Staging Video Calls From the Home Office

One of the unintended side effects of the Covid-19 crisis is the conversion of people’s homes into video studios. Suddenly the contents of my closet or a shoe rack are getting broadcast across the internet. Even the local news broadcasts are coming from the anchor person’s home. 

Here are some do's and don'ts for setting up for a video call or meeting:

• Think about and test the camera angle - make sure anything in the frame is something you wouldn’t mind your neighbor or mother to see.
• Backgrounds matter. Local news broadcasters provided a template for how to quickly transform their home spaces into home studios with staged plants and props in the background.
• If you can avoid it, don’t set up the video in locations where people or pets will be walking through the frame.
• Keep the background area clean and consistent.
• Don’t have a bright light source behind you.
• Make sure you have a way to cover or block the camera to avoid unintended broadcasts.

The most popular meeting tools do include some features to stage your background. Zoom has a feature that will allow you to post a picture as your background. If you do this for business, make sure the picture is something professional and not a day at the beach. Teams has a feature that will obscure the background by blurring it. Both the Zoom and Teams technologies have trouble finding you in the frame, which can cause you to disappear, or most common to lose your ears. If you don’t have the luxury of staging a space for video, you should consider using one of these technologies.

At Beringer Technology Group, we've been applying video technology to our business for years and can help your company adapt their business to today’s reality.

Click HERE for more information.