Improve Your Virtual Setup — Video
In the explosion of virtual conferences and meetings, here’s what you should do to optimize your video.
Have you ever jumped into a call or online talk and said “Wow! That looks like a cool office!” or found yourself distracted by someone’s camera quality?
Now flip that
Have you ever sworn that you just had a call with a lifeless sickly, pixilated, zombie who is in the witness protection program?
🧟♂🧟♀️🧟♂🤣
With a little bit of investigative time and effort, we can get your virtual presence kicked into high gear. You might not know what to look for, but with these tips, we can find the features that boost your virtual self from rags to riches.
If you’re interested in improving your audio quality, 🔊 🎤see my other blog post here!
Overview
The video quality of your meetings and online talks speaks volumes. It’s sad to say, but if you’ve got a beautiful visual setup, people will listen longer and be more interested in what you have to say. It’s part of a well known cognitive bias called the halo effect. So why not have it work in your favor?
A good friend of mine Jed Bartausky asked how he could improve his video, and over one weekend, we got his video looking crisp!
To get your video looking great, we’ll cover go over three aspects of your virtual self.
- Webcams
- Lighting
- Backdrops
1. Webcams
Webcams are a sore subject for a few of us. Some spent hundreds of dollars on their top-of-the-line webcam in 2015 which was surpassed instantly by a built-in webcam on their laptop. Some scrambled to buy one during the early days of social distancing and were fleeced for another hundred dollars. And some of us have the top of the line webcams and they don’t look or work well at all.
Webcams are flawed devices.
The form factor of industry webcams is that they are small. If you know about lenses, you know the size matters. There’s the essence of the problem.
To get a bigger lens, you have to basically buy a nicer camera and retro-fit it to become a webcam. There’s no middle solution. So let’s take a look at USB and non-USB plans.
Level 1: USB Webcam
WHY USB? — It’s simple. Sometimes too simple. While you can just plug in USB and immediately start, the right webcam vastly improves your presence, and the wrong one ruins it.
Not all webcams have small lenses. While you’re reading reviews, you’ll come across fantastic cameras with lots of reviews and proprietary tricks, like the Logitech C920. But pay attention to that little lens.
This camera was rated “The Best WebCam” on several Google results… but by what standard?
I personally HAD this camera and I don’t really like it for a couple of reasons.
Do you really need speakers on there? In my experience, the Swiss Army knife isn’t a useful daily knife.
On the other side, contrast that with the Cisco PrecisionHD. Which has a large lens.
Teleconference professional cameras with larger lenses might have terrible built-in mics (the LifeCam Pro has a nice one), and they might not have little speakers or color options, but they get the job done. If you’re on a budget, check out the used ones on eBay. My Cisco PrecisionHD is 5+ years old, was bought on eBay, and still blows most of the competition away.
THE BEST USB camera is the HuddleCamHD Pro
- 4K Video
- Controllable presets on remote (great for standing desks)
- Contrast and lighting settings
The HuddleCamHD Pro is the best USB camera on the market right now, in my opinion.
2. NON-USB
WHY NON-USB? — Absolute control, focus, and maximum quality.
Do you have a decent camera with video capture? If you’re really picky, you can use that with a capture device (maybe even 4k?) and make that your webcam?
This setup is more complex but could result in the highest quality videoconferencing if you’re willing to deal with the headache.
Some gotchas:
Besides the jump in price, you’ve also got some strange headaches with a depth of field, auto-focus, and video capture. Expect additional hardware for holding your camera (it’s too heavy for your monitor now) and additional hardware for your conversion/capture. Having a more advanced camera means you can really dial things in, or screw them up.
Companies like Elgato have a wide variety of devices for multi-mount and video capture hardware but are frequently sold out.
I’ll leave you to evaluate if you’re going to go down this route. If you’re sitting at your desk, a nice USB is probably good enough. If you’re traveling or using a studio, you might benefit from the details of an advanced camera.
Research can be quite the rabbit hole, but if you’re serious about remote presenting/streaming/work, then you should consider researching cameras to find the best that fits your budget. Here’s a fantastic YouTube channel for this research: https://www.youtube.com/user/EposVox/videos
Special Note: You can use your phone as a webcam. It’s a bit complicated, and who has an extra “new” phone sitting around with a great camera? I wanted to mention this because it might fit your need.
JED CHECK ✅: Jed’s photo at the head of this article was taken through a Cisco PrecisionHD . It’s the popular camera around Infinite Red thanks to our CEO Todd Werth who used it first. You can clearly see a significant increase on the detail.
2. Lighting
Webcams love to try to fix your lighting for you, and it does so by making your video grainy and ugly. Improving your lighting significantly improves your virtual presence.
Some Rules for Lighting
- More is usually better
To stop your webcam from adjusting ISO, you’ll need some significant lighting (on YOU, the camera should not see strong lights) - Natural light is dangerous
If you get everything set up and look crisp and clean using natural lighting, you can guarantee that it won’t even last an hour. While it’s nice to use windows, daylight is notoriously fickle and you’ll have to adjust each time. - Giant monitors can be worse than natural light
If you have two or three large monitors, what is on your screen can significantly alter your lighting. When I have a presentation, I’ll often dim my monitors to minimize the effects. Especially if you’re wearing glasses. Test your video with your slides up before you give a talk, and be ready to dim monitors in meetings.
On the flip-side, you can pull up a page and use that as a cheap fill light if you’re on a budget.
4. Three-point light
The three-point light system is a known studio lighting trick.
In front of you will be two lights, your key, and your fill.
The key light is a bright direct light on your face causing sharp contours of shadow. The fill light counters the shadows caused by the key light, so that they remain for 3D effect, but are not as hard and unforgiving.
As you can see from the photo above, my key light is direct and amber, while my fill light is pure white and blocked by “barn doors”. These two lights are on either side of my camera which gets a crisp visual. That’s simply an option. If you’re looking to use photography level light, you’ll want purchase lights with a Kelvin rating (or temperature) of about 5500k.
The 3rd light of the Three-point light system is a hair or rim light for your depth. A “hair light” above you which will gently provide a non-flat look for your shoulders and head. Lighting your room for your webcam presence is a bit of an art.
Not included in the three-point light, but usually quite important, is a fourth back light to give a soft glow to your background.
5. Top-down — “the angles”
Do NOT use your laptop camera from your lap and give an up-nose shot. This isn’t the Blair Witch Project. Your camera and your lights are all top-down. When people take selfies they know to use the classic “myspace angles”, and nothing has changed since those times. Your camera and lights are higher than you at all times.
JED CHECK ✅: Jed’s photo at the head of this article has a three-point lighting system. Scroll up and notice how his original lighting was flat and behind him, and then it was moved to key/fill from the front with a gentle top-down.
3. Backdrops
Having a beautiful background really locks all the previous settings into place. Lots of streamers and speakers use green screens, and while a nice green screen is a step above messy, it’s not nearly as beautiful as a well-designed office backdrop.
Having a clean but distinguished background finalizes your visual presence. It might sound strange, but a dark background is better than a light background if you have back lights. As we mentioned earlier you can use your back lights to control the level of contrast you’re looking for.
Take a look at this matte black wall with two powerful back lights. You probably would have never guessed that it’s a dark black wall.
Use lights to fill your background. Even a few soft lights can be in direct view of the camera, like marketing master Pat Flynn uses.
Take a moment to identify his setup. Where’s his key light? Where’s his fill light? Notice his use of multiple small lights in the background, but an overall back light from below and behind him. His microphone is out of frame, so you feel teleported directly into his creative space. This is a quality virtual presence.
Let’s take a look at Nigel Barros’ setup. Compare his key lighting to Pat’s. Compare their use of soft non-practical lighting in the background.
Lastly, let’s take a look at mine! I’m always working on improving my background, but space is hard!
You can see my amber/warm keylight helps saturate my camera. Additionally, I painted my office door scarlet to give my backdrop symmetry. The storage behind me gives an interesting contrast, but I should probably switch those to a deep and rich dark color to up my contrast. Always improving!
JED CHECK ✅: Jed’s wall used to have white paint with black and white paintings that were fish-eyed into looking crooked. Since then he painted his back wall to be black and has dynamic gradient back-lighting like we use in our studio.
Summing it all up
Not everyone can fix up their backgrounds, buy quality cameras, and multiple controllable lights, but everyone can use what they have to bring their virtual presence up a few levels. Our good buddy Jed is often in inter-company calls and now he has one of the strongest video presences.
There’s no tasteful way for me to screenshot and show the worst video meeting presences I’ve seen… but trust me, I’ve seen some that are pretty bad. 🤪🤪🤪
It doesn’t have to be that way. Everyone can fix it up! I’ve seen people light up their faces and backgrounds with lamps that are just out of the frame and cheap stands stacked on books. Understanding the concepts helps you get started on your setup, and if you want to have a quality digital presence, you can do it!
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Gant Laborde is a co-owner and Chief Innovation Officer at Infinite Red, published author, adjunct professor, worldwide public speaker, and mad scientist in training. He’s a GDE in Web and ML. Follow, tweet or visit him at a conference.
