Webinar Wire

So You Think You Want Video

Posted by Ken Molay November 28 2007 8:56 PM EDT

Webcams are marvelous devices. They finally opened up the long-predicted dream of the "video phone" in a way nobody had expected. "Wave to Grandma, honey!" What a wonderful way to add a visual touch to interpersonal communications.

But as delightful as this Norman Rockwell-meets-Dick Tracy image might seem, the webcam also has a dark side. It is dragging online event quality relentlessly downward.

There is an art and a science to making a person look good on camera. And trust me, you and your webcam don't have what it takes.

If you are bound and determined to greet your webinar audience with your beautiful mug, here are some tips. If you don't have the time, the inclination, or the resources to comply with them, perhaps you should think about leaving the video off or getting yourself to a studio and doing your webcast from there, in a controlled setting with professionals who know how to present you in the best light (figuratively and literally).

Since I mentioned light, let's start there. Your camera works best with you lit in a bright, but diffuse light. Don't shine your desk lamp into your face, your skin will reflect that incandescent light right back into the camera. If you are too dimly lit, your image will appear blurry and shadowy. Be careful about lighting from one particular direction, as the shadows will look very strange in the broadcast image. PLEASE don't sit in front of an open window unless you want to look like an anonymous informant in one of those whistle-blower documentaries. The camera will set its exposure to handle the bright light behind you and you will appear as a black sillhouette.

And while we're on the subject of what is behind you, your best option is to have a completely neutral and featureless backdrop that offers no visual interest to your audience. Make them focus on your face, not on the bookshelf behind you. Or the shot of the aisle outside your office with coworkers moving back and forth. I hardly ever use a webcam for my presentations (as should be obvious). But if I am absolutely forced to, I can set up the portable backdrop I built out of some PVC pipe and a Salvation Army bedsheet. You might want to use one of those old portable movie screens on a pole if you have one around your office.

While your audience is looking at you, what are you looking at? You want to train yourself to stare unflinchingly into the center of the webcam's lens. You will get tired of doing this. You will want to check your screen, or glance down at your keyboard, or turn your head just to break the monotony. Every time you do this, you break the connection with your audience and you look just a little less trustworthy ("Why does he dart his eyes around so much? He must be lying.") My emergency webcam is made by Ezonics and has the interesting feature of being able to hang down from the top of my monitor so the camera lens is sitting in the center of my screen. That way I can look directly at the camera (therefore, directly into the eyes of my audience) and still see the information I am presenting on my monitor.

A big problem for webcam users is how to get the audio. Headsets with boom mikes look dorky on camera. There's just no way around it. Do you really want to persuade potential customers to buy your product while looking like an air traffic controller? If you are delivering your audio through your computer, a lavalier microphone can be connected either through a USB port or your microphone connector. It will probably deliver better quality sound than your webcam room microphone and won't look as strange as a headset.

If you use a telephone, you are probably out of luck. The jury is out on whether one of those behind the ear bluetooth headsets looks any better than a regular headset... I think it makes you look too much like a Borg. What we really need is a telephone headset that uses a single ear bud on a wire and a lavalier microphone. But I haven't been able to find anything like this on the market. If you know of such a beast, please write a comment. If you are an audio equipment manufacturer, please add this to your product mix!

Now that you have the mechanics taken care of, you can move on to the fun part of adjusting your own on-camera performance. While delivering your message and keeping interest and enthusiasm in your voice you can think about your blink rate, your facial expression, staying in frame, staying at the right focus distance, and so on.

Take care of all these items, and you will give your audience a professional looking video webinar. Compromise on them for expediency, and you have yourself just another amateur YouTube entry. And that's no way to promote your company -- or yourself.