5 ms·

Given how severely imperfect this approach is, I’d much rather people didn’t use it: it’s disconcerting and distracting. Either do it properly (which tends to m

Given how severely imperfect this approach is, I’d much rather people didn’t use it: it’s disconcerting and distracting. Either do it properly (which tends to mean chroma keying, preferably with thoughtful handling of lighting too if you do anything like background replacement rather than just removal), or don’t do it at all. I have not the faintest clue whether this position of mine is popular or unpopular. Better models may improve matters (the one shown here looks to be decidedly worse than some), but even the best I’ve observed at this time is still something I’d prefer not to be used, because it’s still wrong too much of the time in annoying ways.

alsobrsp 5y ago
I won't use the blur or fake backgrounds normally, I find them goofy. I just let people see what is behind me. If it not appropriate for video I'll leave it off. My background has been, the living room, kitchen pantry, bedroom, forest behind my house, patio, whatever. We are real people, in real locations just show it.
kelnos 5y ago
Chroma keying requires a green (or other solid, "unusual" color) screen, though, right? Most people don't have those, and won't want to expend the effort to set something like that up. It's certainly imperfect, but it's useful for people who'd prefer to obscure their surroundings while on a video call without having to deal with a more "professional" setup.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  The problem is that those people don't grasp how ridiculously awful it looks. Do you pay money for decent clothes and a decent haircut? Then spend the money on either a greenscreen, or anything else to put behind you to cover whatever you want to cover without making you look like a special effect done by a third grader.
  - trog 5y ago
    I pay about $30 every 3-4 months for a haircut and most of my clothes are 10+ years old (one of my favourite shirts, that I regularly wear in the home office, is the Australian team's football jersey from the 2006 World Cup). I cheerfully use Google Meet with it's poor blurring that constantly pops things in and out of the background without giving it a second thought. I judge people by the content of their words and the merit of their actions, not what they look like or how much effort they've gone to in order to have a perfect webcam production. This tool looks super awesome and I can absolutely see myself using it. I've tried greenscreen in OBS before and decided it wasn't worth the effort for my purposes; something that is roughly decent as this looks at a glance will be really useful.
    - robbrown451 5y ago
      Blurring the background is different than putting some other sort of background there. That doesn't bother me nearly as much. Regardless, I am someone who never pays for a haircut and has very casual clothes. But this is something that, to me, indicates a complete lack of sensitivity to aesthetics, and in a large number of jobs/roles, that's a really bad sign. There's also a bit of the "what is so important to hide?" question. It's great if you can ignore such things, but not everyone can or does. This is almost like someone who has poor hygiene, who has dirty hair or a bit of a smell to them. Anyone would advise such a person to put in a bit of effort if they want career success. Same thing.
      - chrismorgan 5y ago
        Nah, the blurring is just as bad. In the best of cases I find it to be firmly in the uncanny valley, as I also do of what little I’ve seen of software-based depth of field manipulation or artificial blurring in smartphone photography. In the typical case, it suffers from exactly the same issues as background replacement because it’s doing exactly the same thing, estimating a mask for the areas of interest and altering the rest. Half the hair will be blurred one moment, then one shoulder, then half the chair will flicker between being blurred and not blurred—it’s just as disconcerting and unpleasant.
      - 5y ago
- ianbooker 5y ago
  You are one bed sheet away from chroma keying in OBS. Since you can easily configure the color to be keyed, you will have luck with anything besides the color of your skin or your eyes. I tested it with a green sheet fitted on the bookshelf behind me and since bed sheets wrap around roughly the size of it, I did not even need any tape or clamps to fit it.
kkarakk 5y ago
the primary usecase of OBS is for twitch/content creation streaming i think and for that use-case it's pretty good. however as the system resource usage is pretty high i don't think this will see adoption for much compared to chroma keying.
cube00 5y ago
I was watching some court proceedings and one of the parties had the background blur on and every so often when the person half turned their head to review a document nearly half of their face disappeared under the blur. It was very distracting. Perhaps if people were a bit more professional and stopped commenting on other people's personal space that's taking up a fraction of the screen real estate we wouldn't need features like these. My boss can't help himself making smart ass comments about my background, at one point I managed to get a plain white wall and even that scored a comment.
- andy_ppp 5y ago
  I would consider changing your boss. What a piece of work. My guess is he’s flawed in many areas…
  - copperx 5y ago
    > My guess is he’s flawed in many areas… That's a dead giveaway of being human.
- antihero 5y ago
  Your boss sounds immature, but furthermore why do you care?
- stavros 5y ago
  Wait, why do people care about other people's personal space? It's just houses and offices, what's there to hide about that? I have an array of RC planes on the wall behind me (because they take up room and mounting them vertically on the wall was a good solution to save space, they make for a great background.
  - hwers 5y ago
    I wish we would stop using the "what's there to hide" argument. Let's just give people a right for default privacy without questioning what they want to use it for.
alwaysanon 5y ago
100%. My new boss both has a background that is 'our office open plan area but empty' (he must have taken a photo when the place actually was empty) when he's at home. Plus he now has some greyscale or sepia filter so that he looks like a ye olde ghost for some reason. Not to mention he has headphones where you see these slivers of no background through them around his head. I asked him if he was using some sort of filter and he was like "I don't like the color of my face in my camera". He stands out like a sore thumb in the grid of people in video in larger meetings now too as the only one not in color and with a weird background (others just blur it which I also kind of hate - but less). I find calls with him with the video so distracting. I would much rather see his living room or whatever he's trying to hide - and it being real - than this weird fake office thing he is trying to do instead... Maybe it is a sign of privilege though that I have a spare bedroom with a white wall behind me I can use without background or blur. I remind myself not everybody is so lucky...
- Your_Boss 5y ago
  We’re gonna talk about this on Monday, [name redacted].
- Telemakhos 5y ago
  I've done that. In my office I have a 27" Mac from 2011. I keep it around as a 32-bit machine, and I decided one day to try using it as a video conferencing computer, because it has the biggest screen out of everything I have. The camera, on its default settings, makes me look like I have a skin disease. It's really horrible. But Macs from that era could have their video stream intercepted and tweaked by third party systems, so I desaturated it to black-and-white.
- logifail 5y ago
  > My new boss both has a background that is 'our office open plan area but empty' [...] During the first lockdown, a friend of mine sourced a photo of the inside of his local (closed-down) pub, and he used that as a background. "Working from home? Of course I am. Honest..."
- Kaze404 5y ago
  I don't understand what people are so eager to hide in their cameras
kevincox 5y ago
I also find it distracting and prefer people wouldn't do it. However they have the right to privacy and not showing me their house, so the choice is theirs. The implementation matters a lot too. I found that for most people the Zoom implementation is pretty bad. The Google Meet one is typically less distracting especially on blur mode. (because the flickering isn't as noticable than when flipping between two completely different colours)
Netcob 5y ago
My company had the marketing department design a few abstract backgrounds with company colors / logos, which look fine on their own, but incredibly weird when there's a blurry and badly cut-out person with a window behind them. Basically it looks like there's a challenger approaching in Smash Bros. We only have to use them when talking to people outside the company, but most people just leave them on all the time. Personally I'm not a fan of background removal/replacement unless it's done properly, but I do like blurring. I use a good webcam and I mounted a soldering light above my screen as a ringlight which works surprisingly well. Plus nvidia broadcast for noise filtering and background blurring, which makes the task easier for teams to blur it some more without cutting into me. Overall I think it looks fine. My home office looks too messy and unprofessional when in focus, but has nice colors when blurred heavily. My boss often sits in his closet with lots of suits and shirts behind him, which confuses the filter enough to replace all his hair with the company background. I think people should just decide for themselves what to do and just learn the basics of how to do lighting. Nothing fancy, just make sure the light comes from the front, not from the back, use a proper webcam (or maybe your phone, that might have a better camera+processing), see if you can do something about your background to make it presentable or easier to blur. Of course some people don't have the luxury of a separate room in their house for nothing but work and the money to turn it into a movie set. Maybe they are forced to work in their bedroom / kitchen / closet and don't want everyone to see how they live. I think in that case background replacement is the lesser evil.
JeremyNT 5y ago
I agree this approach can be distracting, but I'm still glad OBS is adding this feature. There are times when it's "better than nothing" (if you're in a coffee shop or an airport or something where your background would be genuinely distracting). It's important to remember that OBS is a bit of a "swiss army knife" and there are plenty of use cases where this could be handy. That said, I've done background replacement using chroma key with OBS and it's quite easy. Anybody serious about streaming (or recording) video who wants to remove the background should own one. I own something called the "web around" which is a fabric disc supported by a tension wire around its circumference that attaches to the back of your chair. I'm convinced that this (and a decent microphone) do make a difference in how people perceive me in meetings and presentations.

alsobrsp 5y ago

I won't use the blur or fake backgrounds normally, I find them goofy. I just let people see what is behind me. If it not appropriate for video I'll leave it off. My background has been, the living room, kitchen pantry, bedroom, forest behind my house, patio, whatever. We are real people, in real locations just show it.

kelnos 5y ago

Chroma keying requires a green (or other solid, "unusual" color) screen, though, right? Most people don't have those, and won't want to expend the effort to set something like that up. It's certainly imperfect, but it's useful for people who'd prefer to obscure their surroundings while on a video call without having to deal with a more "professional" setup.

robbrown451 5y ago
The problem is that those people don't grasp how ridiculously awful it looks. Do you pay money for decent clothes and a decent haircut? Then spend the money on either a greenscreen, or anything else to put behind you to cover whatever you want to cover without making you look like a special effect done by a third grader.
- trog 5y ago
  I pay about $30 every 3-4 months for a haircut and most of my clothes are 10+ years old (one of my favourite shirts, that I regularly wear in the home office, is the Australian team's football jersey from the 2006 World Cup). I cheerfully use Google Meet with it's poor blurring that constantly pops things in and out of the background without giving it a second thought. I judge people by the content of their words and the merit of their actions, not what they look like or how much effort they've gone to in order to have a perfect webcam production. This tool looks super awesome and I can absolutely see myself using it. I've tried greenscreen in OBS before and decided it wasn't worth the effort for my purposes; something that is roughly decent as this looks at a glance will be really useful.
  - robbrown451 5y ago
    Blurring the background is different than putting some other sort of background there. That doesn't bother me nearly as much. Regardless, I am someone who never pays for a haircut and has very casual clothes. But this is something that, to me, indicates a complete lack of sensitivity to aesthetics, and in a large number of jobs/roles, that's a really bad sign. There's also a bit of the "what is so important to hide?" question. It's great if you can ignore such things, but not everyone can or does. This is almost like someone who has poor hygiene, who has dirty hair or a bit of a smell to them. Anyone would advise such a person to put in a bit of effort if they want career success. Same thing.
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      Nah, the blurring is just as bad. In the best of cases I find it to be firmly in the uncanny valley, as I also do of what little I’ve seen of software-based depth of field manipulation or artificial blurring in smartphone photography. In the typical case, it suffers from exactly the same issues as background replacement because it’s doing exactly the same thing, estimating a mask for the areas of interest and altering the rest. Half the hair will be blurred one moment, then one shoulder, then half the chair will flicker between being blurred and not blurred—it’s just as disconcerting and unpleasant.
    - 5y ago
ianbooker 5y ago
You are one bed sheet away from chroma keying in OBS. Since you can easily configure the color to be keyed, you will have luck with anything besides the color of your skin or your eyes. I tested it with a green sheet fitted on the bookshelf behind me and since bed sheets wrap around roughly the size of it, I did not even need any tape or clamps to fit it.

kkarakk 5y ago

the primary usecase of OBS is for twitch/content creation streaming i think and for that use-case it's pretty good. however as the system resource usage is pretty high i don't think this will see adoption for much compared to chroma keying.

cube00 5y ago

I was watching some court proceedings and one of the parties had the background blur on and every so often when the person half turned their head to review a document nearly half of their face disappeared under the blur. It was very distracting. Perhaps if people were a bit more professional and stopped commenting on other people's personal space that's taking up a fraction of the screen real estate we wouldn't need features like these. My boss can't help himself making smart ass comments about my background, at one point I managed to get a plain white wall and even that scored a comment.

andy_ppp 5y ago
I would consider changing your boss. What a piece of work. My guess is he’s flawed in many areas…
- copperx 5y ago
  > My guess is he’s flawed in many areas… That's a dead giveaway of being human.
antihero 5y ago
Your boss sounds immature, but furthermore why do you care?
stavros 5y ago
Wait, why do people care about other people's personal space? It's just houses and offices, what's there to hide about that? I have an array of RC planes on the wall behind me (because they take up room and mounting them vertically on the wall was a good solution to save space, they make for a great background.
- hwers 5y ago
  I wish we would stop using the "what's there to hide" argument. Let's just give people a right for default privacy without questioning what they want to use it for.

alwaysanon 5y ago

100%. My new boss both has a background that is 'our office open plan area but empty' (he must have taken a photo when the place actually was empty) when he's at home. Plus he now has some greyscale or sepia filter so that he looks like a ye olde ghost for some reason. Not to mention he has headphones where you see these slivers of no background through them around his head. I asked him if he was using some sort of filter and he was like "I don't like the color of my face in my camera". He stands out like a sore thumb in the grid of people in video in larger meetings now too as the only one not in color and with a weird background (others just blur it which I also kind of hate - but less). I find calls with him with the video so distracting. I would much rather see his living room or whatever he's trying to hide - and it being real - than this weird fake office thing he is trying to do instead... Maybe it is a sign of privilege though that I have a spare bedroom with a white wall behind me I can use without background or blur. I remind myself not everybody is so lucky...

Your_Boss 5y ago
We’re gonna talk about this on Monday, [name redacted].
Telemakhos 5y ago
I've done that. In my office I have a 27" Mac from 2011. I keep it around as a 32-bit machine, and I decided one day to try using it as a video conferencing computer, because it has the biggest screen out of everything I have. The camera, on its default settings, makes me look like I have a skin disease. It's really horrible. But Macs from that era could have their video stream intercepted and tweaked by third party systems, so I desaturated it to black-and-white.
logifail 5y ago
> My new boss both has a background that is 'our office open plan area but empty' [...] During the first lockdown, a friend of mine sourced a photo of the inside of his local (closed-down) pub, and he used that as a background. "Working from home? Of course I am. Honest..."
Kaze404 5y ago
I don't understand what people are so eager to hide in their cameras

kevincox 5y ago

I also find it distracting and prefer people wouldn't do it. However they have the right to privacy and not showing me their house, so the choice is theirs. The implementation matters a lot too. I found that for most people the Zoom implementation is pretty bad. The Google Meet one is typically less distracting especially on blur mode. (because the flickering isn't as noticable than when flipping between two completely different colours)

Netcob 5y ago

My company had the marketing department design a few abstract backgrounds with company colors / logos, which look fine on their own, but incredibly weird when there's a blurry and badly cut-out person with a window behind them. Basically it looks like there's a challenger approaching in Smash Bros. We only have to use them when talking to people outside the company, but most people just leave them on all the time. Personally I'm not a fan of background removal/replacement unless it's done properly, but I do like blurring. I use a good webcam and I mounted a soldering light above my screen as a ringlight which works surprisingly well. Plus nvidia broadcast for noise filtering and background blurring, which makes the task easier for teams to blur it some more without cutting into me. Overall I think it looks fine. My home office looks too messy and unprofessional when in focus, but has nice colors when blurred heavily. My boss often sits in his closet with lots of suits and shirts behind him, which confuses the filter enough to replace all his hair with the company background. I think people should just decide for themselves what to do and just learn the basics of how to do lighting. Nothing fancy, just make sure the light comes from the front, not from the back, use a proper webcam (or maybe your phone, that might have a better camera+processing), see if you can do something about your background to make it presentable or easier to blur. Of course some people don't have the luxury of a separate room in their house for nothing but work and the money to turn it into a movie set. Maybe they are forced to work in their bedroom / kitchen / closet and don't want everyone to see how they live. I think in that case background replacement is the lesser evil.

JeremyNT 5y ago

I agree this approach can be distracting, but I'm still glad OBS is adding this feature. There are times when it's "better than nothing" (if you're in a coffee shop or an airport or something where your background would be genuinely distracting). It's important to remember that OBS is a bit of a "swiss army knife" and there are plenty of use cases where this could be handy. That said, I've done background replacement using chroma key with OBS and it's quite easy. Anybody serious about streaming (or recording) video who wants to remove the background should own one. I own something called the "web around" which is a fabric disc supported by a tension wire around its circumference that attaches to the back of your chair. I'm convinced that this (and a decent microphone) do make a difference in how people perceive me in meetings and presentations.