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.