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! :)
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 :)
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.
[1] 'Make entry level webcam better' - https://needgap.com/problems/185-make-entry-level-webcam-bet... (Disclosure: I run this problem validation forum)
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.
https://www.logitech.com/en-us/video-collaboration/software/...
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/logitech/comments/nw17w1/brio_cam_w...
Edited to add: Meant Narrow DOF when writing this, but both are true if you sit close to it!
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.
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.
On full frame I used 85mm 1.8 to get a a good FOV / DOF / proportions.
But it sat on a tripod 1.5 meters behind my computer and made the room a nightmare to navigate :D
35mm on FF would indeed be mildly wide (just on wide side of "normal" 50mm lens)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
Same way how you get a lot from talking face to face vs talking on the phone.
Why would my coworkers need to see the individual pores on my nose anyways?
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
These pathways are the same. You're decidedly not getting raw video out of (most) consumer cameras via HDMI.
I've since started recording some of my courses directly from OBS. [0] The framerate probably suffers, but I've never had thermal/overheating issues.
0 - https://store.metasnake.com/view/courses/a1a19c9e-af18-4615-...
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.
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 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).
It's fairly easy to get an audio interface and a xlr microphone. I always appreciate when other people have clean audio.
Source: Recently swapped over to a better camera, after testing it out in informal meetings and verifying reliable function...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/VideoEditing/
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.
After that everything works flawlessly.
Heck, I've had to fight to just get the onboard to function, particularly so in MS Teams.
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.
People built Linux over email. Having audio meetings is more than enough.
Lots of these tools do real time closed-caption now anyway.
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.