If you go this route, please make sure your system is robust and ready to go before meetings.
We had to ask one employee to go back to his reliable built-in webcam because every other meeting started with 2 minutes of him getting his camera turned on, messing with audio inputs, getting his microphone boom in place, and fighting other quirks. He also had a tendency to drop out of long meetings when his camera overheated, at which point it was another 1-2 minutes of messing around with the camera setup.
If you're going to do this, it must be reliable and ready to go before meetings. Don't be the person fighting with expensive equipment all the time just to get a marginally better image for your highly compressed Zoom video stream. This isn't a Twitch stream. We just want to talk and get down to business.
Agree 100% - This is why I eventually dropped it. I used to run a photography side gig, so I reused my full frame DSLR, nice portrait lens and lighting + cloth backdrop. But I had cables everywhere and multiple points of failure in the chain. Camera could overheat, software was wonky, something would get unplugged, and there was stress on the CPU at times too due to 3rd party apps required.
Overall it just wasn't worth the effort, especially once I realized nobody cared or even really noticed. Now, absolutely, many projects are worth doing for their own sake and for your own satisfaction :). But while accomplishing it brought that satisfaction, continued use on daily bases just wasn't worth it.
So I looked for a nice webcam with narrowest possible FOV (which is the opposite from what manufacturers are going for, unfortunately), put it on a tripod with ring light, and I get results that are externally undistinguishable (if not better), but FAR superior reliability.
----
Note also that photographer in me wanted to do a Portrait shot with zoom in my face. Interestingly, overwhelming feedback once I actually asked real people, is that they PREFERRED a wide shot with my office visible. Made it more human and less stark/intimidating, apparently. So as ever, don't make assumptions of your user base! :)
Hi - I assume your question is which webcam did I use for narrow FOV - for actual camera, it's trivial to pick a lens or zoom :).
I ended up getting Logitech Brio. It's expensive for a webcam, and honestly I'm a bit peeved - I don't feel I am getting my money's worth in terms of image quality. The software is also absolutely atrocious, so I don't really use it. But it is the best compromise of image quality and FOV that I could find.
(if your question was about DOF / bokeh/ blur, no webcam will do that and so far I haven't liked any software options. I just put a black collapsible photography background behind me so nothing but me is in the photo to begin with :)
Considering Logitech hit a goldmine during pandemic induced lock-downs by selling >10 year old webcams at premium, I don't see any reason for them to innovate or at least improve their products in near term.
Perhaps we've overestimated the need-gap[1] for good quality webcams? Most people seem to be just fine with mediocre webcams for that video call in which their video is anyways going to be compressed and resized to small window if there are multiple participants.
That doesn't mean I didn't waste my time in trying to build a better webcam like others here, I tried to convert a old point-and-shoot into a webcam using CHDK firmware but I couldn't find a way to get the video stream.
Most people yell at their computer. Preciously few people who spend 6+hrs a day on calls and meetings, get a good headset with a boom microphone. Nobody correlates the "what? Did you say something" and overlaps and garbled voices and muffled noise cancelled uni-directional simplex conversations on them not getting a company-expensed headset. Improving on the built-in laptop video is not even on the radar :D
I have both the 920s and the Brio. The Brio’s image is sharper and more detailed but somehow the 920s’ image is more natural.
I was underwhelmed with the Brio but I eventually got used to it. It’s not the upgrade to the 920s I had imagined it to be but it’s good enough to keep.
And yes, I used Logitune to tune as much as I could. It was horrendous out of box.
I find the LogiTune software good enough for managing my Brio webcam. Certainly less buggy and frustrating on Mac than some other official software I tried previously.
Unfortunately, the C920s resets all its setting when losing power.
I'm using it on my home computer and my work laptop, but don't want to install the software on the work laptop. So I must live with the extremely wide FOV there.
I have a script which runs after login and after resume from sleep. It runs guvcview (Linux tool for managing webcams) and loads a saved profile that has my preferred zoom and focus settings.
To be honest, 1.5k is a pretty decent budget for any non-gaming laptop. It's definitely a red flag to start at a company and get a bargain bin laptop, but giving out 5k laptops to every new hire is probably just being wasteful with about 3.5k. Chairs & desks are where penny pinching is an even more dreadful flaw.
If you expect someone to sit for 8 hours a day give them a good chair lest they start having back issues after two months of employment.
Amateur photographer looking to learn more here. My initial impression is that a 35mm focal length on a full-frame/35mm film equivalent sensor would have a relatively _wide_ field of view (FOV). Or do I have that backwards?
My other thought is that the suggested lens can stop down to f1.8, which would give a nice narrow depth of field (DOF) and add a pleasant background blur, but it would also be harder to stay in focus during a call. If the person on camera moves forward or backward very much at all when the lens is at f1.8, they would be pretty blurry. So perhaps they could get away with a lens that just stops down to f2.8 or so, albeit with worse low-light performance (smaller aperture, less light coming through).
But take these comments with a grain of salt. It sounds like you have a setup that works well for you.
Yeah, not enough coffee - got my DOF and FOV mixed up.
In any case I find if you sit close to your camera, 35mm is a good FOV that will fit in your head and shoulders. The background blur for f/1.8 works well if you enable Servo Autofocus with Face Detect. It will momentarily get confused if you step out of the frame and back in again, but it can track a face pretty well after that.
Just checked using a camera and you're right; a person right around "conversation distance" from the camera focusing at 35mm looks pretty natural in frame for a video call. It sounds like I underestimated modern continuous autofocus. Great info from you and the sibling comments, thanks.
Most modern cameras have the ability to do constant autofocus in video mode, to varying degrees of quality and success. Usually they will try to follow anything that looks like a human face, or at least the brightest object in the field of view.
That said, even the greatest autofocus isn't going to be able to keep up with a person who moves around a lot at f/1.8 - so it's reasonable to stop down a bit if that's the case for your subject.
> If the person on camera moves forward or backward very much at all when the lens is at f1.8, they would be pretty blurry.
The mirrorless EOS camera's (R series) have autofocus with face tracking which works quite well. At f1.8 you get 8cm depth of field at 1m distance so you'd have to stop down the aperture to about f4 if you want your whole head to appear sharp on video.
My bad, I read this as "narrow DOF", in which case a low f-stop helps.. Will leave the recommendation for anyone who wants a nice background blur. But perhaps go for a 50mm f1.8 if you want a narrower FOV.
He was probably using software, like Canon's Webcam Utility, to stream his camera's HDMI OUT to his computer instead of using a capture card. He likely did this because of his camera not having "clean" HDMI output (i.e. you'd see icons if he were to capture what was on his camera's screen). Software like this is extremely unreliable by comparison and consumes CPU cycles like crazy, both on the camera and on your computer.
Additionally, for most cameras, the input feed used by the software goes through the camera's image processing stack as if they were using the real-time "Live View" feature (i.e. showing you the image you're going to take post-processing, i.e. real-time image processing). This often heats the camera up and causes it to shut down due to thermal overload. If you use a capture card, it captures whatever's on the screen without hitting the image processing stack, which is much less resource-intensive.
The first person I interviewed with this setup had the same problem. He looked great, but the software processing the input from his camera made him lag horribly.
I have a Canon M200 mirrorless SLR with an Elgato HDMI Capture card and have used it for all-day online meetings (even through OBS!) with no issues at all. Startup takes me, like, 30 seconds: turn key and fill lights on, turn camera on, press hotkey to start OBS, Krisp and Zoom, turn on video.
> He was probably using software, like Canon's Webcam Utility, to stream his camera's HDMI OUT to his computer instead of using a capture card.
No, he was using an HDMI capture card and trying to do things with OBS.
> Startup takes me, like, 30 seconds: turn key and fill lights on, turn camera on, press hotkey to start OBS, Krisp and Zoom, turn on video.
Which is all great and fine if you've got it perfected and you're the type of person to handle all of this before the meeting starts.
But when someone shows up late to a meeting or forgets to prepare, it's far easier for everyone involve if they can just open their laptop and join the meeting with the built-in webcam instead of turning on their camera, turning on lights, starting OBS, confirming all the settings, etc.
There are HDMI to USB cards that emulate a USB HID camera which is immediately available in zoom w/o need for OBS, the only thing I do is turn on the camera itself which takes maybe 2-3 seconds and is non-blocking for the call (until it's ready it's just a black screen in zoom if the meeting was already started).
> No, he was using an HDMI capture card and trying to do things with OBS.
There’s definitely a lot of variables and points of failure here but this isn’t my experience using an elgato cam link and a Sony camera. Granted it was a desktop so it’s quite a bit more powerful than a laptop but once setup I had no such issues with overheating or random drop outs (tested for 3-4 hrs at times).
Adjusting the mic should also not take much time, put it in front of your face.
I’m far from an expert in such setups as well so it sounds like your coworker either had bad hardware or less than optimal config.
I agree with you though, if you’re going to use this setup make sure it’s solid before you rely on it.
However one thing I have noticed is mic quality matters... up to a point.
I'm not even talking mic booms and super expensive setups, the difference between some omnidirectional mic on the bottom of a laptop or the side of one of those bluetooth headphones and pretty much any headset with a mic pointed at your actual face is night and day. It doesn't need to be expensive, but it does need to be within reasonable proximity to your mouth, and preferably not over a questionably compressed bluetooth stream.
I find the macbook pro onboard mic to be superior to every headphone mic and every group room mic I have tested and I have tested many. If you have one and you are using headpones made for music do everyone a favor and set your defaults so that it always uses the mac's mic. With many Bluetooth heaphones you also get vastly better sound quality in your ears if the mic is not in use.
I agree with your statement about quality, but everything is good only until you start typing. Everyone on a meeting will hear it as if their ears were inside your laptop. And when you’re talking while typing, oh god
Out of curiosity, I picked up a Konftel Ego portable blutooth speakerphone for some testing. An integrator turned us on to Konftel as a cost effective alternative to polycomm speakerphones, and they were indeed quite good.
I've been very happy with it! Indeed, I started typing without thinking during a meeting, apologized to the group and they said they didn't hear the typing at all. I was shocked because I am in a temporary setup and am using my mechanical keyboard - which I try to avoid during the day for obvious reasons.
Pretty amazing quality. I ended up getting one for my parents to use on their calls and they love it - works with the computer, their cell phones or their house phone. Provantage has 'em for $80 too.
That is definitely true, but I have developed the good habit of not typing while I talk and muting the rest of the time, or at least when I do have to type.
I agree when compared to BT mics. They suck, in general. But compared to a decent (~50€) wired headset, they lose, hands down. You can also find really decent mics in second-hand stores. I got a 900€ mic for 20€ and just had to replace a few components.
Also, there’s nothing more annoying than hearing birds chirping when you’re trying to have a meeting with the volume turned all the way up to hear you talking. Buy a freakin headset.
Same! The macbook speaker is also one of the best I've heard. Sometimes if I'm not expecting a rustling or footsteps, or a quick car beep in the background of a movie, I'll look over assuming it was a real life sound.
That's coming from plugging a bose speaker in to whatever laptop I'm using before.
The machine has it's flaws, but this part is really close to magic for me.
> Disagree. You still get a ton from a low res image of a person vs a static image.
Like what? Having worked from home since the time when (affordable) connections were too slow for anything but text, it's questionable if audio even brings any value. I never watch any video streams that may be present on calls. They are, while a fun novelty, useless.
> Why would my coworkers need to see the individual pores on my nose anyways?
Your coworkers wouldn't need to see you at all under normal circumstances, but if video is your product then doing it right is worthwhile. There's good reason why movies aren't filmed on first generation iPhones.
People aren't shooting movies, they are just conveying mood and nuance through facial expressions, which is essentially an extra channel of communication that we have evolved to use efficiently. If a team finds that certain discussions go better with video/audio, using a simple web cam will certainly be better than dismissing it entirely jusy because people don't have professional setups
Body language, facial expressions, tone of voice (annoyed, happy, etc), massive speed increase in communication.
Please don't take it the wrong way, but it's extremely strange you don't see any of this.
If I may ask, what do you do for work now? What kind of communication do you need with people where text is as fast as face to face? Have you ever worked in a physical office before? Do you have any issues when it comes to socializing with people IRL?
Without trying to sound glib, it's a long list. I have a number of different jobs across multiple industries. However, director of a beverage company along with working with a software development team are where my calls take place most often.
> What kind of communication do you need with people where text is as fast as face to face?
In particular, software-related technical matters are painful to communicate by voice. Because of that, everyone wants to share their screen to reintroduce text, so any video that is being recorded gets pushed to the side anyway. This where text wins hands down, if you know how to communicate.
Indeed, it has become apparent in the last couple of years, with everyone moving home, that most software developers have no idea how to communicate. Calls have become a crutch to try and fumble their way through it. When you have to repeat yourself over and over again to get your point across, voice bandwidth starts to gain an edge. However, my experience in working with effective communicators in an age when text was the only practical option (long distance charges would have killed you!), it's clear that text is far more efficient when utilized well.
> Have you ever worked in a physical office before?
I have, even in software, a long, long time ago. Some of my jobs also still take me to physical locations. Software has been WFH for most of my software career, though.
> Do you have any issues when it comes to socializing with people IRL?
I guess that's for the receiving end to decide, but in terms of socialization IRL is my preferred mode. Work communication isn't really socialization, though. It's knowledge transfer. And that's where text shines. Not only in its ability to communicate ideas but also the natural maintenance of record.
> Please don't take it the wrong way, but it's extremely strange you don't see any of this.
Frankly, as mentioned, shared screens dominate the vast majority of calls I'm on given the ineffectiveness of voice. Even if I thought there was theoretical value in the video, it would be difficult to give attention to it. I don't find it strange that an animated postage stamp off to the side provides no value at all. What is to be gained from it? You can't see much without taking from the focus.
If you’re in consulting this brings a lot more professionalism to the table if your video and audio are higher quality. For normal coworkers, yea probably not worth it though a good quality mic + boom will be greatly appreciated.
I'd say the opposite. I don't need to have perfect video quality in a business call. I want to see their facial expressions and understand them clearly. I don't care if the skin tone matches reality to 100% or if brightness is perfect.
I'd argue only if you have a presenter without screen sharing, perfect video makes sense. In most business meetings screens are shared anyway or there's a group of people.
Take a picture of your face, set it as your background in OBS, and stream that. It's much more convenient, because you only have to make sure your camera works well once, instead of for every meeting.
Let's just end the simulacra and embrace the absurd, take a video of yourself walking into the room, acting surprised that someone's on a call and awkwardly backing out of the room, if your platform supports animated backgrounds, use it.
Take anyone who notices and asks if you have a previously undisclosed twin-sibling out to dinner for being observant.
Bonus points if you wear the same clothes as your video self to really mess with someone's head
Yeah Apple's network link conditioner is great for this. If you don't want to send video but the organizer insists, just tune it down to the point your audio goes roboty. They'll be begging you to turn off video to improve the connection :D
How is streaming a picture to Zoom more convenient than uploading a profile picture to Zoom? If you stream the picture, you have to have special software running all the time. With a profile picture, you don't.
> Additionally, for most cameras, the input feed used by the software goes through the camera's image processing stack as if they were using the real-time "Live View" feature (i.e. showing you the image you're going to take post-processing, i.e. real-time image processing). This often heats the camera up and causes it to shut down due to thermal overload. If you use a capture card, it captures whatever's on the screen without hitting the image processing stack, which is much less resource-intensive.
These pathways are the same. You're decidedly not getting raw video out of (most) consumer cameras via HDMI.
This is what I use as well. The software can be a slight pain in the ass, but once you get used to a handful of quirks it's pretty smooth sailing. I've used it for teams calls, web-based barcode scanning testing, etc. Never had it cut out on me due to some arbitrary limitation.
Having a webcam on a proper tripod makes it really easy to control variables in testing of things like barcode scanning and other image recognition tasks as well. Being able to swap lenses and manually control the entire system can make a huge difference for my purposes. I will tape my test samples to a whiteboard (sometimes with varying backgrounds) and place the camera at a fixed location from it.
I don't go much further than the camera and basic software. I don't have patience for backdrops, lights, finicky software chains, etc. I simply do M50=>canon software=>windows webcam device.
I’m starting to suspect something is wrong with our Elgato card because it has been a hit and miss experience for a long time now. We also have a knock off chinese 4k stream box (not the total dirt cheap ones) and that has sometimes been better than the elgato.
You need to make sure that you're not connecting it to an overloaded USB hub and that it's connected to a USB 3.0 port. I get framerate drops when those conditions aren't satisfied.
I've got a very nice mirrorless camera and glass and eventually came to the same conclusion: It's just not worth the hassle even for the improvement in image quality.
However, I have found that it's absolutely worth it to upgrade to a better microphone. Just about anything is better than the mic built into most computers and better voice quality will give you more presence and make it significantly more enjoyable for others to listen to you. Wearing headphones also helps so that the computer isn't forced to do echo cancelation on the signal.
A decent dynamic mic handles background noise well by design, as opposed to using software to attempt to process the dirty signal coming from a tiny ECM. I can comfortably take a call on my setup while people are talking next to me and with the TV on. If you want to go further there are ENG mics which can handle even noisier environments - think an interview in the middle of Times Square.
A mixer or interface also allows you to monitor the microphone signal in your headphones or speakers. It keeps your tone and volume more consistent and you'll immediately notice if you accidentally back away from the mic (as opposed to the other side complaining they can't hear).
I got a highish quality webcam (the Dell one with no mic, I use airpods) for this reason. It looks MUCH better than a built in webcam, not up to the level of a mirrorless camera, but not that you can really tell on a compressed stream.
Every other day I have someone ask me about my mirrorless setup (I frequently have calls with new people), it is night and day to my expensive waste of a webcam.
This advice goes for... life. Don't switch over from something reliable to a newer/flashier solution until the reliability of a new system gets close-enough that you won't break critical functionality.
Source: Recently swapped over to a better camera, after testing it out in informal meetings and verifying reliable function...
I think the problem is that the people who are prone to do this are also prone to fiddle and over-complicate things. For the last 18 months, I've been using a wild-overkill mirrorless camera through an HDMI->USB adapter dongle thing (not the El Gato, it's one that uses a standard UVC driver so works with Linux with zero fuss). The adapter limits it to 1080p resolution, but that's plenty for webcam work, and all I do to use it is flip the power switch on the camera.
The advantage in my case is huge: I have a bright window to my side (and I refuse to close the curtains and work in the dark) and a white background. My c920 would expose for the average brightness level, and made me look like I was in the witness protection program. With the mirrorless, it has more dynamic range, and also I can set the exposure manually so I always look fine and the background gets a bit blown out.
I agree with people saying that better lighting (I look better when I use the Key Light as a fill light on the opposite side of the window) and a better microphone (Rode USB mic on a boom arm that I keep positioned just under what's visible in-frame -- still close enough to my mouth to get good sound without the "hey, don't forget to like and subscribe" effect) are more important, but doing a better camera is better, too.
Yes, if you are using a camera for the webcam, it should probably be dedicated to it. Mine is a Canon M50, attached into a quick-release shoe into a teleprompter but even then it still two wires (USB and HDMI) and I also have to take out the AC power adapter to use the camera on its own.
I'm using mine all the time (I do corporate training and haven't done in-person since March 2020), so it sits in the mount. I also know the correct combination of rain/blow-into-the-Nintendo dances to get OBS and other software to work with it.
My setup is:
Older Nikon D71000 DSLR here with 17-55mm on wall-mount
Elgato Cam 4k dongle mentioned in the article
two good lights with nice diffusers to the left and right of my monitor facing the wall, for reflected light
HyperX glowy red mike with physical mute, love that thing
This gear works 100% of the time, all the time, in Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Webex, you name it.
Bootup is definitely does some things, turning on two lights, camera on/off switch, and a small button on back of it to shift to the 1080p output. But at this point it is just seconds, muscle memory.
I get a lot of compliments on quality, clearness, and the natural optical effect of out of focus blurred background.
And I definitely notice other people's poor lightning, bad quality picture, artifacting of cheapo webcams or got forbid native built in laptop cameras.
>He also had a tendency to drop out of long meetings when his camera overheated,
Also make sure your digital SLR or whatever expensive camera you're using as a webcam doesn't have a 30m video limit, which some do. This is one of the most recommended pieces of advice on /r/videoediting (non-professional) for new streamers.
For most people, if you want better video quality for Zoom meetings or teaching Yoga online or similar, then a relatively recent smartphone camera + better lighting and microphone is more than sufficient.
Some cameras still turn off the video mode, it has been patched out in some nikon and Canon models as it's just a firmware limitation stemming from the same tax reason.
The video limit isn't related to recording but thermals. Often they just have an in built timer to turn off video at the point they tested the camera to be getting too hot.
That sounds unfortunate. After a few kinks at the beginning, I've moved to using my nikon z6 as webcam. The first kink was power delivery, I found a plug that goes into the battery slot.
Amen. Can confirm this 100% - I just spent the past two years doing robust physical tech product presentations with multi-cam setups and many different video streaming configurations. It always takes quite a bit of effort to set up and something doesn’t work right randomly all-the-fucking-time.
I don't even know why anyone in your meetings needs to see each other's faces. I've been working remote for a year and eventually everyone just turned off their cams. I'm one of three out of a dozen plus that even has an avatar.
I just used my iPhone's rear camera as a webcam. Works surprisingly well, and had even less issues than trying to use my mirrorless Fuji cameras. Quality is substantially better than my built-in webcam, but about the same in a compressed stream as the mirrorless really.
Agree! It took time to learn how to do this effectively while remaining mobile/nomadic, and it forced me to decide what meetings are worth it which ones aren’t. For all of the gear I have (as a filmmaker…) I fall back to using an iPad quite a bit on the road.
I think it's also important to highlight commercial USB webcams, like the Logitech 922. They are kinda expensive but still cheaper than a DSLR and will get you all of the low hanging fruits over webcam quality. DSLR would get you benefit on top of that but arguably, given that 720p is the common webcam resolution, you wouldn't be missing out on much. Except maybe features like improved focus and depth of field effects.
Are you mandating video in meetings? Why would he need to drop when he can just turn off the camera? This seems more like a human problem than a technology problem.
And if you don't go that route, please make sure to turn off your camera.
From what I've seen people being late is more often a problem of the people and not the hardware.
And if after three years of remote work, you weren't capable of getting a working microphone, camera and stable internet connection, I'd con that as a people problem, too. Working meaning you can actually hear the other person and not only their fan.
Honestly the video adds pretty much nothing to a Zoom meeting. You're better off without it. Maybe it's different for managers/executives but for engineers it's more of a distraction.
People built Linux over email. Having audio meetings is more than enough.
We've had a few video meetings at the beginning of this whole plage situation, but after a few weeks, cameras were left turned on just for the initial "hi!"s and "hello!"s, and after that, everyone turned their camera off, because everyboy was watching the shared screen, and probably because noone was wearing pants anymore. Now, we don't even turn them on in the first place.
Even for streamers, audio is _much_ more important than video. You can have a potato webcam and get by, but if your audio sounds like crap nobody is going to stick around at all.
Unless one of the participants has some degree of hard-of-hearing, in which case, being able to see the other person's lip movements is really helpful.
I'd be shocked if that really came through with the jitter/compression/etc. IMO Email is king for accessibility, I wish people didn't hate on it so much.
Lots of these tools do real time closed-caption now anyway.
I love email, but not everyone does well with it. There is no tone or body language with email, you have to read into it and if you don't know what you're looking at or who you're talking with, you have to evaluate all sorts of potentially negative scenarios. Is this person a poor communicator? Are they speaking with a guarded tone because they're covering up? Are they cc:ing and bcc:ing because they're looking to burn me or protect themselves from something? etc. Emails are saved for years and resurface. They are also shared with other people and you may or may not know.
Some people write long emails like reports, other people write very short emails. There is no standard.
The real-time closed captions are gratefully appreciated and much needed from an accessibility standpoint, but they're not perfect. More technical words, accents, etc. all cause difficulties.
If the bandwidth is good and ping time low, video conferencing works very well. You can see and hear when the audio matches the lip movements. It's awful when the audio is not in sync with the video.
We had to ask one employee to go back to his reliable built-in webcam because every other meeting started with 2 minutes of him getting his camera turned on, messing with audio inputs, getting his microphone boom in place, and fighting other quirks. He also had a tendency to drop out of long meetings when his camera overheated, at which point it was another 1-2 minutes of messing around with the camera setup.
If you're going to do this, it must be reliable and ready to go before meetings. Don't be the person fighting with expensive equipment all the time just to get a marginally better image for your highly compressed Zoom video stream. This isn't a Twitch stream. We just want to talk and get down to business.