The Ultimate Guide to Making Your Video Calls Look (and sound) Professional
Video calls have become an essential part of our daily lives, whether for work, school, or personal connections. However, as we all know, not all video calls are created equal. Poor lighting, camera angles, and backgrounds can make for a less than optimal experience. In this blog post, I’ll cover some tips and tricks to help you make your video calls look better.
Use what’s Available
First and foremost, lighting is key when it comes to making your video calls look better. Setting up in a dimly lit space is a recipe for disaster, as the tiny sensors used by webcams will struggle to discern what they see. The result is often a grainy, unclear, and unflattering mess. Thankfully, we all have access to a gigantic and freely available light source: the sun.
Assuming your call is taking place during the day, try to setup near a window with lots of natural light. How you should sit relative to the window depends on the look you’re going for. For a generally pleasing, well-lit look, sit facing the windows directly so that your entire face is evenly lit. For a slightly contrasty look often found in portraits, try to sit at roughly 45 degrees relative to the window so that the side of your face that is further from the window becomes slightly shadowed in comparison. The helps to create a bit more depth to the image and is typically more flattering that straight on lighting which can flatten facial features.
The one position you’ll absolutely want to avoid when relying on natural light is to be sat with the window placed behind you. Lighting from behind will force your webcam to adjust exposure for one of two extremes, resulting in either you appearing too dark to be seen, or a background that looks as though you may be taking your call from the surface of the sun.
Whether you decide to sit facing the window or at an angle, the golden rule for lighting is as follows: the softer the light, the better. Rather than letting the harsh sunlight shine directly on your face thereby creating harsh shadows, either sit a bit farther from the window so that you still benefit from the indirect ambient light without being directly in it, or diffuse the light coming through the window with opaque curtains. The latter will act like the large softboxes typically found on professional video production lights.
Turn up the house lights
Now, assuming it’s nighttime or you’re not situated in a way to take advantage of natural light, you’ll need to rely on artificial light. Sure, you can flip a switch and make use of the overhead lights, but top down lighting like this creates large, unflattering shadows under your eyes. Since the goal here is to get you looking your best, you’ll ideally want a light that you can easily move and whose height can be adjusted.
The best bang for your buck in this situation is a small LED panel that you can attach to a light stand or mount right to your desk. While it may be tempting to grab any available floor lamp you have lying around and call it a day, the advantage of these panels is that the brightness level can be adjusted on a scale of 0-100, unlike floor lamps which typically give you three levels of intensity at best. To add to that, if you find yourself occasionally working from other locations other than your home (the office, co-working space, etc), LED panels are small and lightweight enough to take with you.
When setting up the light, try to position the panel so that it is coming from slightly above you, pointing down at an angle. This position will allow the light to look much more natural than it would coming directly from the side, while still avoiding the deep under eye shadows that a light placed directly overhead would cause.
Like I mentioned above, you ideally want to soften the light as much as possible. When it comes to soft lighting, the golden rule is the larger the light source, the softer the light. Unfortunately, LED panels are relatively small, so the light they give off tends to be quite harsh if shined directly on you. Luckily, we can resolve this in a couple different ways. Best case scenario, you can hang an opaque curtain or lightweight white bedsheet in front of the panel. This will cause the curtain or sheet to act as an extra large light source rather than the small panel.
If that isn’t doable, sit near a white wall. Rather than pointing the panel directly at yourself, point it at the wall. The light will bounce off the surface, causing it to spread out and soften before hitting you. If you go this route, be sure to use a white wall, as the light will be affected by whatever color it reflects off of. This could lead to some interesting and very unnatural skin tones.
Mind Your Surroundings
By this point, your lighting is looking nice and you’ve ensured that you’re properly exposed. While you may be the star of the show, unfortunately, that’s not all that people are going to see. Before signing in to your meeting, take some time in advance to open your computer’s webcam application or create a new meeting just for yourself. Once you’re able to see yourself on the screen, take a moment to look around the frame and take stock of what’s going on behind you. Is there anything you wouldn’t want the other meeting attendees to see, such as laundry waiting to be folded, a messy bookshelf, your child’s toys sprawled all over the floor, etc.? Also, how is the contrast? By this I mean do you sufficiently stand out from the background? Make sure that whatever is behind you is sufficiently lit and different enough in color so that you don’t blend into your surroundings like a chameleon.
Know Your Angles
When people complain that remote meetings feel very impersonal in comparison, a big part of what they’re picking up on is the lack of eye contact and the inability to read body language via webcam. While not much can be done about the latter, being mindful of your camera placement can go a long way towards making your viewer feel more connected with you.
In general, try to keep your camera as close to your eye level as possible. Nothing shatters the feeling of connectedness quite like someone seemingly staring off into space while they talk to you. In the event that you’re like me and your webcam sits atop a large monitor that is positioned above your head, drag the video window to the top center of your screen so that your line of sight will naturally fall in line with the camera. If you still find it’s difficult to make eye contact with your current setup, you can try something like NVIDIA Broadcast. This free computer app has AI-powered tools to enhance your video calls, including a filter that can make eye contact for you even if you’re looking somewhere else. This is also a great option to explore if you have to read notes while giving an online presentation.
Mic Check
The importance of clean audio to your overall video quality cannot be understated. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s just as if not more important than your image quality. In the all digital era, people can overlook a somewhat pixelated or subpar image, but muffled, noisy audio? Unforgivable. It’s distracting to the point where the person on the other end of your video call will end up paying more attention to the sound of your voice than the meaning of your words.
While most webcams these days have built-in microphones, these tiny, pinhole-sized mics are in no way adequate and should only be used as a last resort. Think of it like one of those 3-in-1 shampoo, conditioner, body soaps. Sure, you can combine them all, but are any of them really working as good as they could on their own? Ideally, you want a standalone microphone that you can connect to your computer via USB. Personally, I use a Blue Snowball condenser mic. It takes up very little room on my desk, but sounds fantastic.
In conclusion, making your video calls look better is about paying attention to the small details. With good lighting, proper camera angles, an eye for your surroundings, and clean audio, you'll be able to make a great impression on the other end of the call. In the event that you need your video call quality to look even better, you may want to enlist the services of a professional videographer. If you’re in Japan and need help with video production in Tokyo, contact me to discuss the details of your project.