After working for almost 3 years with a barebones work-from-home setup (standup desk + laptop), I finally invested recently in some equipment to improve upon my crappy laptop camera and a room with little natural light. The difference in my video call quality is night and day. This is what I got:
- A key light (Godox ES45) to throw a bunch of bright, natural white light at my face. Attached to the desk and positioned tilted above my head so that it doesn't blind me. I don't notice it when it's on.
- A mic (Razer Seiren Mini) on a boom arm attached to the desk, positioned above my face, just out of the camera's sight. Nice, clean sound. Would sound even better if I were speaking directly into it, but I don't like having the mic visible.
- Repurposed an old mirrorless camera (Sony RX100 III) into a webcam for that sweet HD quality. Way better than any of the webcams out there. Needed to buy a cam link 4K card and connect it via a MicroHDMI <-> HDMI cable. Required a dummy battery kit to connect to AC and some setting tweaking, but it works beautifully. Connected the camera to the key light stand with a clamp mount.
Yes, I love this. Most people don't realize this setup but I feel it is very important. I have a normal soft & warm light (not flat white) that I can flick quickly (point upwards that bounced off the walls). An additional flood light in stand-by for interviews and other more important meetings.
A well mounted setup with a dedicated microphone is a time saver and no brainer. I'm not too keen on the video and think is lesser important than audio but have been thinking on that too. I invested in an extended mount for a separate display, mic, and lights. I has paid off pretty well.
I didn't realize how much a difference the lighting makes until I got one. I got the Google dLight and it has both brightness and warmness sliders and can change it from computer or app (and has profiles) so it's really convenient.
I got a Seeed ReSpeaker mic array and have been really happy with it. At first it wasn't working at all, but then I did a firmware update on it and it's been great since. It's a 4 mic array with speaker output, and it does some fancy processing to remove the output played from the speakers and uses the 4 mics to detect voice location and "zoom in" on it.
I went from terrible echoy voice to rock solid.
Then I got a 16" MBP, which is what I mostly use now for video conferences because I upgraded my Linux work laptop and switched to Wayland and can no longer do screen sharing.
In terms of camera settings, I think the main ones were switching the file format to XAVC and turning off the display icons so they don't show when I'm on video. Might be worth going through https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00245829 and trying a bunch of these, even though the page is not exactly for the same camera.
After that just plug it in and it's recognized as a USB camera. One other thing I ran into was the camera kept losing settings after being turned off. Turns out there is an internal battery that got discharged after years of non-use. I think I used a micro USB cable with a running camera to get it juiced up.
I tried this approach and the latency was through the roof, easily a second or so off, making it effectively useless for video conferencing. Switched to an HDMI grabber so I could get something that was actually realtime.
You need to dial in the fps. It's a little bit of work to try different parameters and might not work for every camera. But with most cameras I was able to get the latency below 300ms which should work for most use cases.
Not sure this would work with every camera. My particular model does not support remote shooting over USB. Newer models of the same camera do and Sony even provides software to go the USB route.
The native Sony software will only support 720p resolution. So gphoto2 still offers better resolution.
"Shooting over USB" is not a requirement to use this. The camera only needs to be able to output the preview stream via USB, which works with most cameras.
> - A key light (Godox ES45) to throw a bunch of bright, natural white light at my face. Attached to the desk and positioned tilted above my head so that it doesn't blind me. I don't notice it when it's on.
I found a sunlamp aimed away or behind something helped me a lot. So much so that I got one of those kitchen countertop hydroponic kits that's time to go off usually when I start work.
The sunlamp + morning coffee perk me right up. Plus herbs and stuff.
Unfortunately the RX100MIII isn’t supported, but the Mark IV and over 30 other Sony cameras work with its [Imaging Edge Webcam utility](https://support.d-imaging.sony.co.jp/app/webcam/en/) so you can use the camera directly as a webcam without the need for a capture card or HDMI cable.
I tried using this for a while on my Mac and while it generally works, it just wasn’t reliable enough. Sometimes the camera wouldn’t turn on automatically or it would claim to be in use by another process. It’s also not supported in all programs, and even when it is, it can be a pain to switch cameras due to UI annoyances.
In short, your webcam is one of those things that really needs to work 100% or it’ll end up causing problems at exactly the wrong time. No one wants to have to fiddle with the camera during an important meeting.
> Would sound even better if I were speaking directly into it, but I don't like having the mic visible.
I've found that the sound is better if I keep it off to the side out of frame instead of above. Especially if you have the setting to make it directional and aim it towards your mouth. You can speak directly to the camera and it picks it up.
If you can, sit at a south facing window for natural light, you can also buy a flexible wire rimmed light diffuser used for photography. If you can get the right diffuser for your window frame it should flex into the frame and stay in place (unless the window is open and it cat he's the wind!)
The problem is that all the old digital cameras I have at hand are either too old or not high-price-segment enough to support any sort of looping video through, which is a shame. I have 2-3 of those and while they're not awesome, the video would totally beat every laptop webcam...
