Tips To Take Your Video Conferencing To The Next Level

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's some tips for bringing your video conferencing to the next level.

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Video conferencing using your Mac is pretty easy. If you have a MacBook or iMac you've got a built-in camera, you've got built-in microphones. You really don't have to do anything extra except turn it on and talk. But if you learn some new techniques and maybe buy a few accessories you can improve the quality of your video for video conferencing quite a bit.

First, the most important thing in video conferencing isn't actually video, it's audio. People need to be able to hear your voice clearly. Now the microphones that come on a MacBook or an iMac are actually pretty good. But you can do better. If you get an external mic you can improve the audio qualities significantly. Now if you want to go right to the top end you can get something like the AT2020 USB. This microphone can sit on your desk or you can get something like a scissor arm so that you could bring it close to you when you're doing a video conference call but maybe just outside of the video frame and then push it away when you're not using it. This also helps reduce the sound of key taps if you're typing on the keyboard. The advantage of a microphone like this is excellent quality. It's going to pickup your voice really well. But the disadvantage is it stays in one place. So if you move your head or talk down or to the side then they're not going to be able to hear you as well because you're speaking to a different point rather than where the microphone is. So it's important to get the microphone as close as you can to your mouth. I see a lot of people that get a really nice expensive microphone but then just put it too far away for it to be of any real use. 

Now another option is to get a headset like this. The advantage of a headset is the microphone stays at the same position relative to your mouth. So as you move you head it's still going to pickup your voice the same no matter where you are facing. But the disadvantage is people see you wearing it. A decent alternative a lot of people are using now is to use the AirPods you may already have. Take one of these, there's a microphone in them of course, and use it as a headset. The quality won't be as good as a real headset but at least the microphone is staying in the same position relative to your mouth and it's pretty close to your mouth. 

How about the camera? The camera built into MacBooks and the iMac is fine. But you can do better with that as well. You can get an external camera like the LogitechBRIO which is a much higher quality camera. It plugs into any Mac via USB and then you can use it for any video conferencing. Plus you can reposition it. So, for instance, you can put it at eye level up higher than the top of your MacBook. Now if you want to go beyond that you can get something like the Cam Link 4K which is a device you could use to take any HDMI video output and use that as a webcam. So, you could take a regular camera, like a mirrorless or dslr camera, as long as it has clean hdmi output, and you could pipe that through the Cam Link 4K and into your Mac as a webcam. Now you're using a real camera with real lenses. You can check the website for a list of cameras they've tested with it. You may already have one of those. So it's just a matter of getting the Cam Link 4K to make this all work.

Now how about lighting? Ideally you want to have lighting in front of you hitting your face. A lot of times that's where the room lighting is. It's up above or off to the side. If you've got lighting off to one side get a desk lamp or something and place it on the opposite side of your face so you light up both sides of your face. Or you can get two desk lamps or two inexpensive kind of studio lights to put in front of you on either side to give you more illumination. A lot of people say the light from a window is best but typically we have the window on one side of us or the other so just using that casts quite a shadow. 

The next thing is your background. Of course if you want to use what's actually behind you as a background you want to keep it simple and not distracting. But another option is to use a green screen. An app like Zoom will cutout whatever background you've got behind you but there's also an option in Zoom to use a green screen. So you put a green screen behind you. You tell Zoom you're using a green screen and now it looks a lot better. But if you're going to do this and you're going to put another background behind you don't make the mistake of making that a distracting background. Make it something plain and simple. Even a solid color is a good choice and maybe the most professional thing to use in a lot of cases. Here's green screen that you can get for $40. It's really easy to setup. Pretty easy to put away and you can just leave it against the wall or hang it or you can get just about any green fabric and hang it on the wall behind you.

Now how about some camera tips? The biggest mistake I see a lot of people making is they don't look at the camera when they are talking. They'll look down at the screen because that's where they see the people they are talking to. You want to practice talking to the camera because when you talk to the camera you're talking directly to the other people. But a lot of times you want to look directly at the camera even when you're not talking. Otherwise everybody just sees you looking down. One trick you can use to mitigate this a bit is to bring the window of the video conferencing app up to the top middle part of your screen so at least you're looking down only a little bit instead of a lot. If you're using a MacBook a lot of times the camera is going to be well below eye level. You should raise the MacBook up either using a stand or a stack of books or something just so it's perfectly at eye level. Also a lot of times I see people sitting too far away. Even this is a little too far away for some video conference calls. When you're watching a video of me you're usually watching it taking up a lot of your screen. But on a video conference call you may be in a tiny little box. So you want to fill the video frame with as much of your face as you can. Next time you're on a big video conference call look at the various distances you'll see people from the camera. You'll see some people close, some people far away. Which one looks better?

Another aspect of video conferencing is sharing your screen. If you're going to share your screen you also want to think about professionalism. Turn on Do Not Disturb certainly so people don't see notifications popup on your screen. There's a great option to turn Do Not Disturb on for one hour which is usually the length of many video calls. This way you don't have to remember to turn Do Not Disturb off at the end of the call. But also clean up your desktop. Even if you didn't plan to show your desktop, you just want to show a presentation, you may end up accidentally showing it. You don't want to see it cluttered with drives and files. You can turn off desktop items in Finder Preferences but also keep a clean desktop. I think it's a good enough reason just to be neat and organized to put all your documents in the Documents folder, not on your desktop. But video conferencing adds yet another reason to keep a perfectly clean desktop. 

Don't have a complex desktop background. Having a pretty desktop background does serve a purpose when it's us working alone on our computers. We like having variety and having something interesting to look at on the desktop background. But you don't want that distraction for other people when they're trying to pay attention to what you're showing them. So instead of using a picture or illustration or any of the regular desktop backgrounds you may normally use think about using something like a solid color or gradient. 

My final tip is about the Mute button. Learn to use the Mute button and mute yourself whenever you're not talking. You may have some ambient sound in the room or the environment around you that you hardly notice. But take that and add that to everybody else's ambient sounds and you might have a noisy conference call. If everybody uses Mute and only unmutes themselves when it's their turn to talk things will be a lot clearer for all. Some apps, like Zoom, even have Push to Talk functionality where you can set it so use something like the spacebar, push and hold that and you can talk, release and now you are on mute again. Learn to use that if you can.

So, I hope you found these tips for video conferencing useful. As we have all been using video conferencing a lot over the last year if you have any tips or tricks you would like to share leave them in the Comments below.