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Like a few other commenters here, after seeing how often I would be on camera and being tired of the potato quality of my laptop's built-in camera, I decided to

Like a few other commenters here, after seeing how often I would be on camera and being tired of the potato quality of my laptop's built-in camera, I decided to do something about it. $60 worth of lighting recommended by YouTubers + a $7 HDMI to USB capture device off eBay plugged into the Sony RX100 I already had from years ago and now I regularly get people commenting on how good my video looks (bonus: it makes me look better, too).

zingplex 6y ago
Could you link to the lighting?
- mdorazio 6y ago
  Sure thing. Check out [1] for the overview in video form. I saved some money by building my own softbox with cardboard, duct tape, aluminum foil, and white tissue paper (works surprisingly well), and got the corncob bulb direct from China [2] since the right color temp wasn't available on Amazon or eBay at the time. Note that if you go that route you'll probably need one of these [3] as well. Alternatively, you can grab one of these two-light kits for lots of light on the cheap [4], but you won't get much control over per-side intensity. Be sure to watch a few "video lighting tutorial" videos on YouTube to see how they are usually setup in relation to yourself and the camera for best results. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IF-VG69DAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IF-VG69DAU [2] https://www.ledlight1.com/40w-led-studio-light-bulb-e26-e27-medium-screw-base-5500k-standard-color-balanced-full-spectrum-photography-bulb-for-video-background-camera-lighting-p0015.html https://www.ledlight1.com/40w-led-studio-light-bulb-e26-e27-... [3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07X37NZSK/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07X37NZSK/ [4] https://www.amazon.com/HPUSN-Professional-Photography-Continuous-Reflectors/dp/B07NBP6D98/ https://www.amazon.com/HPUSN-Professional-Photography-Contin...
  - zingplex 6y ago
    Are you using a single light source or multiple?
    - mdorazio 6y ago
      I have two lights. One bright one to my right-front, and a dimmer one to my left. I couldn't get a good bounce panel setup with the way my apartment is arranged. Note that my apartment is really dim, even during the day, due to the way the windows face. If you get more sunlight you can probably get away with a single light.
webmaven 6y ago
> [...] tired of the potato quality of my laptop's built-in camera, I decided to do something about it. The term "potato quality" has a lovely ring to it. I don't really care if you meant "makes you look like a potato" or "looks like you're using a potato as a webcam", it works so well either way.
StillBored 6y ago
Well a large part of that is because the low light performance on all these webcams is stuck in the early 2000's. So, if you feed them some extra light the image quality gets a lot better. OTOH, take a 10 year old DSLR, flip it to video mode and compare the results when you don't have the lights amped up to max. Webcams are one of those areas where 7-8 years ago I was wondering why all the webcams were still USB2. For something like video you _REALLY_ want the extra bandwidth. Sure lots of peoples home connections aren't going to be able to feed the 250Mbit or so that is possible with a USB2 webcam, but in many cases your GPU/etc is probably much more capable of doing a good job with a random codec than whatever $.50c codec happens to be integrated on the webcam itself. So run a reasonable bandwidth to the PC and let it cleanup/compress the image. Rather than having the camera compress it to mpeg2, drop 1/2 the clarity, then have your PC decompress it and re-compress it with a more modern codec.
darekkay 6y ago
> a $7 HDMI to USB capture device off eBay plugged into the Sony RX100 I already had from years ago Is it the Sony RX100 I or a later version? I couldn't find any CamLink which supports the first generation.
- mdorazio 6y ago
  IV in my case. I'm not sure when they added it, but the HDMI port allows real-time output of what the camera is seeing. With an HDMI to USB capture converter it works perfectly as a camera device for any of my computers (limited to 1080p with my cheap converter, but that's more than enough for Zoom calls).

zingplex 6y ago

Could you link to the lighting?

mdorazio 6y ago
Sure thing. Check out [1] for the overview in video form. I saved some money by building my own softbox with cardboard, duct tape, aluminum foil, and white tissue paper (works surprisingly well), and got the corncob bulb direct from China [2] since the right color temp wasn't available on Amazon or eBay at the time. Note that if you go that route you'll probably need one of these [3] as well. Alternatively, you can grab one of these two-light kits for lots of light on the cheap [4], but you won't get much control over per-side intensity. Be sure to watch a few "video lighting tutorial" videos on YouTube to see how they are usually setup in relation to yourself and the camera for best results. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IF-VG69DAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IF-VG69DAU [2] https://www.ledlight1.com/40w-led-studio-light-bulb-e26-e27-medium-screw-base-5500k-standard-color-balanced-full-spectrum-photography-bulb-for-video-background-camera-lighting-p0015.html https://www.ledlight1.com/40w-led-studio-light-bulb-e26-e27-... [3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07X37NZSK/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07X37NZSK/ [4] https://www.amazon.com/HPUSN-Professional-Photography-Continuous-Reflectors/dp/B07NBP6D98/ https://www.amazon.com/HPUSN-Professional-Photography-Contin...
- zingplex 6y ago
  Are you using a single light source or multiple?
  - mdorazio 6y ago
    I have two lights. One bright one to my right-front, and a dimmer one to my left. I couldn't get a good bounce panel setup with the way my apartment is arranged. Note that my apartment is really dim, even during the day, due to the way the windows face. If you get more sunlight you can probably get away with a single light.

webmaven 6y ago

> [...] tired of the potato quality of my laptop's built-in camera, I decided to do something about it. The term "potato quality" has a lovely ring to it. I don't really care if you meant "makes you look like a potato" or "looks like you're using a potato as a webcam", it works so well either way.

StillBored 6y ago

Well a large part of that is because the low light performance on all these webcams is stuck in the early 2000's. So, if you feed them some extra light the image quality gets a lot better. OTOH, take a 10 year old DSLR, flip it to video mode and compare the results when you don't have the lights amped up to max. Webcams are one of those areas where 7-8 years ago I was wondering why all the webcams were still USB2. For something like video you _REALLY_ want the extra bandwidth. Sure lots of peoples home connections aren't going to be able to feed the 250Mbit or so that is possible with a USB2 webcam, but in many cases your GPU/etc is probably much more capable of doing a good job with a random codec than whatever $.50c codec happens to be integrated on the webcam itself. So run a reasonable bandwidth to the PC and let it cleanup/compress the image. Rather than having the camera compress it to mpeg2, drop 1/2 the clarity, then have your PC decompress it and re-compress it with a more modern codec.

darekkay 6y ago

> a $7 HDMI to USB capture device off eBay plugged into the Sony RX100 I already had from years ago Is it the Sony RX100 I or a later version? I couldn't find any CamLink which supports the first generation.

mdorazio 6y ago
IV in my case. I'm not sure when they added it, but the HDMI port allows real-time output of what the camera is seeing. With an HDMI to USB capture converter it works perfectly as a camera device for any of my computers (limited to 1080p with my cheap converter, but that's more than enough for Zoom calls).