Insights
Your next client meeting is on camera. Does it look like it?
Plenty of professionals are good on their feet. Put them in a room with a client and they're clear, warm and easy to trust. Put them on a Teams call and they become a grainy face lit from above, slightly out of sync, looking at the bottom of the screen.
That's not a small thing any more. For a lot of the firms I talk to, the video call is now where the first meeting happens. It's how a lot of clients first see you, and nobody planned it.
Four things make the difference, and this is the order they matter in.
Sound first
People will put up with a soft picture. They switch off when they have to work to hear you. A laptop microphone picks up the room as much as the voice: the hard walls, the air conditioning, the keyboard.
A proper microphone close to your mouth fixes more than any camera upgrade will. If you only change one thing, change this.
Light from the front
Most offices are lit from the ceiling, which puts shadows under the eyes and makes everyone look tired. A window behind you turns you into a silhouette.
Light that faces you, soft and a little above eye level, does most of the work a camera gets credit for. Dim is fine, as long as it's in front of you.
Camera at eye level
A laptop on a desk looks up at you. The viewer sees the ceiling and your chin, and it feels like you're looking down on them, because you are. Raise the camera to eye level and the conversation feels level too.
A better camera, last
Only once the sound and light are right does a better camera show. Then it shows a lot: a 4K camera with a fast lens gives you a sharp face and a soft background, which is the look people recognise from television without knowing why.
Why most people never get there
None of this is secret. It just takes fiddling. Someone buys a ring light, a USB microphone and a webcam, plugs it all into a laptop, and it works until the laptop moves, a cable goes missing or someone else uses the desk.
When we install a Turnkey Studio, the call set-up is part of it. The camera, two LED panels and the microphone are tuned for the room once, and one cable into a laptop makes the whole thing the camera for Teams, Zoom and webinars. The same desk records client videos when someone wants to, but most days it's how the principal turns up to meetings.
That's also why it gets used. Gear that's only for "making content" waits for a day when someone plans to make content. Gear that's on every call gets used every day.
A quick check you can do today
Open your camera and look at yourself the way a client sees you:
- Can you hear the room, or only your voice?
- Is the light on your face, or behind you?
- Is the camera looking at your eyes, or up your nose?
Fix them in that order. Most people get a long way with the first two.
If you'd like to see what a call set-up looks like when it's built into the office, the kit is on the Turnkey Studio page. For the rest of the set-up, see how to set up a video studio in your office.