A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit | Hacker News Reader

A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit

spandex.substack.com

201 pointsdarimo126 comments

I expected to read about studio setups for live-streaming, e.g. on twitch. There are some musicians on twitch that have really awesome setups where one can discover so much visual detail while listening. I would have loved to read about some of those, perhaps even with a bit of advice how to build my own.

Instead I got a luke-warm analogy of business attire and videoconferencing backgrounds. Mildly disappointing.

Given that the analysis seems far removed from mainstream livestreaming, I'd say very disappointing.

The point of the article is not "how to do it", but rather to observe that this kind of thing, previously a (relatively) niche concern, has become important to a general audience. The article even suggests that there's a business opportunity for fashion businesses to create tailored videoconferencing spaces, which is predicated on the notion that most people lack the time or inclination to set up their own bespoke setup (including lighting, cameras, audio, and so on).

The takeaway is meant to be that videoconferencing has reached a point of cultural importance where it has become hard to take a public figure seriously if they have a poor setup, in much the same way that it would be hard to take a poorly-dressed person seriously. Much as people experiment with clothing as a means of signalling status and personality, one's videoconferencing setup becomes a new way of signalling these things. It's all fairly obvious, but it's still not something that I have spent much time thinking about, and a how-to guide would probably not prompt me to think about the social and cultural aspects nearly so much.

Eloquent summary and analysis, thank you!

I was an organizer for a major ACM conference last year, and I really struggled with my home video streaming setup. A lot of equipment was sold out last year. I followed the recommendation of some YouTubers and realized that this is not as simple as it seems. Despite realizing the importance of a live stream setup and investing in it, I'm pretty unhappy with the results. Thankfully we are out of the worst of the pandemic .. but I agree that a good home streaming setup will be important going forward.

Edit: one thing I never figured out how to solve was removing glare on my glasses (either monitor glare or from key lights). Best investment was an external microphone and a few items mounted on the wall behind me (which used to be bare).

For the glasses glare I found a few things that help:

    - Turn down display brightness
    - Dark mode everywhere possible
    - Block direct sunlight (blinds/curtains or rotate desk)
    - Illuminate the rest of your face to reduce the contrast from glasses

If you use a terminal for most things, including notes, one thing that helps a lot is to use a semi-transparent black background and position the terminal window over the meeting display.

>Block direct sunlight

Yeah, I don't bother day to day but, if I'm recording video, I have a couple different pieces of fabric that I can use to control the light coming in the windows--which also have shades--depending upon how sunny it is outside.

I wonder if using a polarizing filter over your webcam would reduce the glare from your glasses. Polarizing sunglasses very effectively reduce glare on water, as well as car windshields.

Yes this works. I use a polarising filter on a DSLR for a web cam and it makes my lenses invisible to the viewer... No reflection whatsoever.

For glasses glare you can use soft lights (large, non directional lights, like lamps with large shades or harder lights bounced off of a white wall) on each side of your face, much more to the left and right than normal - almost perpendicular to your nose, just slightly in front of your face. It's a nontraditional setup.

For glasses glare a couple of things: First, a circular polarizing filter can help. Second "key lights" don't have to just be your monitor. You can dark mode the monitor you have in line with camera and leave it at low brightness, then bring in the primary lighting from the side (another monitor, or a cheap/home-made soft box would work - a diffuse desk lamp may serve well, or a strong harsher light bounced off a white wall ). You can't stop light reflecting off your glasses, but you can make sure most of it doesn't bounce into your camera.

Not if you go very directional on the light you may need something to fill from the other side so you don't get strong shadows. One source should be ok if you only give enough angle to loose the reflection.

Over a year ago now I had commented that it's funny watching the TV networks struggle to figure out what teenagers on TikTok had dialed in: Their streaming setups.

I imagined that the broadcasters, when they had to switch to remote, had video and audio engineers you could put together a kit for their stars. But for a while it seemed like so many were "You have a laptop with a camera and mic Good to go!"

My FIL does TV debates in India, and his setup is to skyoe/zoom/meet into their station.

He's using an iPad mini to run all the apps tbh, and it works fine more or less.

> in much the same way that it would be hard to take a poorly-dressed person seriously

The sooner we can get over this obsession with people dressed "nicely" and instead listen to people who know what they are talking about, the better.

Any monkey can wear a jacket and tie. I hate that society automatically elevates well dressed people the way it does. To me it only signals that they have money.

You may be surprised to realize that you’re the one being superficial here in equating style with money. Dressing well does not require money - what it signals is a form of sophistication or good taste in the case of high fashion, or tidyness and well-being for casual clothing. Millions of people dress nicely from Primark/C&A alone, and even fashion students get going on tight budgets sourcing second hand items.

Much like keeping your hair looking good, trimming your nose hair and so on, these signals will never be completely ignored unless social norms for personal care change significantly - and that’s not happening without a significant cultural / economic / health shift.

> what it signals is a form of sophistication or good taste in the case of high fashion, or tidyness and well-being for casual clothing.

Caring about sophistication or good taste in fashion is a luxury that it takes money to afford. Even just the time investment it requires to be fashionable, to source nice clothes and plan outfits and all of that shit, it's absolutely the domain of people who have money.

I don't think you've ever been poor. Poor enough that "second hand" doesn't mean thrift stores, it means "hand-me-downs".

You have moved the goalposts.

> I don't think you've ever been poor.

You shouldn’t jump to conclusions - there are many people on hn from other countries where having access to a thrift store defines you as relatively wealthy.

Either way, if you look like a hobo on your livestream setup, then people are likely to judge you.

I wish the world was less judgemental, but you don’t get to tell others how to be, so you have to live with how they act, and sometimes that means playing dress up. Sometimes it is a sign of respect for other people’s opinions - some people really care about how you dress and that is OK.

Edit: also if you are obviously needy, then are you sure you can’t find thrift stores that will give you stuff for free? The best stores are run by volunteers who just want to help people.

> some people really care about how you dress and that is OK

Extremely disagree. That is them trying to exert a form of control on me and it's absolutely bullshit.

So's... like, everything in society, really. Capitalism itself comes readily to mind, as an extreme form of soft social control that's actually not all that soft at all, in aggregate.

In the case of clothing, marking willful non-conformists is, notably, a significant part of its true (as in: accurate and useful) signaling value. This is where some counter-cultural fashions come from, in fact—an effort to make it crystal clear that one is dressing contrary to fashion norms on purpose and not by accident. To signal a distinction between the non-conformist and the ignorant or destitute.

The existence of society is a form of control on you. That's almost the entire point of society; standardized expectations and norms meant to maintain order.

You presuming to tell other people how they should think, according to your worldview, is also “bullshit”.

Accepting how other people have other opinions, rightly or wrongly, is just part of being a participant in this world.

If you interact with others as you are doing here, then perhaps you need to learn some wisdom.

Note that I agree that judging others by how they dress is bullshit + I have always hated it myself. I would also hazard a guess that you judge others for how they dress e.g. I expect you don’t like power dressers, or extremely fashionably dressed people.

You invest your time into your appearance so other people won't need to waste their time trying to determine if you're trustworthy. Appearance is a heuristic. Raging about it is counter-productive.

It signals that they have money... and/or high conscientiousness—you can fake that with enough money, to e.g. pay for someone to entirely take care of having your clothes clean and ready on-time and waiting right where you need them, of course, but for anyone other than the "employ multiple full-time people as 'help'"-rich, fine clothes require more care and attention from the wearer than a hoodie and jeans.

Wearing fine clothes that fit well, and not looking uncomfortable in them, also signals that effort (not just money—though, again, at the higher end of the scale, as with everything else, money can replace effort) was put into finding that good fit, and that one puts in the extra work to dress well often enough to feel at-ease being so dressed.

It signals awareness that people treat the well-dressed better than the poorly-dressed, and both willingness and ability to follow through on that knowledge.

Then, of course, yes, clothes signal group membership. So do $120 hoodies and $400 Scandanavian high-performance light outdoor jackets and $90 hiking pants and $150 selvedge high-weight jeans and $350 impractical, throwback work boots, and shit, those aren't even the expensive side of tech-nerd signal-wear. Of course the people buying those are doing it because the items are "high quality", not to fit in with and signal among their peers. Clearly.

> Wearing fine clothes that fit well, and not looking uncomfortable in them, also signals that effort (not just money..)

Having the time to put in that effort requires some amount of money. To afford to have someone take care of the kids for a bit, or to pay someone to work on your car on the weekend instead of fixing it yourself.

It takes money to have the free time so you can spend the time clothes shopping instead of doing life maintenance.

Yes—as with everything else one may wish to do, it's easier to dress well the more money you have, and it's very hard for single parents with two jobs to do it (again, like everything else). That's true.

Yes. So placing higher value on people based on how they dress is a garbage practice used to profile people with poorer backgrounds and limit their social mobility, keep them out of better jobs, keep them out of upwardly mobile roles like management.

It's "learn to play the fashion game or get fucked"

We would be so much better off without that crap.

Sure, but we the same applies to any other skill or practice. Like learning to program. Or bathing. Or showing up to work on time (a much, much bigger problem than, say, not owning a suit, for the actually-poor—ask them, or their employers, and you'll get an earful).

In the case of management, specifically, I'd think if someone's reached the point where they have a realistic shot at a management position, but haven't figured out they need to dress for it, and also found the time & willpower to do so, that's signaling working as intended. Any of several causes for that would be a good reason to think twice about putting that person in management. Meanwhile, anyone who cares can dress plenty well enough to start in a lower-level management position by hitting Goodwill or eBay and dropping low-hundreds of dollars, which isn't nothing (I'm aware—I'm familiar with tracking the costs of groceries while shopping to make sure you won't overdraft, or only getting 5 gallons of gas because you can't afford more until next week, et c.), but that's a pretty damn low admissions price compared to, IDK, college, which is usually also required to take the easy route to management.

There's a pretty big gap between middle-management dressy, and having enough bespoke suits to wear a different one every weekday and switch them out seasonally. The former's not exactly a high bar, compared to all kinds of other costs and time-sinks that are associated with being employable. Once you're "in" then yeah, maybe costs increase somewhat if you want to improve your chances of both being effective and moving up, but at that point you're... in management, so that shouldn't be some kind of huge hurdle anymore.

> In the case of management, specifically, I'd think if someone's reached the point where they have a realistic shot at a management position, but haven't figured out they need to dress for it, and also found the time & willpower to do so, that's signaling working as intended

It's signalling working as intended from the perspective of people who think they can tell everything they need to know about someone by how they dress.

And they're wrong. Every single one of them.

It allows a certain group to continue favoring their own group, or force people to conform to their group before being considered.

How you dress says nothing concrete about your ability to function as a human, as a worker, or a manager of people.

It is just another aspect of how attractive people get preference in society. We have to shed this eventually.

> It's signalling working as intended from the perspective of people who think they can tell everything they need to know about someone by how they dress.

Everything? No. It's a somewhat noisy signal. It is a signal, though, and absolutely does carry useful information. For instance, the poorly-dressed are one of, or some combination of: poor; ignorant of fashion; aware of fashion, but nonetheless not putting effort into it despite knowing its benefits; or are deliberately choosing not to dress well. The well-dressed are one of, or some combination of, the opposites of those. Clearly, then, you can tell some things about people from how they dress, or at least narrow down the possibilities.

Someone choosing to communicate deliberately over that signaling channel, or deliberately trying not to is, itself, information, as is someone trying to but missing their intended message, or someone plainly not understanding that it's a method of communication, or communicating with a message tuned for the wrong audience. This is how you end up with things like computer-nerd "uniforms"—they must make it clear they're trying to be non-conformist, as that's the signal they want to send, distinct from "I'm very poor", "my background is, in fact, low-class, and so my attitudes continue to follow", or "I don't know how to dress well even if I wanted to".

Every time you correctly identify a geek from across a room, or out on a trail, or on the street, based solely on how they're dressed and how they carry themselves, that's fashion-as-signal working very well. Does that mean you can so-identify every geek? Of course not. Does that mean there's no information available in fashion? Of course not. Are the geeks who choose to make it very obvious they're a geek sending a signal you're intended to receive? Oh my god, yes. And the ways they choose to make it clear further refine that message.

> Meanwhile, anyone who cares can dress plenty well enough to start in a lower-level management position by hitting Goodwill or eBay and dropping low-hundreds of dollars

Would second Ebay if on a budget, lots of very cheap options compared to what things go for retail. Back when I was in school I bought around 10 designer silk ties for 20$ (retail new for 200$+ each) and a few suit jackets. Knowing your measurements can't be overstated, and only costs a tape measure. Alterations are also very affordable and can make a world of difference.

Clothing, second hand, is pretty much worthless. It also offers a much larger selection compared to just than what is hip today (uhh all black? white cloths forbidden?) which allows you to create your own style for next to nothing. Just ask the article of clothing if its you and listen to what it says.

A guy once pointed around the room and described what 20 people were wearing, where they bought it, what it costs, how fashionable he considered it. I ask him what I was wearing. He said: I have no idea! Its so wrong that it works, its more refined than everything in the room. I cant imagine spending more than 10 euro on the set (shoes aside)

> I cant imagine spending more than 10 euro on the set (shoes aside)

Indeed, for men, shoes are the hardest part to work around on a budget. Cheap looks cheap (and tends to fall apart really fast) and used is rarely actually cheap unless they're so beat up that, at best, you can manage smart-casual out of them. You can save money buying used, but "cheap" is practically unattainable.

The materials (leather, mostly) are just too expensive for actually-cheap men's shoes to be A Thing, at least for mainstream looks which basically all require leather shoes above a very-casual register. Even alternative fashions usually find a way for it to be hard to get away with cheap shoes, it seems (much "street" fashion, for example) usually subbing in expensive casual styles (pricey sneaker, or conspicuous-consumption work or military boot styles) for the oxford or loafer or whatever.

> Any monkey can wear a jacket and tie.

Not really.

Suits are flattering to the male figure because they smooth out the difference between a man's waist and his thighs, and accentuate the shoulders. That's not a fashion statement, that's an explanation of why suits are timeless.

With that said, they're fairly difficult to get fitted right. So wearing a suit that actually fits you says one of two things - you either buy new suits all the time to ensure that your suits actually fit you (in which case, yes, a suit signals that you have money), or you have the self-discipline to maintain your figure so that you don't need to buy a new suit all the time as you gain weight.

The fact is, either quality is desirable. It's those qualities that make suit-wearing the signal that it is. People who don't have at least one of those qualities, can't pull off wearing a suit.

A lot of serious, famous people live in grand, nice houses in older neighborhoods with hopelessly oversubscribed Comcast. The CEO of my Fortune 500 company presented at a remote all-hands at about 0.25 frames/second. Now at that level, maybe you can spend the $10 million it would take to pull fiber to your house. But we’re not taking about buying some prosumer electronics here, we’re talking years of permitting and digging up the street. For mid-tier famous people the only hope they have of getting better upload bandwidth is moving to houses that already have it. That’s a bit more dramatic than going to a clothing store.

I find it shocking that bad uplink in private homes is still a problem in the US. In times where a good proportion of public life happens on the web, most of shopping is done online, and media are dominated by streaming, why do people not run rampant against the lack of a decent wired uplink?

Most of the web works fine with a fast link _to_ your home, so that's what Comcast et al have optimized for. I had to upgrade during Covid to get a decent upload rate. Speedtest says I now have 238Mbps down/12Mbps up. For comparison my office has 100Mbps up and down and has never felt slow for downloads.

It isn't still a problem. Misguided wifi setups certainly are though.

You should avoid connecting to video conferencing via wifi if at all possible

Yeah. People with a spare room can spend thousands of dollars decking out a studio just so. But a lot of that money is pretty much wasted if they have glitchy Internet and there's not much they can do about other than renting a private office that has good Internet (which is probably an OK option for mid-tier famous people if they live near a city or other area with good network infrastructure).

This seems like a sort of roundabout reinvention of the television network. There are already buildings in every population center where famous people go to make their broadcast appearances.

Google I/O 2021: A peek into 3D video chat booth Project Starline

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-gives-peek-into-3d-vide...

You can get enough bandwidth to do a good stream wirelessly.

Any chance you could list some links for the Twitch streams you're referring to? I've been asked to participate in some live streaming sessions for electronic music and I'm not quite sure how not to make it boring, at least from a visual standpoint.

I've toyed with live electronic music streaming setups using OBS Studio (as a kind of video compositor and audio router) paired with VCV rack for visual effects. I'd recommend both as solid tools with many useful surface level features and a ton of useful but optional power user configurability for when you want to go deep on something.

I’d be curious about that as well! One thing I noticed is that the blog posts I’ve seen on streaming setups with dedicated cameras tend to focus on using bits of kit to make something similar to a standard webcam setup—except with better sound, lighting etc. But you can of course experiment way more with how you place yourself in the frame (if you even want to be in the frame!) Instead of frontal, the perspective can be from the sides, the top… Which ties in to what sense of space you want to project… we’re now so accustomed to see a webcam-sized corner of a room, but you could show an entire room, or only a small detail, like a part of an instrument or something… The advantage of playing with framing is that you can do it in advance of the performance, because while live I imagine you will have to focus on the music itself!

With pleasure! Although my main recommendations are "analog" musicians, which is of course is a misnomer since most of the tone generation chain is digital, except for some vibrating strings and vocal cords!

There's ortopilot who is perhaps the best musician I have found on twitch. His studio setup is absolutely stunning, both for its audio quality and the visual appeal.

Another one I've discovered recently is EmmaMcGann whose studio is also visually stunning. Definitely worth a look and listen, too!

I also like SydHeresy although that stream is more focused on repairing digital music gear, with the occasional modular synth live show.

Then there is TheTangerineClub. Absolutely amazing music skills with a decent studio setup.

German-speaking folk might hop over to SvenDorau who has a nice studio, too.

Happy watching! and don't blame me for the hours spent listening to those guys play ;)

Emma McGann Livestreaming home studio walkthrough

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClKZR9x-eyARpIDz1mEEzcg

Check out sarahcoponat for a cinema-quality stream. She improvises flowing cinematic piano, sometimes two hours of two pianos at the same time. She's streaming today, but it's an experimental day with guests so you'll want to check out her VODs, recent YouTubes, or Wednesdays stream.

I was excited to check her out, but it seems like VODs and highlights are limited to subscribers sadly. Clips gave me a good feel for what she's doing and it's a solid setup for sure!

He hasn't streamed in a few months but RAC has a great setup: https://www.twitch.tv/rac

Had no idea they streamed - came across them on Spotify last year. Definitely will be checking this out.

Fantastic Plastics are a husband/wife duo that play Devo-inspired synth pop. It’s not normally my cup of tea, but they’re fun and the production value is great. They’ve got costumes, make extensive use of green-screening, OBS overlays, and interstitial video between songs. It’s silly and fun and they’ve clearly put a ton of work into it.

At least he didn't wander off about spandex.

I've been watching quite a few of those kinds of setups videos on Youtube during the pandemic. I actually setup a small home studio because I've been getting back into music during lockdown (I originally studied music in undergrad before switching to engineering).

It's been fascinating. The mic setups and also the lighting setups that people have put together are great. I've seen some very inexpensive ingenious setups. People spending less than a hundred dollars and some time to put together a better lighting setup than I was seeing my photography friends use 10 years ago. All that with a few shop lights and some carefully folded paper.

Sounds great - if you have the names of some of those youtubers with a low-cost high-quality setup, that would be awesome! ;)

Shameless self plug but I just helped set up this stream: https://www.instagram.com/p/CQRHhSGD_Py/

Visual Synthesizer is what's used to get some of the visual to react to the drum set input via MIDI. Surprisingly easy to setup with a DAW like Ableton: https://www.imaginando.pt/products/vs-visual-synthesizer

I'm happy to answer any questions in the meantime until I write up a blog post about it all.

On the lighting bit... I stumbled across this at Two Minute Papers- a neat bit on relighting a video stream. https://youtu.be/SEsYo9L5lOo

The paper is Total Relighting: Learning to Relight Portraits for Background Replacement from Google Research. It can be found at https://augmentedperception.github.io/total_relighting/

The video from the presenters - https://youtu.be/KeebkkaZhhI

What point is the author trying to make in comparing the two iPhones? There was a setup but no payoff.

It this wasn't on substack I would have guessed someone paid to have this article written on Fiverr.

I also felt like the article hit pretty weak in a lot of places.

In the part where they compare Bill Gates to the Bloomberg anchor, it just says "Her self-presentation is overawed by Gates’ setup." with no clear explanation as to why. And it's not actually clear to me when I look at the pic.

Maybe I just don't have the "technical expertise to understand how colour temperature, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO conspire together to form a beautiful picture".

I suspect they could have found a better example, but Gates was clearly using a camera with a very wide aperture, giving a shallow depth of (focused) field, meaning his background wasn’t distracting. His lighting also had slightly less hot-spotting (you can see she’s using two main lights, but can’t readily ID Gates’ light placement).

Given the disastrous video setups I’ve seen, I think the Bloomberg anchor’s setup was at least a 7 on the 10 scale (and maybe an 8), so hardly terrible.

Side note: audio is a fraction of the effort and expense and IMO is more important.

If you mean to really REALLY push the quality, audio gets expensive. My video is in service of audio plugins so I have a motivation to do that: the reason my audio is strikingly good on my voice is, it is NOT done with plugins.

It's done with a Roswell Colares (or a Sennheiser lav) a $1500 boutique mic inspired by $10,000 mics, into an API 3124 studio pre, directly into a MOTU 16A interface with no further processing. Room treatment also plays a part: the room has two large openings into other spaces and six large T-Fusor diffusors, painted to match the walls.

A setup like that projects its sound character into the recording so strongly that there's nothing to fix: when the mics and things are high enough quality it's like the intention of the vocal performance comes through more powerfully in the first place, and this responds very well to digitization and compression.

Sure, getting to the 99.99th percentile of audio is incredibly expensive [just like anything else].

My comments were more directed at getting people into the 80th percentile level (decent mic on a boom, correctly placed and away from a built-in camera/laptop mic), but your point is correct for the absolute best 1-in-10000 level.

The anchor is a beautiful young woman, and Gates is a crusty old man. Humans would naturally be more inclined to look at the anchor, but she looks like she's live from a badger-hole (possibly the badger also did her makeup?) while Gates appears to have floated halfway down from heaven on a fluffy white cloud.

De gustibus!

Bill's setup wouldn't be perfect for everybody but it's very intentional and well adjusted for his needs.

He's using a good camera and a lens with a wide aperture to blur out the background (possibly even with ND filters to allow the wide aperture with brighter lighting). The bokeh is quite good on his blurry background: it's not meant to be just a gaussian blur, bokeh has edges (especially on point light sources) but in a nice way. It's definitely a real camera he's using with a proper lens.

The anchor's hair is blending with her bookcase, color-wise. It's not the best possible background, there's too much sharp detail and contrast behind her (by contrast Gates is apparently in Heaven).

She's got two points of light, one a larger area (you can see the reflections in her eyes) but Gates seems to have larger area lights, entirely to the sides. Maybe, maybe a light nearer the camera, but it's not very intense. Maybe just white area in front of him to bounce light. You can see reflections off the SIDE of his glasses, but there are no bright reflections IN his glasses and this is probably why he chose the way he did. He loses out on being able to have 'anime highlights' in his eyes for appeal, but he looks younger through the lighting covering him from all sides, hiding detail.

When I stream or make videos, I push pretty hard to get useful effects out of the situation, and I go for a big flashy anime highlight reflected in my eyes. You can use an area light, like a tent, but those have to be HUGE to really push the highlight size and cover a broad area: like, several feet wide and right up next to you. Instead of that, I've been using a ring light and aiming the camera through it, using a slightly longer lens (and wide aperture, and modular synth for bokeh-ed out blinky lights in the background, and Hypno video generator to do stuff in the black areas of the shot, etc etc etc)

It's pretty hilarious how close the ring light has to be, to take up any space in the image reflected off your eyeball. You're almost sticking your head through the ring light. All that matters is how the shot looks: viewers can't see all the crazy lighting that you're looking at.

There's a competitive aspect to it. If I can beat Bill Gates's quality level, I'll feel I did a good job. I will not beat Ricky Tinez, no matter what I do :)

As they say, it's the skuomorphism. The original iPhone aimed to replace various existing things - instead of TV, we've got YouTube! Instead of a notepad, we have the notes app! No need to carry around paper maps with charming little pins stuck in anymore! This is equivalent to dressing up nicely as one would for an in-person meeting and plonking oneself down in front of a laptop webcam, according to the author.

In the newer iPhone, and in Bill Gates' setup, it is understood that the framing is the important part, it is not enough to pretend to be in a normal meeting.

Of course the whole thing is a bit silly

> of course the whole thing is a bit silly

As goes with fashion as well. I’m not a practitioner myself (but married one, and am the parent of one) and I have observed that even the ones who take it seriously also treat it wil a sense of humor.

As someone quite into fashion (and worked in the space before), this is a very astute comment!

Fashion trends in the past few years have often progressed increasingly into a level of irony. It's become about what level of craziness/funkiness you can pull off while making it look intentional and attractive.

This includes hairstyles like dying your hair platinum blonde or purple and buzz-cutting it, or wearing loud, maximalist patterns, or even ironically wearing defunct fashion brands or cultural symbols opposite of your everyday life, like the popularity of Bass Pro Shops hats. The comeback of 'dad sneakers' and 'mom jeans,' while even retaining those monikers but in a positive way, are other good examples.

It also demonstrated the almost limitless possibilities of the UI. Smooth scrolling textured windows! Tap a button and they curl over to reveal a new pane! And it comes with a UI that was designed, not thrown together by a coder!

I am using the built-in webcam for video as well as a boring white wall as backdrop, as to not over-design the self-presentation. But I invested quite a bit of time in setting up a good microphone and pre-amp, as listening to bad audio is the most tiring part of videoconferencing for me.

Since the pandemic, I’m seeing more and more over-engineered home video conferencing setups that add more trouble than they’re worth.

Adjusting your home setup for decent front lighting and workable audio quality is important. Getting a mirrorless camera with expensive lenses and a podcasting microphone setup is not. I’m getting tired of losing minutes at the beginning of each call while the people with exotic camera, microphone, and lighting setups play games to get everything working with Zoom.

I would rather give them a few minutes than spend the entire meeting straining to understand people over their echos, terrible mic quality, etc.

That’s the false dichotomy that lures people into these over-complicated setups. You don’t need a professional podcasting microphone to be understood. Plenty of us do just fine without.

I have pro audio gear at my disposal, but I’ll still reach for the MacBook Pro built-in Mic when it’s convenient. It just works and I don’t have to worry about placement, reflections, setting gain and clipping, keeping noise sources away and so on. There’s a lot going on with the directional microphone setups in modern laptops that happens behind the scenes.

An improperly setup podcast style cardioid mic will actually catch more echos and stray noise than the finely tuned directional setup built in to a MacBook Pro.

Pro gear doesn’t automatically solve problems, but it does introduce a lot more opportunities for incorrect setup.

I agree that it's not black and white. We don't need a full audio studio for a video call. However I will tell you if you're using a macbook mic, I'd find it really painful to listen to you talk. It's not as good as you think. I've only encountered one or two people at work who have good-sounding audio, and the difference is really night and day.

We have had two completely different experiences. For me, most of my team stopped caring about their video after the first month of working from home and just wing it.

I guess it depends on your organization, etc. but on most of my conferences, it's rare when a participant even has the webcam on.

To continue the article's metaphor:

This is like being late to a meeting because you're struggling to knot your tie in the bathroom.

Being prepared and in control is part of the point of a good setup.

Doesn't the issue have more to do with people not being ready on time than it does their gear?

It's no less annoying than a person who shows up to a meeting without having read any required background material in advance.

I always make a point in connecting to a conference a couple of minutes in advance to make sure all the inputs are correctly assigned and working, simply because I don't like making people wait.

See also Ed Zitron's how-to set this up for yourself or your clients (he's a PR guy):

https://thefuturebuzz.com/2020/08/06/how-to-make-your-zoom-c...

Matt Mullenweg has a few takes on this as well.

Early in 2020: https://ma.tt/2020/05/ceo-video-streaming/

Second iteration at a lower cost: https://ma.tt/2021/05/2021-streaming-kit/

I took a picture of myself using my videoconferencing camera, then set it up as my meeting background. The effect is hilarious when people see you, then see you again moving into the frame :)

Good overall advice, but what is missing is the how. How do you setup "good lighting" that can be calibrated? How do you buy/select a "good" camera or a "good" microphone? Specific products or features to look for when purchasing would be helpful.

Lots of people have spare phones sitting around with really nice camera setups. https://reincubate.com/camo/ is a pretty cool way to use those for a quick upgrade to your camera setup.

I've found it to be super laggy and unusable, unfortunately. iPhone 12 + 2018 MBP.

Yowch. Sorry to read that. I built Camo. Can you drop us a note? Should be lower latency than a regular webcam as we can rely on device hardware to encode.

I love Camo. Any ETA for the Android version?

Thank you. We're going to be bringing more people onto the beta this week. We had a bit of a pause whilst we revisited a few bits. Hopefully you're on the list — I don't think we're too far away now!

I love Camo too. I use it for my Twitch stream. Great software, thanks for the awesome stuff.

The big feature I'm waiting for is the built in chromakey / greenscreen tools.

I use Camo about 14 hours a week for recordings. I've never had this problem. I'd love to know what is causing it if you ever figure it out.

I don’t know about fancy mikes but just using a phone as the webcam made a profound difference for me. And my AirPods seem to work well as microphones for me.

https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1405575186691330054

"I don't know who needs to hear this, but your colleagues want to hear from you, and your AirPods sound like shit"

Might not be professional audio but Airpod's are better than using the built in Mic's and just using headphones improves your audio quality.

I have wondered about this but we record a lot of our meetings and I have heard myself and I sound pretty clear. Admittedly this is me judging myself, but I do listen critically to see. Also I was interviewed for a podcast recently and I asked a few friends if I was clear and they all said yes, even when I said why I asked.

FWIW.

I was expecting a review of some of the really amazing setups some Twitch streamers use. Check out CodeMiko if you haven't already.

CodeMiko is incredible. I don't care for her content particularly, but the tech is just incredibly interesting.

Part of the problem is widespread of MacBooks. When this coronavirus thing was just starting, I thought about maybe working from home and bought a cheap 720p Logitech webcam for my home desktop PC. Year and a half later my picture still looks a magnitude better than most of coworkers' using their MacBook camera.

Is there any way to integrate an app with zoom/teams to know when a video call is happening? I’d like to have lighting when I answer a video call but not the 99% of the time when I don’t have the camera on.

I have a good mic setup, but trying to improve my lighting. The biggest issue I have is with the mounting. How do people generally mounting their lights so that they don't take up much desk space?

I don't have a good answer for you but right now I'm facing a large diffused light that lightens my face and a backing green screen. Mine is floor standing and enormous, but you can get an equivalent diffuser attached to monitor and an LED behind that.

Building on this, I sit at a south facing window that gets good lighting for most of the day. I use a large circular photography light diffuser that can stay firm in the window frame using the tension of the diffuser. That plus slightly grainy background images to blend with the webcam footage and I blend well with any background :D

Mounted with a desk clamp at the back of the desk, takes up no space really (but its a bit further away you might need a bright lamp).

As someone who records nearly daily, I'm going to critique:

> What’s required for an impeccable streaming setup?

> 1) Good lighting that can be precisely calibrated, both in brightness and in colour temperature

For most uses, fixed brightness is fine as long as you can adjust the light's distance. Lighting doesn't need to be color-temperature adjustable because that's what the white balance on your camera is for -- just make sure all your lights are the same color temperature. Mostly, just get a single large ring light, about $90. [1]

> 2) A good camera with a big sensor and a wide aperture lens

If you've got good lighting, then no -- honestly an $80 Logitech C920 [2] will be perfectly adequate for sharp 1080p, and over videoconferencing it's going into deeply compressed 720p anyways so it's more than enough. A wide aperture lens is only if you want a blurry background, which is almost never desirable in professional interviews or videoconferencing. (Gates has a blurry background, this is very unusual.)

A large sensor/aperture is required for low-light conditions, but you should be using good lighting, so that shouldn't be an issue.

> 3) A good microphone

It doesn't need to be that good, just better than your built-in laptop mic, or built-in Bluetooth earphones mic. A $40 Blue Snowball iCE [3] will be more than enough. A $35 lapel mic [4] will be pretty decent too. But just like lighting is far more important than your camera, distance to the mic is far more important than the mic itself. Generally, it should be roughly 9" away, which means keeping it just out of frame, supported by some kind of stand.

> 4) The right rigging to hold everything together

Yup, basically just a stand for your mic and maybe for your webcam. Also possibly a stand for your laptop to support it at eye level.

> 5) Ambient fill lighting

Any normal room has this, though you may need to change which direction you're facing to optimize.

> 6) The technical expertise to understand how colour temperature, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO conspire together to form a beautiful picture.

You absolutely need to manually set the white balance and lock it. Webcams don't really have ISO (they have gain), but you absolutely do need to set the gain to zero (because you have good lighting) and lock the shutter speed for the desired exposure. Not a whole ton of technical expertise here though -- it's pretty simple.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Neewer-Ring-Light-Kit-Self-Portrait/d...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Widescreen-Calling-Recording...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Snowball-Condenser-Microphone-Ca...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Microphone-Omnidirection...

There doesn't seem to be a great consensus on the best microphones to use on my usual sources (HN). This is surprising because the difference between laptop mic or bluetooth mic and a good microphone is enormous. I also don't mind spending a bit more $$$ because this is for my day job.

But when buying a mic, I've read many types of good microphones (bluetooth streamer/podcaster looking mics vs XLR traditional looking mics e.g., Shure SM58-LC). Its hard to pull the trigger and know whats best. At this point I'll go with the Shure model, a stand and an XLR to USB-C cable sooner rather than later.

I have a nice webcam so a great mic is the next step.

I think your main choice is primarily just condenser vs dynamic -- for budget, that means something like a Blue Snowball vs an AT2005 (similar to the Shure you mentioned).

And that's ultimately a question these days mainly of aesthetics -- how do you want your voice to sound? I personally prefer the condenser for being a bit more "full-range" (brighter, more sensitive = more realistic) but plenty prefer the dynamic precisely for being less sensitive so it picks up less background noise.

Choice also depends on how much you use it. I do a lot of calls so I gave up on the mic on a stand that needs to be moved in place and mounted a small condenser on a boom above my head so its not in the way of the monitor and is always in the right place.

>the difference between laptop mic or bluetooth mic and a good microphone is enormous

Yes but for most of us for most purposes, you can probably spend $50-$100 and you're pretty much there. Something like that Shure is almost certainly fine. I have a Blue Snowball and a Behringer XM1800S that I use for different purposes. (Not for different sound quality but the Behringer is plugged into a mixer for podcasting.)

re: webcam

I actually set up my Canon 5Diii after Canon updated its webcam software to support this somewhat older model. I do sometimes use it when I'm recording a video presentation but for day to day use it's more trouble than it's worth. It sits behind my desktop monitor so I end up having to reach over and fiddle with switches by hand. I have a Logitech 920 webcam as well and it just works with whatever conferencing software I'm using. Any material video quality issues are far more likely to be the fault of the network.

And I'd add that if you use a wide enough aperture to really defocus the background on a DSLR, you need to really control your motion so you're not going in and out of focus. That's fine for recording a video/interview but would be sort of a pain for random video calls.

You've suggested $200+ worth of equipment for an entry level setup. I realize in Silicon Valley that's probably the price of a hot dog but in the rest of the world its not cheap for just looking professional in meetings. Full time streamer is obviously different.

Also that much kit needs some space to setup semi permanently which is also going to complicate things. Each individual item isn't that big a deal on its own but everything together starts prove what the article was saying.

The original article was comparing it to a well-tailored suit. The equipment suggested certainly isn't any more than that.

And of course it's overkill for meetings for most people. It's for people whose profession is their appearance in part -- streamers, interviewees, presenters, hosts, salespeople, certain executives, etc.

For most people, a tiny clip-on ring light together with a cheap lapel mic, maybe $50 combined, would provide biggest bang for least effort/cost/space. And you don't even need the light if you're lucky enough to be facing a window and it's daytime (you always need a mic though). Plus making sure your built-in webcam is at eye level, not down below.

As for space, fortunately everything large in this world of equipment comes on tripods, and is foldable to flat. I store all my large items (ring light, mic stand, laptop stand, backdrop) in a 9"-wide sliver of space in the side of a closet, and the small things (webcam, webcam mount, mic) in a desk drawer. I've got the setup and takedown processes both down to 5 minutes.

> A good camera with a big sensor and a wide aperture lens

And how does one use this in a way that has no latency for a live webcam.

Use an HDMI capture device.

Spandex talking about well-tailored suits? Isn't that stretching it a little bit?

I write off anyone who video conferences with a bookshelf behind them as a fool trying to pass off as more intelligent than they actually are. It’s so cringey because of how blatantly manipulative it is.

So living in a small space is being manipulative now?

Yeah, I live in a one bedroom, one kitchen-office-living room. I don't have a choice but to have most of my flat "on display".

This made me realize, that I have some book by some prominent anarchist author on my book shelves in clear view of my webcam. I guess my employer know where I stand now haha.

Some people have only one workspace, and also actually happen to have some books they don't want to stack on the floor.

When I was getting my office video properly set up I thought about more deliberately putting some other objects there and so forth. But the thing is that it's my office bookcase and I'd have ended up having to pile a bunch of books in the floor in another room. So I decided it wasn't worth it.

This is funny. I sit in front of a bookshelf to work so that’s where I video from.

I’m not (consciously) manipulating, I’m just dropping the video feed into wherever I am.

Perhaps it’s not manipulative and different people do things for different reasons.

I don’t turn on blur or backgrounds because I find the edge detection not matching offsetting and seems cheesy to me.

Writing people off in general might be not the best life strategy.

From the point of view of a sound engineer: book shelves are probably the best background surface one could have in a typical living environment due to good sound diffusion characteristics.

The best position for filming in my office gives me a blank wall as a backdrop. Looks great, helps the lighting, end up with a wonderful, natural backdrop gradient around me in kind of a "halo". People've commented on it, unprompted. It's nice.

However, the most functional and useful layout of my room fills my whole camera backdrop with bookcases, edge-to-edge.

Here I was, right this moment, trying to decide between moving my desk back to a spot that lets me re-claim half the room for other purposes, or keeping the better-looking backdrop but having a shit room layout, and now I guess I have to worry that some people will judge me an asshole if I have books behind me. WTF.

Personally, I think bookcases look fine as a backdrop. I tidied mine up a little bit but otherwise it's just what's in the background from the external webcam on my desktop system. The only "stage management" I've done is that I draped a fabric print wall hanging over some ugly metal file cabinets. I thought of getting a background Japanese screen sort of thing early on but it would be perpetually in the way.

1. Plenty of desks are normally in front of shelves anyway.

2. I have an empty bookshelf as my background as a joke about this.

That's ridiculous. Lots of people don't live in huge houses where they have lots of options. They're videoconferencing from their home office desk, which guess what -- it's extremely common to have bookshelves behind your desk. Has been for many decades, it's not a Zoom thing.

If anything is cringey, it's your tremendously unsympathetic comment, unfortunately.

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