with you on your end of the VC. If you have to, use a speaker-mic combo like Jabra 710 (for its echo-cancellation).
The headset recommendation (Voyager 5200) should work well here. But as long as you can use a mic from above while routing the incoming audio to another headset, then you can use any of your existing favorite headsets.
Camera (your video to your recipients)
Get a good camera! Laptop cameras (even 2019 Macbook Pro) usually look like garbage with poor low-light performance, motion blur, and noise artifacts. After testing a bunch of them, here are some recommendations:
$0 Use your phone camera with a tripod. If you have a flagship phone, your front camera is better than your high-end laptop. Join the meeting with your laptop as well as your phone. Use the phone for your video and your audio; use the laptop to see the remote folks and presentations on a big screen.
$50~80 Logi 920 or 920s camera does 1080@30fps (or 720@60fps). 3rd party optical zoom add-on.
$200 Logi Brio does great HD, but I find its auto-focus keeps blurring me and make me look like I have a glow.
$800 Huddly IQ does auto-zooming at 1080@30fps. It’s diminutive size makes it really portable.
$500~2500 but bulky: DSLR like Canon SL3 + lens + low-latency HDMI capture card like Magewell. This is mostly for the AV nerds but can give you a sweet shallow depth-of-field.
Note: Most video call platforms don’t support anything above 720p or 30fps. So don’t bother going higher. Zoom does 1080p if your admin asks. Duo does 1080p if both folks are using Samsung S20. Messenger does 1080p only if both parties are on Portal to Portal. 4k is mostly a pipe dream.
Lighting and Placement (your video to your recipients)
Light yourself up! A free way to work with your existing laptop camera is to move yourself towards a window such that the bright outside lights up your face. Don’t sit with a bright window in your background! Your camera will make you look really dark, like a silhouette (under-exposed).
If you don’t have that option, or have meetings after dark, use lights. Even with the good cameras above, dedicated lighting will drastically reduce noise and improve the video quality.
$0~20 Use a table lamp with the light pointed towards you. You can also get a simple ring light with an arm for $15. Your face will look a bit flat (which you might prefer) and it won’t evenly illuminate your torso but it should work as a minimum.
$50–150 Neewer 2-pack LED lights or a stronger $150 Aputure AL-MX(you’ll need 3x for Key, Fill and Background)
Bonus: Whiteboarding (or collaborative doodling)
We all have presented our screens at some point in a meeting or a chat. Consumer apps like Messenger, Duo and Houseparty also allow presenting the screen which I often use it to present photo albums I’m talking about (just like we’d do in person) or something else on my phone like a news article.
Whiteboarding is a tried and tested activity for seamless idea transfer and brainstorming as a group. And you can continue doing that remotely even in a video meeting with collaborative canvases like Jamboard! Here are two ways:
- Join the meeting from your tablet and present it into the meeting. Use a doodling/sketching app, and present from the video call app on the tablet. This is also great option if your Laptop already has a touchscreen and a stylus (eg. Pixelbooks, Surface series, etc). You can also use a collaborative design app like Figma, or canvas like Jamboard, while presenting it.
- Connect your tablet to your computer and capture the screen to do a regular screenshare of a window. You can do it with iPad->MacOS as well as Android->MacOS/Windows.
Apps and Platform
Recommending an app is hard because
- Lack of good 3rd party data about their performance in terms of video quality, user rating, latency, call drops, etc. Here’s one I found.
- If it’s for work, it’s kinda out of your control as your workplace has decided what it wants for business overall.
The video call apps I’ve tried recently are Jitsi, Skype Business, Teams, Hangouts Meet (+Grid extension), Zoom, Whereby/Appear/vLine, WebEx, Hangouts Classic, Facetime, Duo, WhatsApp, Houseparty, and Messenger.
Here’s my nutshell thoughts on these (not exhaustive):
- Jitsi: Works well if you want a fully open source solution. Can start a meeting without account here: meet.jit.si.
- Skype (+business): Granddaddy of this space. Still works well. Has a novel no-account-required single-click call-setup here.
- Teams: Through work only. Signup is clunky. I don’t really understand why I can’t do it in my browser and need the app.
- Zoom: The hot new star in town. Has a litany of privacy and security issues but ease-of-setup and reliability aren’t amongst those. Works in the web browser but they aggressively goad you into downloading their app.
- Whereby: Works straight in the browser. Sparse in features overall, but supports co-watching Youtube. Useful to create a room link and just share with people.
- Hangouts Meet (+Grid extension): If you have this option from work, it works really well and without installing anything. (needs app if joining from phone). Supports upto 250 people for now. It also has auto captions.
- Hangouts Classic: Deprecated but the mobile apps and web service still work. No install required on a computer and most people have an account already so onboarding is easy.
- Facetime: Default and exclusively on Apple ecosystem. Launched with a lie. Sips more bandwidth compared to it’s competitors, and not as fault tolerant. End-to-End encrypted.
- Duo: Newish kid on the block. Supports 12 people in a group call, all end-to-end encrypted. Has low-light mode as well as background blur. Surprisingly fault tolerant and yields high quality.
- Whatsapp: Big wide graph in many countries. End-to-End encrypted. Works quite well even on low power devices. Sadly no way to call with a computer. Phone or Portal required.
- Messenger: Big wide graph of Facebook users. Supported on many platforms and works with a web browser.
- Houseparty: Signup required but is trending well in some countries. Quality isn’t consistent, albeit the ‘walk in a room’ concept is in Zoom, Meet, Whereby as well.
Most apps support background blur and filters on phone but not on a web browser (with WebRTC) or a computer. You can also change webcam settings on MacOS with this app.
That’s it!
Let me know how your setup goes and (especially) if you think there’s a better option for any of these!
