How to Make Your Webcam Footage Look Better | Filmmaker Explains

I do notice that it's quite messy back there and people are gonna judge you. It's already looking and sounding a lot better. Let's say we want to go one step beyond that though. You know we're all have to step up our game maybe there's some things we can do? Hey what's going on Indy Mogul? Today we are doing a little bit of a different episode we're gonna show you how to make this web cam footage look like this. Or if it's a nighttime setup-- this. And we're gonna be doing it with things that you already have and adding on pieces step by step if you want to improve your web quality footage it's all up to you. So talking about this today we've got my friend Larry Fong ASU Larry's basically an amazing cinematographer that shot a lot of big-budget movies things like Batman vs Superman, things like Kong Skull Island, Super 8 - all the big movies out there and Larry you've actually been helping out a lot of people set up their own livestream set up to making sure that their web cam footage looks good right? Yeah I've been getting a lot of calls over the last you know couple weeks months and people just asking like what can I do and I never thought about it much either because I had the usual it's not like you're trying to be a movie star as long as you're getting the point across it's fine so I lived with it and then I thought about you know we're all have to step up our game maybe there's some things we can do so I just went on a little adventure from what you can do with no money simply all the way to spending a lot of money. First of all this right here is a frame that I think we have all seen before you can see it on my face how bad the lighting is. Very realistic. Yeah. We've all seen it. So uh why does my frame look so ugly and how do we make this frame much better? Especially with a webcam because I mean the camera is clearly the only thing that dictates the image right? There's nothing can do. Everyone uses their laptop and of course the laptop sits on the desk and then the camera is where it is so there's really nothing you can do it's looking up at you up your nose it's looking really high up in your house. Saying you don't like that you don't like looking at the nostrils? No I think it's it's good it's like when you do a movie you want someone to look scary and menacing it's a good technique. Yeah if you're trying to sell insurance or impress your coworkers probably not. The first thing that costs no money at all is to just raise that up by using could be books or boxes or anything you have around. Just to get the lens about eye level or maybe slightly higher. When a cinematographer takes a portrait usually at that eye level. So we have a laptop stand here, let me pull this over. This will probably work for us too raise up our stands so I'm going to put this on all right how's that? Better already. Better already okay what's the next thing that we can do to make this look better? One thing is your background you can't change the fact that you have-- What's wrong with my background? Interesting neighborhood you were that's really your house it's like I do notice that it's quite messy back there and people are gonna judge you especially you being a young college student. Oh of course absolutely. Clean up your beer and your clothes. "By gosh Hey Dad you can't tell me what to do I'm not gonna clean up my room. There's actually a lot of trash back here because we kind of went hard to put in that garbage back here so super time laps-- Already so I kind of cleaned it up I actually just moved everything out of the camera frame. Well it's really bright out there right so it seems you have a maybe if you draw the curtains a little bit it'll be less contrast. Gotcha so a lot of the time sunlight is super duper bright and I see this a lot where people put a window directly behind them and then they can they get this crazy silhouette look but I got going on just saying close the windows or put at least some kind of heavy curtains to kind of diffuse them a little bit. Yeah let's try it. So this is just from closing all the curtains in this space and just blocking off our hard Sun that's it. Better, do you have a table lamp? We have a table lamp yes what do you want to do with the table lamp? Maybe put it just off to your right like on the desk you can also, if there's a wall, like I have a wall here and I'm just bouncing a light into it, you can also do that. Put some kind of light here to just kind of 45 degrees on the side. I'm walking it in but uh Larry this light is really orange compared to a lot of this sunlight. Right because it's daytime and uh regular lightbulbs are tungsten 3200 which are too warm so you have to go out to Home Depot right now yeah now with LED bulbs you can get daylight balanced which around 5,500 degrees Kelvin. Got it. And I've seen them at Home Depot and they don't cost a lot yeah I'm gonna run to Home Depot. No fortunately we do have them here today so let me pull a daylight LED or really just a daylight balanced light that's gonna go into this practical household. This one here's 5000 so we'll do that all right. No longer orange. No longer orange okay. I like you orange it looked like you had a bronze tan like you've been out. Something like that right all we did was we diffused our lights we lifted up to eye level and we cleaned up all this garbage in the background this is already looking a lot better than we were looking at it just a couple seconds ago. This is funny I had mine I had a cool bookcase behind me that I used to use a lot and it's not bad and it impresses people because it looks makes people think you read now I do this 45 degree angle thing it's still at my desk but sometimes if you just twist a bit you might see like a more interesting part of your house I mean do you want to try that yeah let's do it that window maybe moves away from you a bit got it so basically moving the camera and moving the laptop just a little bit to see if we can find a more interesting part of the house of course then you can push there also look cool I say we try to dress up the frame a little bit because people are gonna judge you by your bed yeah if you're gonna be there like every day and work or something do a little bit it's funny that what the news guys are doing is now live where you know their their kitchens clearly profited folds of apples and stuff to make it look like they're living but yeah so life yeah so you don't have to get where it looks you know people can figure you out but it's up to you how much how far you want to go now is that why not already so uh this is our frame it's looking pretty good is there anything else that we need to do before we just jump in I'm sound so a lot of headphones and a lot of ear buds they either do or they don't have a microphone in this case it sounds like the key point here is really make that yours does have that right there which is basically a microphone so that'll keep your microphone close to your mouth the entire time and that way if I'm going like this or leaning in and out the audio sounds the same the whole time right yeah and everyone has those because they come with the phone right yeah now before we move on I want to give a quick shout out to Squarespace who will absolutely be there when it's time to update your image now I know it's kind of hard to go out there and shoot especially we get new work specially during these times so you might as well just use this as an opportunity to reflect on your past work and if you don't want to go through all the effort of making a new reel and you have all your films already somewhere on Vimeo this is what I would do make a new page with an images layout screenshot a bunch of those thumbnails for each of your films upload them to the image box and then change the click-through link for each of the corresponding links with the corresponding film literally before you know it you have a film showcase that will put you ahead of the race when it's time to start working again and really all that stuff to do after that is just choose from over 200 top-level domains and it's literally that easy so head on over to squarespace.com to get your 14-day free trial and if you type in squarespace.com slash Indy mogul you're also gonna receive 10% off your first purchase level website or domain which we're gonna put in the description down below so thank you again Squarespace for sponsoring this episode and now back to the episode so already here we have a pretty good frame this is probably about as good as we can get with free stuff again let's say we want to go one step beyond that though let's say we're doing like a regular interview or we're doing some kind of live stream or want to impress somebody how do we make this even better on top of this if you want to make it even better I mean there's nothing wrong with this for the average conference but I was trying to think of what I could do with the laptop lens because you're locked into this wide-angle lens yeah and there's you can't change that but I realized that on my iPhone I used these they're called moment lenses from the moment company now you can put wider lenses and a morphic other things on your cell phone but on the website I noticed the other day that they make this kind of clone app thing where it clips on to your laptop and you put a lens here one of their moment lenses and then you line it up so it fits right on your webcam that's built in your laptop they have a telephoto lens which is a longer lens it's a 58 millimeter and it cost about $100 so we have one here as well we've got a little webcam clip here along with the 58 millimeter telephoto lens I'm gonna put this on so we have this lens on what is the reason why we want a telephoto lens as opposed to a wide-angle lens if you're a professional photographer you almost always use a longer lens to shoot a person because it's more flattering it's not like crazy wide-angle lens right in there so not everyone may notice it but you your image is actually a little nicer of course it makes you bigger anything you're too big then you have to back up a little bit okay got something a little bit more portrait frame I'm gonna try to lean back the problem is that I can't lean back because these ear buds that we recommended last time cables not long enough I'm literally getting kind of held by like a leash here so what options do we have to make this work with this telephoto lens then I'm I'm using a lavalier mic and the record is very long yeah so it sounds like we need something to capture audio a microphone and we need basically something to do headphones as well too so the MacBook only has one port in here for both your microphone and your headphone sets so the thing we need to use is we have a splitter okay okay hear me now yeah all right great okay this is a start looking then sounding a lot better so what do you think about lighting how can we make this like even better than what we have on top of that yeah there's a thing called a Chinese lantern or a round paper lantern like when you're in college you had hanging from the ceiling we used that a lot in the movies actually and probably looks crazy in someone's house but he had a big the sphere they were the lipo in the middle of it it actually gives off a great light yeah and what's cool about China balls is you can basically find them in any craft store like Michaels IKEA IKEA yeah like $15 is super cheap so yeah we do have trend balls here we're gonna swap out this table lamp that we've been using to basically light us with the china bowl let's see what that looks like as far as the difference this is about 45 degrees off from my face right now this has a daylight bounce bulb in it this is a China ball it screaming that softly that you're seeing in my face now if you want to go there lecture level and you like to do this kind of thing you might be a nerdy person then maybe you want to do a backlight or something but are you set up to do something like that I'm very nerdy so yes you're set up to do that kind of thing you don't in the shot like you'd be put on a stand you need some kind of a boom arm or a way to attach it so I have got a super duper cheap flimsy Amazon stand here and we've also got a Kingma arm and this is gonna be together with our little LED light and three of these working together are going to create is a backlight so let's give this a trick and all right how's that Larry not bad so you got our key light over here which is our soft light that's kind of making my face look good and you got this backlight over here that's separating me from the background makes me pop out a little bit too lights number three so we're gonna try to use an external camera now so when you use an external camera what are the key kind of tools that we need that live in the camera itself and also do all cameras work with a setup I think almost any mirrorless or DSLR camera with an H mini HDMI output there's no way you can just plug a camera right into a laptop by itself do you have to buy a capture card or something to make it happen and it's something called cam link you can google it the camera will turn off by itself after a couple minutes so you have to get a continuous power source that plugs into the camera and plugged into a wall so the camera stays on okay so in that case when you get that set up so now we have the camera plugged into the Blackmagic Ultra studio mini recorder and that is basically acting as our new camera but everything else is the same in the frame already looks so much better as you can already see Larry is there anything else that we can do to make this frame look even better to take it that much more well it already looks pretty good but if you wanted to go crazier you can make I think maybe you would kid up the light just a little bit the craziest thing would be now you have a china ball which is great but we used an even bigger soft source like a softbox which is available almost anywhere various price ranges so we have a 36 inch softbox here but they have even bigger ones out in the market you can get things that are like 6 foot or 7 foot you can get huge soft that won't fit in your college dorm yeah 36 inch sounds pretty good let's do it okay so we'll swap out this Lantern now we're gonna stop this out with a softbox one second I think it looks great it's good I can't think of anything yeah this is probably about as good as it gets for webcam footage okay so let's switch over real quick to a nighttime setup and take a look at what we need to change so now we are in a nighttime set we no longer have daylight coming in through the windows anymore we still do have the same soft light here and we do have this little backlight here set up on this little rigged over here but how is this frame looking to you good but the it's kind of dark and like some scary on that side but maybe you can use that practical and turn that on so let me turn this household lamp on okay how is that cool actually yeah and it goes against certain rules you know in filmmaking you know what a giant thing that year that there's like a nuclear warhead in the back of your neck but but I think it looks cool personally but maybe we should see what it looks like gutten work towards ed your frame my dad still looks a little bit bright right that's like pretty nuclear so probably what we can do is we can dim that down a little bit in kind of studio filmmaking obviously there's like Hantz lasers and stuff like that I know they're really pricey they're hard to find we have a Home Depot $6 a little lampshade dimmer so we plugged that in real quick let me try bringing that down and I think one of the things to make sure of when you have a LED and you're trying to dim it or really any kind of light bulb do you want to make sure that it is a dimmable light bulb it's an honorable light bulb but you're gonna get some flickering that's gonna come from these kind of things so this is already looking pretty darn good your camera set on daylight and out of your not day 3,200 all around got it so because we don't have sunlight coming in anymore we don't want the light of our source to be sunlight anymore we want to match that bulb there in the background so I'm going to take this bulb all right so we have our wipeout set to 3200 Kelvin we now have tungsten and tungsten in the background that looks pretty darn good Larry no I think we've come a long ways very quickly and with a lot not a lot of money sounds good okay so now you officially have a nighttime setup as well - so day or night budget or no budget there's kind of no excuse to having good web camera footage out there hey Larry if people have questions about this stuff is there any place that they can find more information about this or can they bug you about this I wrote about a lot of this on my website on a new page Larry Fong calm very easy have the covered some stuff there and also I have some of the products we talked about and some links to get them if you want to you and if we want to have a dialogue about all this I'm on Twitter Larry Fong as well right on again thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode start putting your work out there by going to squarespace.com slash Indy mogul for 10% off of your first purchase of a website or domain but that's it guys go gave Larry some love go find those links go check them out over there I'm Ted this Indy mogul thank you so much for watching that in closet that's uh it's nothing you guys the door that goes nowhere

Channel: Indy Mogul

Views: 607,693

Keywords: behind the scenes, film school, webcam settings, tips and tricks, indy mogul, low budget, moment lens, skype, zoom, remote interview tips, remote interview, remote meeting, remote meeting tips, discord, facetime, high quality webcam, obs, elgato camlink 4k, blackmagic ultra studio mini recorder, studio quality, Larry fong, live interview, news broadcasts, cinematography breakdown, easy steps, Mac or pc

Id: 6NY8wWo_VBs

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020