Guide: Getting Better Video Calls
Well 2020 introduced a lot of people to the concept of working remotely and with that, the growing pains of transitioning a workforce to collaborating remotely. Those of us that have done conference calls in the past know the pain this brings. After putting together Skype Station (read about it here), I wanted to learn how to take advantage of the fancy equipment we have and make sure that we weren’t contributing to the bad call-experience for others. Looking past some of the more amusing gaffs, every call seems to have one (or more!) of:"
Users not using headphones, earbuds, a headset or anything to prevent feedback
Sadly, many times, this is the user who doesn’t mute themselves when not speaking
Has the camera aimed up their nostrils or down at the top of their head
They have a bright window at their back which throws off the exposure entirely
Or has strong overhead lights on so their face is covered in shadow
They sound like they are in a glass coffin or are surrounded by pots and pans
Let me say I’m not an expert at any of this - but YouTube and the Internet at large has been a thing for some time now and it’s not hard to learn. What may be surprising is just how accessible it is to improve your video-call game.
Quick Links
Starting Point
We have to start somewhere so just to get started, let’s assume your current video-call setup comprises of:
A regular laptop with a built in webcam, microphone and speakers
A generic meeting room or kitchen
I will also assume that everyone has earbuds or headphones of some sort available to them. So far, this is a pretty accessible bar; when we talk about webcams, I’ll assume those setups start with a generic 1080P webcam that sits on top of the display.
For all of the audio samples on this page, I use:
Audacity: 44.1 Stereo, 32-bit float
Normalized to -6 dB
To post the audio samples here, I encoded them all to MP3 (-m j -V 2 -q 0 -lowpass 18.5 --vbr-new -b 32)
Audio is King
At first I found this to be a weird one to wrap my head around: that audio would be the most important component of a video-call. But it’s no joke: it doesn’t matter if you’re setting up for a company-wide conference call, streaming a game, a quick call with friends and family, a sales pitch to a potential customer or even a local recording locally - if you have bad audio, it’s all for naught. Just think of all the times you’ve clicked on a video clip which had terrible audio and you just noped right out of there.
Your guests/audience will forgive bad video - they won’t forgive bad audio.
What might be worse is when audio is just a little bit off; this happens often when users have ‘a good mic’ but failed to spend the time to set it up or use it correctly. Slightly-off audio is particularly bad on professional calls (think sales or support & training type calls) - subconsciously your audience is going to be trying to figure out why the call sounds off. Listening to this for any extended duration is not only exhausting but it means they aren’t focusing on your message.
Thankfully, it’s easy to improve your audio without spending too much time, effort or money.
What is good audio?
I’m not an audio engineer, nor am I a vocalist or someone who speaks for a living (thank god!); in short, I likely have a mediocre voice and ears. With that out of the way (and we have to start somewhere), let me propose the following as ‘good audio’.
How to check your audio?
As tempting as it might be, don’t rely on the built-in ‘test call’ functionality of conference apps. They are designed for quick ‘does it work’ testing; when you use them you are potentially introduce three variables:
The test call audio is handled differently than normal calls — compare this Skype Test call sample which was recorded using the same equipment as above. You can hear the prompt-voice sounds great, but my sample recording sounds extremely muddy.
Network load — if, at the exact moment of your test, your network has a slow-down? The app may overly compress your audio reducing the quality
If you use multiple applications (Skype, Zoom, Teams, Meet etc.), they may each use a different compression scheme (or adapt to changing network conditions differently) - you might sound okay on Zoom at 1PM but you sound horrible on Teams at 2PM.
To test your audio, you’ll want to capture your audio as best as it sounds locally; this way you can compare apples to apples and when you’re done, you know that the audio you are sending through the call will be as good as possible before being compressed. I use a piece of software called Audacity: it’s free to use and works on almost any computer. There are tutorials for getting Audacity setup but for my quick testing I do five things:
Select the input device (the microphone)
Select stereo (shouldn’t matter but might as well)
Select your output device: speakers or headphones etc. Since every pair of headphones/speakers sound different, remember to use the same device to play back!
Record and (optional) Normalize
See how it sounds! and (optional) Export it (so you can compare later)
Improving your audio for free
There are two things you can do to substantially improve your audio - for free!
If you’re not wearing a headset, headphones or earbuds, stop being an acoustic pain in the ear for everyone and put them on. Wearing headphones keeps the audio from the call from feeding back into the microphone causing a feedback loop. It should go without saying that you should be muting yourself when not actively speaking as well.
Every room will sound different. Simply changing the room you’re taking a call in can have a drastic effect on how you sound!
Spoiler: If your room has a lot of hard surfaces — bare walls, hardwood floors, hard ceiling, lots of glass windows and/or hard desks, then it’s a bad room! You can can do a quick ‘clap-test’ to check if a room is going to be terrible: clap sharply and if you can hear the clap echoing or reverberating then move on to the next room - that room is going to sound terrible.
I recorded some samples using the same built-in webcam mic in different rooms - some rooms are quite bad. All of these recordings roughly represent ideal conditions: I’ve controlled for the background room noise and I’m keeping my mouth about 6” from the microphone.
If all of the rooms you have available sound echoey, you’ll need to reduce the hard-surface footprint of the room. You can do this for free by temporarily bringing in things into the room that might soften up the surfaces: a rug, blankets, some canvas prints or even pillows and cushions. Scattered around, these softer materials will greatly help to reduce the amount of echo and bounce present in the room.
Cost effective ways to improve your audio
In simple terms, the most effective way to improve your audio is to get the microphone closer to your mouth. That’s it! We’re all familiar with the night and day difference this makes: just think of the difference between someone talking on the phone normally and then switching over to speakerphone! This is why microphones built into webcams, meeting room conference-call phones or multi-user puck microphones never sound good — they’re simply too far from your mouth. A difference of one foot can result in some noticeable changes (again, this is a ‘best case scenario’ recording)
With built-in/webcam mics, when you are close enough for decent audio, you’re usually too close for the webcam to focus or frame you properly! The most cost effective way to address this is to get a lav(alier) or lapel mic. A lav mic typically clips onto your collar or shirt and gets the microphone much closer to your mouth. This has three major benefits:
Being closer to your mouth, the overwhelming majority of what the mic pics up will be you (less background noise, less echo)
If you happen to look or turn away, your audio quality will remain the same
Even a stupid-cheap lav mic will give you a night and day improvement over the built in microphone.
Obviously the sky’s the limit if you want to throw money at it or if you have a specific needs, i.e.:
You want the mic to appear in the shot and it needs to fit an aesthetic
You need to capture audio without going through the fuss of wiring up each time
You specifically need to be wireless
You need to record multiple users
Remember: getting a more expensive or ‘better’ mic does not mean your audio will sound better. If you’re in an echoey room or you’re not speaking into the microphone (poor microphone technique), then all that fancier microphone is going to do is amplify the bad.
Improving audio in post
Our Skype Station is in a spare bedroom — hardwood floor, hard walls, hard closet, hard ceiling - an echoey mess. Getting a ‘fancier’ mic just means I more cleanly pick up the nasty sounding room. To get value out of that nicer mic, work needs to be done in post (between the microphone and the video call).
[I’m not even remotely an expert on audio] In OBS I have the following actions on my audio chain (breakdown here):
Noise Gate
Noise Suppression
Compressor
EQ
Limiter
All of these filters are either included with OBS or are free; all it takes is a little bit of practice and experimentation (remember to use the same speaker/headphones when testing audio so you’re not introducing another variable!). With my specific room and audio filters, we can see a very drastic improvement.
Lighting makes or breaks video
Avoiding the two most common mistakes
Thankfully, making the best of your video is much less involved. For the basics, there are only two things to avoid.
Don’t have a bright window at your back! Having a window at your back puts you at risk of having the background blown out and the subject - you! - being underexposed and dark. More advanced cameras will handle this better but ideally, you’ll want to avoid having a window at your back if possible.
Don’t rely on ceiling/room lights. Of the two gotchas, this one is much more forgiving: when you have overhead lights, your eyes will be shrouded in shadow.
Here are some samples of both gotchas when running on a webcam, a smartphone and a full-sized camera.
Soft vs Hard light
The hardness/softness of a light is determined by the type of shadows that are created. The three properties that will make a light softer are:
Bigger lights are softer. A bigger light has more opportunity for light to diffuse, or scatter in different directions
Being closer to the subject. (Factoid: even though the sun is super bright and super big, it’s also super far away, making it a harsh light)
Being more diffused. Diffused light is light that is scattered evenly by the time it reaches the subject - while the sun in a clear sky is extremely harsh light, if it’s cloudy, by the time the light makes it through the clouds, it’s very diffused and extremely soft.
You can see here, the night and day difference between a hard light and a soft light.
The five elements of a properly lit scene
To take lighting to the next level, we only need five things. Note that you don’t need all of these items nor do you need to buy “photographer” or “cinematic” grade equipment - a floor lamp with some high CRI bulbs which you can get at Walmart is a great place to start.
A key light. A key light is just a fancy way of saying the primary light responsible for lighting up a subject. If you only have one light, this can be placed centered with the subject. If you have some kind of fill light, this can be off to the side.
A fill light. A key light will make shadows on a person’s features (i.e., nose, chin) and a fill light will dampen those shadows down a touch. Note that a fill light doesn’t even have to be a real light — you can use a large piece of white craft board to bounce the key light onto the other side of the subject’s light. If you have a window that isn’t beaming light directly at a person’s face, the window could be a fill light. If you’re using an actual light, you can play around with the brightness of the key and fill light to change the mood.
A hair (or shoulder) light. This is a subtle light that you place behind and off to the side of the subject and adds a tiny bit of light to their shoulder or hair - this little bit of edge lighting keeps the subject from blending into the background.
A background light. This is another subtle light that you place behind you and gives the background a bit of light (or color). The purpose of this is to separate the subject from the background and give the entire shot some depth.
A background. This doesn’t need to be something bought but could literally be a bookcase or shelf of doodads. Plain colored background are boring and sterile so this is an opportunity to spruce up the background a bit.
5 Elements of Lighting
Key light. Here, the light is on the subject’s left — as evidenced by the shadow on the nose and cheek
Fill light. We have a fill light on the subject’s right filling in what would otherwise, be a dark cheek
Hair light. I set this to a yellow tone to make it stand out, this separates the user from the background.
Background light. Another RGB bulb, just to give some color and provide a bit of interest to the background.
Background. Here we have a backdrop, but some green paper and a virtual background would work as well, or pulling a bookshelf into the frame.
The above example shot was taken at night and with only the mentioned four lights.
Camera placement is important too!
In our ‘starting point’, I assumed that the common video-call platform was a laptop with a webcam built in or possibly, a standalone webcam clipped onto the monitor. No matter what your camera setup is, you’ll want to avoid having the camera too low (something common with built-in webcams) or too high (more common with standalone webcams clipped to monitors). Ideally, the camera would be at or slightly above eye level (looking down).
What about a better camera?
Throughout this entire post, I’ve specifically glossed over the topic of what webcam to get. There are certainly milestones at which point it makes sense to make the leap to a better camera but even with a better camera, it’s all for nothing if the audio or the lighting is a disaster. There’s one more element that I’ve not addressed yet and it’s the platform you are making a call on.
Supported Resolutions, by Platform
It’s exceptionally frustrating that the information for Zoom and Teams/Skype (the two big players) is nearly impossible to find or is presented in such a silly manner, it might as well be obfuscated. Below is what I’ve been able to ascertain to be the maximal video quality. [Last updated 2020-02-21]
Google Meet: 720p / 720p (Send/Receive)
Cisco Webex: 720p / 720p (Send/Receive)
1:1 call, from what I can tell, this is 360p/360p video
Group Calls: 720p/720p (Send/Receive) or better, depending on what paid plan you have… but currently unavailable
Worth noting: screen sharing is supposedly uncapped (if you can pipe a virtual camera to the screen share)
1:1 calls, 1080p/1080p (Send/Receive)
Group Calls: 540p/540p (Send/Receive)
Worth noting: screen sharing is uncapped (if you can pipe a virtual camera to the screen share)
Camera milestones!
Assuming that lighting and audio are accounted for, I would say there are four tiers:
A cheap ‘anything better than the built-in one’ webcam - an ultra cheap webcam can be a bit of a hit and miss game requiring a few test purchases to see if you got a model that works for you.
A Logitech C920 or similar - if you don’t want to spend the time or money on trial-and-error with knockoff webcams, this will get you a good baseline experience
Just using a smartphone - this can get you some spectacular image quality with a device you already have. If you’re directly connecting to a call with a phone, you’ll want to make sure you have power and some form of getting better audio in and out of the call. There are even options for iPhone and Android phones to be used as webcams on a computer.
Varying degrees of using a dedicated camera connected either via USB or through a capture card. This is a super open ended bracket - anything from an older GoPro with HDMI output to a DSLR that can be used as a webcam via USB to a dedicated mirrorless camera connected to a USB capture device.
This topic tends to be nebulous and light on details just because there are so many potential options out there and what works for one person doesn’t work for another.
Bringing it all together!
At a very high level:
Get the audio and video connected to the computer. This will vary based on the equipment:
Using a built-in webcam and mic requires no work
Using a USB webcam or microphone should be straightforward
If you’re using a capture device via HDMI, you’ll want to ensure you have a clean HDMI signal - steps to check this will vary based on your equipment
Install some of streaming software such as OBS. You’ll also want to install a virtual camera plugin and a virtual audio cable. We’ll need these later.
Use the Video Capture Device to get OBS to read your video signal
If you are using a microphone routed through the camera, you may not need to do any additional work depending on your capture card. Use Audio Input Capture to get OBS to read the audio signal
Do any post work on your audio and video sources
For audio, I talk about this earlier
For a video, in many cases a good starting point will to use a LUT.
Prepare the outputs
For the audio
We want to mute or disable all the devices that we aren’t outputting
For the audio source(s) we do want to treat as our ‘microphone’, navigate to Advanced Audio Properties and set Audio Monitoring to one of the ON states
The last step is to go OBS settings —> Audio —> Advanced and set the Monitoring Device to the virtual cable.
For the video
Just check the menu Tools —> VirtualCam that the service is running (you can set to automatic if you prefer)
Configure your conference application
In your conference app of choice, set the webcam to VirtualCam and set the Microphone to the Virtual Audio Cable. Set the output to whatever headphone output you have
In a future post, I’ll go through more thoroughly.
At a high level, what we ultimately want to do is “get audio and video into a computer, do some cleanup and use that as our audio and video for a web-call”.
Related
Every video-call (or streaming) setup is a bit different. I learned a lot about setting up the lights, audio and video equipment when building Skype Station. Click through to see what all went into Skype Station.
