All right. Thanks, everybody. Sorry, ran into a couple glitches here, but we're going to get
started now. I'm Spam. I am from DC212, which is New York City area. And this presentation
is called Remote Presentations, Simple Ways to Dramatically Increase the Quality of Your Talks.
It's almost a little ironic, given this in a VR environment, because a lot of what I am
going to talk about is how to increase the quality of your video and also some simple
things you can do for audio. The reason why I think this is really important now is as we are
all holding meetups and in general just having any sort of meeting where we're not physically
close to each other, having a decent audio and video to do your presentation has become much
more important. And a lot of folks are going out and buying all sorts of expensive things to try to
make their presentations look better. And I've found that over time, you can get this down to
some fairly low cost, fairly simple things that give you a very professional look. You don't have
to go out and buy all sorts of super duper expensive high-end webcams and expensive audio
mixing solutions. There's lots you can do with very simple things. It requires a little more
effort sometimes, but you can have dramatic results from it. So first thing is, when we are
looking at this, we're looking for simple solutions, but a lot of times simple doesn't
always mean cheap. We're going to try to keep things both simple and cheap. Sometimes, like I
said, it may require a little more effort on the initial setup or initial configuration side,
but I'm going to try to keep it both simple and cheap because not everybody has a ton of money
to invest in this. So the most important thing that you can focus on, I think, when you are
trying to improve the quality of your video is not getting a more expensive webcam. It's not
going ahead and doing complicated, you know, green screen effects or anything else behind you.
It's focusing on basic lighting. I've seen so many people who get expensive cameras and hook
them up in an attempt to go ahead and have a really high quality setup be let down because
their lighting is not something that's great. So when we're doing lighting, what we're trying
to do a lot of times is emulate almost the lighting that you get from the actual sun.
If you watch any of the late night talk shows in America over the past few months, as they've been
taken out of their professional environments and people have had to do stuff at home,
at first you saw people doing things inside and it was very dark and difficult to make out what
was going on. And then you started seeing a lot of these folks going into their backyards because
if you're outside, you can probably notice even if you're taking photos with your own
personal smartphone, if you go outside, the even lighting that you're going to get from the actual
sun is going to give you much better results a lot of the time. So what we're going to try
to do with lighting is to present very even lighting so that everything that you're looking
at is illuminated well and in some sense is sort of simulating the sun but not necessarily inviting
and move to something where there's a good separation between you and the background.
It's well lit, it looks inviting, and it's going to help you communicate better when you're giving
a presentation. And even a cheap webcam can have it. So this is not me. I'm definitely not this
photogenic. This slide here, this person, this is a guy who has a YouTube channel called Indy Mogul
and this is actually from a video he did on lighting and production with a cinematographer
named Larry Fong who's worked on tons of big budget movies. And they go through how to go from
zero dollar effort to five thousand dollars investments and improve the quality. But a lot
of the stuff is very, very simple. You see everything he has in these two videos,
two screenshots here. This is, I believe, with the exact same camera. So they're not even improving
the quality of the camera but making some simple changes to what's behind him and how he's lit.
We're able to go from that dark shot to the much more pleasant look at shot. So looking at here
what we have on the left versus the right, on the left you see he is seated with a window behind him
which is letting in light, but he himself is very dark. And that's the thing, the first thing I see
a lot of folks don't necessarily think about when they're setting up a shot. We, when you're working
and you have your desk that you're working at, you want to get light so that if you're looking at a
piece of paper or anything on your desk it's going to be illuminated. So you have the light behind
your head. But when you reverse it, the camera, if it's pointed at the light, the way that a camera
works is that bright light that's behind you, it's going to view that as the brightest thing
and then that should be white and it's going to bring everything else darker to compensate for
that. So if we look at the side on the right, what has happened there is we've put over some drapes
on the window and that is going to soften the light a little more and it's going to darken the
room, but they've added in additional lighting to compensate for that and provide a much more
even lighting to everything. And so everything is much more vivid, much more realistic. So I'm going
to go to the first thing in terms of lighting. We want to go ahead and get some lighting that we're
inside of the home. Because while it's great we can cover the window and we're going to lose some
light from that, you can compensate a little bit with lamps you may have around. But I think if you
want to step up your game, we can spend a little bit of money, we can get a lot of bang for the
buck. So the thing that I recommend is getting what's called a softbox if you really want to
step up your game. There's tons of professional lighting equipment that you can get that will
go ahead and do this in a very professional way. But you can find... here's a model I found on
Amazon for under $50. The brand is called Mount Dog and it is an LED light with a softbox that's
going to give you a much more softer light. It's going to spread out like a gel in front of it,
a soft fabric that's going to allow it to to be a nice and not harsh, not glary light on you.
And it comes on a stand. So it's everything you need to go and it's under $50, comes with
remote control, and allows you to go ahead and control the color temperature of the light.
So if you're outside, we have one, you know, we're using the sun. The sun is just one color.
But inside, if you purchase bulbs for your own home, you may have what in America is referred
to as soft white or bright white or daylight. These are all different color temperatures.
Depending on what you're setting up, if you're using different color temperatures, you're going
to... like part of your face may look blue and the other part of your face may look more red.
If you just make sure that all of the bulbs that you're using are warm white,
then you'll, again, be able to have a much more cohesive look to you. And using a product like
this, because it's designed for lighting, allow you to select whichever color temperature you want.
So highly recommend this. You know, if you already have whatever webcam,
getting just this will allow you to decide like, okay, I have my background that looks fine,
but my background is appearing a lot lighter than I am. You put this up, focus it on you,
and then already you're going to get a huge improvement to the quality of your video.
But I want to lay out a couple other changes, because I've tried to bring this down. I've
shared this with a number of folks. This is a $360 kit. I'm going to go through each of the
individual elements. If you want to go all the way and get cinema level results, basically,
when you're presenting online, I think this is the cheapest way I've found to get that done.
And this assumes that you have nothing today. Lighting goes a long way, but if you want to go
to the next level where, you know, somebody's watching the video and they're going to be able
to see, you know, the pores on your face, this will get you there. So I'm going to not touch
on any of these individually. I'm going to just go through as we go through slides and go through
each one, why I chose it, what the advantages of it are, and then hopefully I think you'll see
that if you go with all this, you'll love the results. So first thing is audio. A lot of folks
will focus on video and not necessarily think about audio that much. They'll use a built-in
mic or a cheap USB microphone. Clear video is great, and it makes an impact, and people can,
you know, be able to connect. But clear audio helps you communicate. So I would say one of the
first things I would do is make sure you invest in a microphone. The microphone I recommended on
the previous slide is the Blue Yeti. The Blue Yeti looks like what you see on this slide.
It is the most common microphone that you will see podcasters using, YouTube celebrities using.
Once you know what it looks like, you'll see it everywhere. And there's a good reason for it.
The microphone itself has a lot of options on it without purchasing anything else. If you go with
some higher-end microphones, you oftentimes have to purchase additional audio gear to take advantage
of it. So while the Blue Yeti may not be the highest-end microphone that you can purchase,
the fact that it is a USB microphone, that you don't need anything else really to take advantage
of it, makes it really great for presenters. On it, you have, you see those two dials on the back?
One of them is for adjustable gain. So if you go ahead and you want to make the audio louder
because you're placing the microphone further away from you, you'll be able to do that by
adjusting the gain. You don't need to adjust anything else to do that. If you're too loud,
you can adjust the gain down and bring your audio to an acceptable level. It has adjustable
pickup patterns. I won't go into those. If you're interested, you can do that on the website.
It has a physical mute button, which I think is really useful for folks.
And the last thing that it has that I absolutely love is it has an audio output.
Somebody said that my voice was breaking up a bit. Also, my connection was stuttering a bit.
Is it, let me give you some feedback if I'm coming through okay now.
Yeah, you're good. Awesome. Yeah, it was breaking a lot earlier.
Sorry about that. Maybe my connection. So one thing I really, really love about this microphone
is it has an audio output on it. So you can get a live mix of your system audio
and the audio that the microphone itself is picking up, which is more of a radio host type
of a thing to be able to hear whether you're close, you know, how your audio is going to sound
to others. Obviously, in certain environments, remote presentations can't necessarily account
for things like the internet connection and, you know, intermediary servers. But other than that,
you can know that the audio as it's going out is as you expect. So it's about $100 for the Yeti.
Highly, highly recommend it. And since it's a simple USB microphone,
it's really easy to hook up, really easy to use, and you just get that headphone output.
Next thing is webcams. So a lot of folks have the Logitech webcams and like the C920 and C922
are very popular, although difficult to get these days. But unfortunately, those webcams
and the technologies in them are, you know, like eight, 10 years old sometimes. There
haven't been dramatic improvements to the quality of webcams in a number of years.
So I, you know, when I was setting up my own setup at home, I first tried with an old webcam
that was similar to what I was using, and eventually saw that the real way to up my game
was going to be to use a DSLR or digital SLR camera. Now, how to use DSLR is a different
thing. You know, sometimes you can go with some very basic settings. There's lots of different
ways that you can, you know, up how the quality of your video in the camera itself has a lot of
additional settings that you can configure that you will not be able to do on a webcam.
So I started off with a very expensive SLR, the Canon 6D Mark II, which is fantastic,
but very expensive. What I am using right now is a Canon Rebel T4i, which you can pick up
on the used market for between $100 and $150 very frequently these days.
So it's, the reason you could pick it up for that price is because it's a few years old.
It's like, I think, six, maybe even seven years old at this point.
But it still has the ability to do 1080p video with a large sensor.
Sorry, Spam, but your voice for the last 30 seconds was totally gone.
So can you please repeat from the point where you said about T4i?
Okay. Apparently, I hope everybody heard your, your audio to me as well, but lost some of the
info on the T4i. So with the T4i, I chose it because it is a few years old,
but it still has a lot of great features. The, the image sensor on the T4i is still high quality.
You can get a 1080p image capture at 30 frames a second, and it is available for between $100
and $150 on the used market. It is a, it's, it's a little bit cheaper because it's a little older,
but the quality that you can get from it is still really, really good. So it's an often overlooked
camera. So once we have the camera, we want to go ahead and make sure that we can get that image
into our computer because this is designed for taking photos. With the, the way we're going to
get it into the computer is going to use the capture card. So if you look up capture cards
on the internet, you're going to see everybody talking about the Elgato Cam Link 4K. That's the
capture card that everybody wants to get. And the Elgato Cam Link 4K is fantastic,
but it's under $50. I think it is sold out everywhere right now. And it may be great,
but that's going to be out of reach for a lot of folks. There are a number of really cheap
video capture cards that have flooded the market recently that have totally decent quality and come
in at a ridiculously low cost. If you go on Amazon or on eBay or on a number of other selling
platforms and you search for a video capture card and you see one that looks like this with
no brand name, and it has these rounded corners and just the HDMI logo, USB on one side and HDMI
on the other, this thing you can purchase for as low as $15. And I frequently see it for between
$15 and $25. And it is a totally, totally decent video capture card that will appear as a normal
webcam input on your computer. So I highly recommend this. Even if you don't like the
Canon Rebel P4i, whatever camera you find, whatever video camera you find that has an HDMI output,
you can hook up to this. And for $15, you can use it. So really, really highly recommend it.
When this first came on the market, you saw some folks doing reviews and they were kind of stunned
because this thing is just like it's a cheap $15 card. But the quality is decent and the input
lag on it is also really, really low and competitive with the Cam Link 4K. So it's
a really fantastic setup that you can get with that.
If you want to take your image quality up even further and do some of the fancier things you
may see on YouTube frequently, I recommend switching out the normal lens on your SLR,
if you're going that route, with a different lens. In this case, the one I have selected
is for the Canon. P4i has an EF-S mount. And you can find, there's a company called Yongnu,
which is selling a 50mm lens available on Amazon and a bunch of other places.
And it will fit the Canon lens mount. You can literally go on Amazon, search for lenses that
will fit the P4i, because they have a lens search tool, and sort it by price. And this
will show up as the lowest price. And this is a $50 lens that is a 50mm and an f-stop of 1.8.
So this is not necessarily words that will make sense to everybody. But if you watch a YouTube
video, and you see you have the person clear, and their background is something we're defining as
blurry, they're using what's known as depth of field. So they are in focus, but what is behind
them is either slightly or totally out of focus. This lens will enable you to do that much better
than what came in the box. So we've gone ahead, and we've added by adding all of these elements
together, we end up with a full solution.
Sounds like my voice is breaking up again. I apologize for that.
So if you see here, I've broken it down again by price. You can mix and match as you go.
But I think what you what we have here is something that can give you a full professional
setup. And at a price point that is going to be just a little bit above some of the
webcams that are sold, you know, to be a little bit higher end webcams, those can cost,
you know, 200 to $250 on their own. This gives you a very flexible, very professional setup
for just a tiny bit more than that. So I highly recommend it. If you want to go ahead
and have better presentations, I think it is a very worthwhile investment. And if you get
none of the audio or video stuff, I totally recommend that you go ahead and at least get
the softbox. I know I spoke with a number of teachers who as they are getting prepared for
this coming year, and they know that they're going to be presenting remotely, they've gone
ahead and bought the softbox that I have here. And it's already, you know, leaps and bounds beyond
what they were doing previously. Even if they just went with the built in webcam on their laptop,
it's improved things. So one last thing, because I know this has come up in some presentations
that I've done and seen others do, when you are going ahead and doing a presentation,
you may want to go ahead and show off a, you know, a physical piece of hardware or something else.
Maybe you're doing lock picking. There is, you can invest, you can use OBS,
and there's plenty of tutorials on how to use OBS to composite, you know, a second camera in.
But if you just want to go ahead and use the software that you're already using to do it,
if you're using Zoom, as a lot of folks are, if you just go in and select inside of Zoom,
share camera, and go to advanced, they have a little share content for a second screen.
So you can highlight your video of, let's say, a second webcam that you have pointed
at a piece of hardware or at a lock or anything else, and still have your video of your face
be able to be seen by folks. So that's it. Thank you so much for coming. I apologize that
it looks like my connection may have been not the best and may have affected it somewhat,
but thank you so much, everybody, for coming. And I will, if I have the ability,
I will open this up for questions.