201–210 of 499 posts
Optimizing for that would have me downgrade the video resolution being received by the 8-10 people on my calls.
Also what are the folks on the receiving end actually seeing? Certainly not the image he posted.
The quality aspect is obviously important but I'd suggest that the location of the lens is also vital if you don't want to have meetings where everyone seems to be not looking at you. I cannot wait until cameras work behind the screen and can be positioned right in the center but for now, the only option I found was something called Center Cam that mounts a small lense on a skinny support that can be positioned over…
If you're willing to throw $1000 at a "proper camera" of the sort the author recommends, then sure, it would be very disappointing if it didn't outperform the webcam built in to most laptops or phones. But is there a "proper camera" for under $100 that can also offer an improvement over a webcam?
$100 can get you an excellent microphone with a boom arm and that will be appreciated by your colleagues much more than being able to count your stubble in 4K 60 fps. I actually don't want colleagues to be able to inspect my face in immaculate detail, and the amount of ceremony and awkward stands begind the monitor, etc. do not make sence to me. The more expensive webcams do a decent enough job.
I'll put Reincubate Camo here as an option too - turns your iPhone in to a webcam. I was so impressed I bought a used iPhone to use solely as a webcam; the whole setup was cheaper than the Logitech C920 he mentions. The picture quality is great.
Manual means there are less failure modes - slow autofocus, autofocus trying to refocus, focusing on a wrong thing, etc.
It also means the hardware can be cheaper - camera doesn't need to have good autofocus (some old DSLR is fine), you can also use manual lenses.
You can really see this effect when the early mirrorless DSLRs took to market and every youtuber was using one with a fast wide open normal lens. Everything was zoomed in and out of focus resulting in queasy viewers. It took a couple of years for them to get the hang of it though.
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Agree 100% - This is why I eventually dropped it. I used to run a photography side gig, so I reused my full frame DSLR, nice portrait lens and lighting + cloth backdrop. But I had cables everywhere and multiple points of failure in the chain. Camera could overheat, software was wonky, something would get unplugged, and there was stress on the CPU at times too due to 3rd party apps required. Overall it just wasn't wor…
What camera did you end up with that had a narrow FOV?
Edited to add: Meant Narrow DOF when writing this, but both are true if you sit close to it!
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Yes, that is a gotcha, as some of the cheaper or older camera models have no HDMI out or the require proprietary conversion with a vendor driver. I haven’t run into this often myself yet since most people I know have been buying newer and more video focused cameras over the past couple years. EDIT - For your case perhaps using camera settings to minimize the data (ISO/aperture/shutter etc) being shown on on the scree…
> EDIT - For your case perhaps using camera settings to minimize the data (ISO/aperture/shutter etc) being shown on on the screen works well enough to use what you have? I saw a few threads with that suggestion, but I wasn't able to minimize the data being shown, or confirmation that anyone with a Rebel T7 was able to do it.
Why can’t laptops just get smartphone cameras? Is the BOM impact of a phone camera from 2018 really that high?
If you go this route, please make sure your system is robust and ready to go before meetings. We had to ask one employee to go back to his reliable built-in webcam because every other meeting started with 2 minutes of him getting his camera turned on, messing with audio inputs, getting his microphone boom in place, and fighting other quirks. He also had a tendency to drop out of long meetings when his camera overheat…
He was probably using software, like Canon's Webcam Utility, to stream his camera's HDMI OUT to his computer instead of using a capture card. He likely did this because of his camera not having "clean" HDMI output (i.e. you'd see icons if he were to capture what was on his camera's screen). Software like this is extremely unreliable by comparison and consumes CPU cycles like crazy, both on the camera and on your comp…
These pathways are the same. You're decidedly not getting raw video out of (most) consumer cameras via HDMI.