WEBVTT 00:00.640 --> 00:01.260 All right. 00:01.260 --> 00:02.840 Thanks, everybody. 00:02.980 --> 00:07.940 Sorry, ran into a couple glitches here, but we're going to get started now. 00:09.340 --> 00:10.840 I'm Spam. 00:11.400 --> 00:17.420 I am from DC212, which is New York City area. 00:17.780 --> 00:26.060 And this presentation is called Remote Presentations, Simple Ways to Dramatically Increase the Quality of Your Talks. 00:26.060 --> 00:42.420 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. 00:43.020 --> 01:02.520 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. 01:02.520 --> 01:09.760 And a lot of folks are going out and buying all sorts of expensive things to try to make their presentations look better. 01:09.980 --> 01:22.140 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. 01:22.140 --> 01:33.380 You don't have to go out and buy all sorts of super duper expensive high-end webcams and expensive audio mixing solutions. 01:33.380 --> 01:37.100 There's lots you can do with very simple things. 01:37.100 --> 01:42.500 It requires a little more effort sometimes, but you can have dramatic results from it. 01:43.340 --> 01:54.580 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. 01:54.760 --> 01:59.020 We're going to try to keep things both simple and cheap. 01:59.560 --> 02:16.500 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. 02:18.480 --> 02:27.440 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. 02:27.440 --> 02:36.980 It's not going ahead and doing complicated, you know, green screen effects or anything else behind you. 02:36.980 --> 02:39.440 It's focusing on basic lighting. 02:39.440 --> 02:53.700 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. 02:53.740 --> 03:02.620 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. 03:02.900 --> 03:22.300 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. 03:22.300 --> 03:40.140 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. 03:40.160 --> 03:55.680 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 04:06.550 --> 04:13.270 necessarily inviting and move to something where there's a good separation between you and the background. 04:13.270 --> 04:20.490 It's well lit, it looks inviting, and it's going to help you communicate better when you're giving a presentation. 04:21.430 --> 04:24.450 And even a cheap webcam can have it. 04:24.450 --> 04:27.030 So this is not me. 04:27.030 --> 04:29.530 I'm definitely not this photogenic. 04:29.610 --> 04:47.570 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. 04:47.570 --> 04:55.490 And they go through how to go from zero dollar effort to five thousand dollars investments and improve the quality. 04:55.490 --> 04:58.410 But a lot of the stuff is very, very simple. 04:58.410 --> 05:03.830 You see everything he has in these two videos, two screenshots here. 05:03.830 --> 05:06.390 This is, I believe, with the exact same camera. 05:06.610 --> 05:13.110 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. 05:13.110 --> 05:19.770 We're able to go from that dark shot to the much more pleasant look at shot. 05:20.030 --> 05:34.130 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. 05:34.690 --> 05:40.450 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. 05:41.570 --> 05:50.550 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. 05:50.550 --> 05:53.170 So you have the light behind your head. 05:53.610 --> 06:13.430 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. 06:13.430 --> 06:36.210 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. 06:36.210 --> 06:40.370 And so everything is much more vivid, much more realistic. 06:40.430 --> 06:43.530 So I'm going to go to the first thing in terms of lighting. 06:44.170 --> 06:49.830 We want to go ahead and get some lighting that we're inside of the home. 06:49.830 --> 06:57.450 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. 06:57.450 --> 07:04.550 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. 07:04.870 --> 07:11.510 So the thing that I recommend is getting what's called a softbox if you really want to step up your game. 07:12.030 --> 07:19.650 There's tons of professional lighting equipment that you can get that will go ahead and do this in a very professional way. 07:19.650 --> 07:24.010 But you can find... here's a model I found on Amazon for under $50. 07:24.470 --> 07:37.050 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. 07:37.050 --> 07:47.170 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. 07:47.410 --> 07:48.770 And it comes on a stand. 07:48.770 --> 07:58.710 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. 07:59.410 --> 08:03.110 So if you're outside, we have one, you know, we're using the sun. 08:03.110 --> 08:04.850 The sun is just one color. 08:04.850 --> 08:15.010 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. 08:15.250 --> 08:17.850 These are all different color temperatures. 08:17.950 --> 08:28.150 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. 08:28.150 --> 08:39.650 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. 08:39.650 --> 08:46.670 And using a product like this, because it's designed for lighting, allow you to select whichever color temperature you want. 08:46.670 --> 08:48.750 So highly recommend this. 08:48.750 --> 09:00.550 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. 09:00.550 --> 09:09.890 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. 09:11.530 --> 09:16.890 But I want to lay out a couple other changes, because I've tried to bring this down. 09:16.890 --> 09:19.210 I've shared this with a number of folks. 09:19.210 --> 09:21.650 This is a $360 kit. 09:21.650 --> 09:23.670 I'm going to go through each of the individual elements. 09:23.790 --> 09:34.690 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. 09:34.690 --> 09:36.930 And this assumes that you have nothing today. 09:37.610 --> 09:47.210 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. 09:48.370 --> 09:51.710 So I'm going to not touch on any of these individually. 09:51.710 --> 10:04.090 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. 10:04.890 --> 10:07.030 So first thing is audio. 10:07.950 --> 10:13.150 A lot of folks will focus on video and not necessarily think about audio that much. 10:13.150 --> 10:16.210 They'll use a built-in mic or a cheap USB microphone. 10:17.290 --> 10:24.390 Clear video is great, and it makes an impact, and people can, you know, be able to connect. 10:24.770 --> 10:27.450 But clear audio helps you communicate. 10:27.490 --> 10:33.610 So I would say one of the first things I would do is make sure you invest in a microphone. 10:33.650 --> 10:38.610 The microphone I recommended on the previous slide is the Blue Yeti. 10:38.610 --> 10:43.410 The Blue Yeti looks like what you see on this slide. 10:43.410 --> 10:53.310 It is the most common microphone that you will see podcasters using, YouTube celebrities using. 10:53.450 --> 10:58.030 Once you know what it looks like, you'll see it everywhere. 10:58.450 --> 11:00.230 And there's a good reason for it. 11:00.230 --> 11:07.090 The microphone itself has a lot of options on it without purchasing anything else. 11:07.090 --> 11:13.810 If you go with some higher-end microphones, you oftentimes have to purchase additional audio gear to take advantage of it. 11:13.810 --> 11:29.230 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. 11:29.950 --> 11:34.110 On it, you have, you see those two dials on the back? 11:34.110 --> 11:36.730 One of them is for adjustable gain. 11:36.730 --> 11:48.630 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. 11:48.750 --> 11:51.570 You don't need to adjust anything else to do that. 11:51.570 --> 11:58.670 If you're too loud, you can adjust the gain down and bring your audio to an acceptable level. 11:59.030 --> 12:00.730 It has adjustable pickup patterns. 12:00.730 --> 12:01.870 I won't go into those. 12:01.870 --> 12:04.410 If you're interested, you can do that on the website. 12:05.090 --> 12:09.730 It has a physical mute button, which I think is really useful for folks. 12:10.010 --> 12:17.610 And the last thing that it has that I absolutely love is it has an audio output. 12:21.660 --> 12:25.840 Somebody said that my voice was breaking up a bit. 12:25.840 --> 12:29.860 Also, my connection was stuttering a bit. 12:29.860 --> 12:34.920 Is it, let me give you some feedback if I'm coming through okay now. 12:38.970 --> 12:40.910 Yeah, you're good. 12:40.990 --> 12:41.630 Awesome. 12:41.630 --> 12:43.470 Yeah, it was breaking a lot earlier. 12:44.670 --> 12:45.930 Sorry about that. 12:45.930 --> 12:47.170 Maybe my connection. 12:48.570 --> 12:56.190 So one thing I really, really love about this microphone is it has an audio output on it. 12:56.190 --> 13:14.250 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. 13:14.970 --> 13:24.290 Obviously, in certain environments, remote presentations can't necessarily account for things like the internet connection and, you know, intermediary servers. 13:24.290 --> 13:30.550 But other than that, you can know that the audio as it's going out is as you expect. 13:30.710 --> 13:32.830 So it's about $100 for the Yeti. 13:32.870 --> 13:34.510 Highly, highly recommend it. 13:34.510 --> 13:40.850 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. 13:43.590 --> 13:45.030 Next thing is webcams. 13:45.030 --> 13:56.170 So a lot of folks have the Logitech webcams and like the C920 and C922 are very popular, although difficult to get these days. 13:56.210 --> 14:04.990 But unfortunately, those webcams and the technologies in them are, you know, like eight, 10 years old sometimes. 14:04.990 --> 14:11.250 There haven't been dramatic improvements to the quality of webcams in a number of years. 14:11.830 --> 14:29.850 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. 14:30.450 --> 14:35.710 Now, how to use DSLR is a different thing. 14:35.890 --> 14:39.010 You know, sometimes you can go with some very basic settings. 14:39.230 --> 14:52.370 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. 14:53.090 --> 15:08.350 So I started off with a very expensive SLR, the Canon 6D Mark II, which is fantastic, but very expensive. 15:08.470 --> 15:21.970 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. 15:22.130 --> 15:27.110 So it's, the reason you could pick it up for that price is because it's a few years old. 15:27.110 --> 15:32.110 It's like, I think, six, maybe even seven years old at this point. 15:32.110 --> 15:39.750 But it still has the ability to do 1080p video with a large sensor. 15:39.750 --> 15:44.090 Sorry, Spam, but your voice for the last 30 seconds was totally gone. 15:44.090 --> 15:49.430 So can you please repeat from the point where you said about T4i? 15:49.810 --> 15:50.770 Okay. 15:51.150 --> 15:58.750 Apparently, I hope everybody heard your, your audio to me as well, but lost some of the info on the T4i. 15:58.750 --> 16:09.590 So with the T4i, I chose it because it is a few years old, but it still has a lot of great features. 16:09.590 --> 16:15.210 The, the image sensor on the T4i is still high quality. 16:15.210 --> 16:29.250 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. 16:29.350 --> 16:39.290 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. 16:39.290 --> 16:41.710 So it's an often overlooked camera. 16:44.910 --> 16:53.810 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. 16:54.590 --> 17:00.890 With the, the way we're going to get it into the computer is going to use the capture card. 17:00.890 --> 17:08.530 So if you look up capture cards on the internet, you're going to see everybody talking about the Elgato Cam Link 4K. 17:08.530 --> 17:12.110 That's the capture card that everybody wants to get. 17:12.370 --> 17:17.490 And the Elgato Cam Link 4K is fantastic, but it's under $50. 17:17.490 --> 17:21.070 I think it is sold out everywhere right now. 17:21.110 --> 17:24.890 And it may be great, but that's going to be out of reach for a lot of folks. 17:25.530 --> 17:36.950 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. 17:36.950 --> 17:56.870 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, 17:56.870 --> 18:00.710 this thing you can purchase for as low as $15. 18:00.810 --> 18:04.210 And I frequently see it for between $15 and $25. 18:04.210 --> 18:13.050 And it is a totally, totally decent video capture card that will appear as a normal webcam input on your computer. 18:13.050 --> 18:15.170 So I highly recommend this. 18:15.170 --> 18:25.390 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. 18:25.390 --> 18:28.710 And for $15, you can use it. 18:28.930 --> 18:31.590 So really, really highly recommend it. 18:31.590 --> 18:42.030 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. 18:42.450 --> 18:51.350 But the quality is decent and the input lag on it is also really, really low and competitive with the Cam Link 4K. 18:51.350 --> 18:55.690 So it's a really fantastic setup that you can get with that. 18:56.130 --> 19:14.430 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. 19:14.750 --> 19:20.310 In this case, the one I have selected is for the Canon. 19:20.550 --> 19:25.990 P4i has an EF-S mount. 19:26.310 --> 19:37.130 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. 19:37.670 --> 19:41.550 And it will fit the Canon lens mount. 19:41.550 --> 19:53.470 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. 19:53.470 --> 19:55.970 And this will show up as the lowest price. 19:55.970 --> 20:01.930 And this is a $50 lens that is a 50mm and an f-stop of 1.8. 20:01.930 --> 20:06.810 So this is not necessarily words that will make sense to everybody. 20:06.810 --> 20:20.670 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. 20:20.670 --> 20:26.930 So they are in focus, but what is behind them is either slightly or totally out of focus. 20:27.030 --> 20:32.650 This lens will enable you to do that much better than what came in the box. 20:32.650 --> 20:40.970 So we've gone ahead, and we've added by adding all of these elements together, we end up with a full solution. 20:52.690 --> 20:55.730 Sounds like my voice is breaking up again. 20:55.830 --> 20:57.390 I apologize for that. 20:59.090 --> 21:03.370 So if you see here, I've broken it down again by price. 21:03.370 --> 21:05.830 You can mix and match as you go. 21:06.690 --> 21:13.070 But I think what you what we have here is something that can give you a full professional setup. 21:13.930 --> 21:28.970 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. 21:28.970 --> 21:37.410 This gives you a very flexible, very professional setup for just a tiny bit more than that. 21:38.110 --> 21:40.870 So I highly recommend it. 21:40.870 --> 21:48.570 If you want to go ahead and have better presentations, I think it is a very worthwhile investment. 21:48.570 --> 21:56.550 And if you get none of the audio or video stuff, I totally recommend that you go ahead and at least get the softbox. 21:56.550 --> 22:08.810 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. 22:08.850 --> 22:13.610 And it's already, you know, leaps and bounds beyond what they were doing previously. 22:13.610 --> 22:19.050 Even if they just went with the built in webcam on their laptop, it's improved things. 22:20.030 --> 22:39.250 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. 22:39.250 --> 22:40.990 Maybe you're doing lock picking. 22:41.490 --> 22:50.910 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. 22:50.910 --> 23:07.370 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. 23:07.370 --> 23:22.530 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. 23:23.430 --> 23:25.290 So that's it. 23:25.290 --> 23:28.450 Thank you so much for coming. 23:28.530 --> 23:40.990 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. 23:42.210 --> 23:52.790 And I will, if I have the ability, I will open this up for questions.