Over the past year, for many of us “WFH” has gone from a luxury to a temporary inconvenience to a running gag on the year 2020 to a possibly permanent lifestyle. I thought I’d share a few tips that have helped me in this new Zoom dominated office.
Video Scrum
Scrum has always been a useful tool for engineering teams to coordinate their work. In a short brief meeting everyone on the team states what they had done the previous day, what they were planning on doing today, and if they were blocked by anything. But prior to 2020 it had become something of a formality for many of us, something we knew we were supposed to do but not something we held as particularly important to the team. Our team had switched to a Slack app where we just typed in our status and then it posted it at the appropriate time. It was much easier as we could just add our status whenever it was convenient. And after all, if I really wanted to know what my coworkers were doing I’d just turn around and ask them.
That changed when we were all no longer in the same office. At risk of becoming a team of pen pals, we switched back to live scrums, facilitated by Zoom. It required a bit of extra work on our part as we had to return having a coordinated meeting time, but going back to having something resembling a human interaction with our teammates was worth it.
External webcam
But in order to do a video scrum you need a webcam. No problem, right? Everyone’s laptop these days has one built in, either right above the screen or below in a position specifically designed to show off the inside of your nostrils.
The problem is those webcams are typically horrible. They have low resolutions and don’t focus too well. And they are dependent on where your laptop is positioned, and the ideal position of your laptop’s screen might put it in the glare of a window.
Luckily external webcams are pretty easy to find these days. They come in a large range of prices, from $50 to $200 depending on the features available. But even the cheap ones are pretty good. And definitely better than that tiny thing your laptop’s manufacturer crammed into the bezel.
Virtual Background
Of course a nice webcam brings a problem. Do you really need it showing off your living space in such detail? Do your coworkers really need to see your dining room table, or the pile of boxes behind you? Do you really need them to be able to analyze your bookshelf and see the 12 year old books that you bought before switching to eBooks? I swear, I have no idea how that Struts 1.2 book got up there.
A virtual background fixes all that. It can be something abstract, a nice natural landscape, or even a photo of a really nice realistic office to give the appearance that you aren’t working from home. Personally I like using landscape photographs I’ve personally taken, but there are plenty of sites where you can download images that make for great backgrounds.
Green Screen
Zoom’s built in virtual background support is pretty good, and even works without a green screen by detecting which part of the picture is you. It works ok, but is a bit flaky around the edges and you have to deal with randomly disappearing body parts and pieces of furniture appearing out of nowhere from time to time.
A much better solution is to get an actual green screen. If you have the room you put up a dedicated green sheet along your wall, or get a frame to hold one up behind your desk. But that is kind of a hassle, and not the most attractive setup in real life. The solution I went with was a Webaround green screen. You attach it to the back of your chair and no matter where you are you have a green screen behind you. And then after your meeting you can just fold it up and stash it.
Video editing software
Of course as soon as you put it on you will realize there is a problem. As big and as awkward as it might be, your camera’s viewing angle will likely still dwarf it. The result will be a normal view of your office with you popping out of a portal from the beach or wherever your background is. Which is cool if that is what you are going for, but it does kind of defeat the point of hiding your home office.
I really wish zoom would come with built in cropping or maybe a masking function so you can hide the rest of the image. Or if not Zoom the operating system. Unfortunately as of today, that seems to be lacking. So you have to get third party software to handle it for you.
For Macs the best solution I’ve seen is iGlasses. It costs $20 but that’s like half a tank of gas which you aren’t using commuting to the office. It has a bunch of weird filters if you are into that sort of thing, but much more importantly it has an easy to use cropping function.
Another option is OBS Studio. It is much more powerful, which is great if you want to learn how produce professional quality videos. However it may be a bit overkill if you just want to crop out your webcam’s view of the table behind you where you have been stashing empty soda and beer cans until you can be bothered to actually throw them in recycling I know I’ll get to them soon. But it works on Windows, Linux, and Mac, which is a huge plus. And in addition to cropping you can add an image mask to just cancel out the parts of the image that aren’t you or your green screen.
Of course one downside of cropping is that it will drop the he apparent resolution of your camera. If you got a webcam with 4k resolution you will probably still be ok, but if you decided to go cheap the resulting image quality might suffer.
Lighting
If you talk to anyone who does photography at even a hobbyist level, one thing they will stress to you is the importance of lighting. Our eyes are great at handling wide dynamic ranges of lighting intensities and being able to make up for poor lighting quality. Digital cameras are not so great. Even if you are in a well lit room, if there is an open window looking out on a sunny day, the light from that window will overwhelm any indoor lights. Your camera will not be able to correctly expose both the outdoors and the indoors scene, so the software controlling it will be forced to make a choice. There is a 50% chance it will guess wrong.
So to get your face to show up at a proper brightness you need to make sure there isn’t a light source behind you. Especially not an open window. But even a bright lamp will make it hard to make out your face, which presumably is the thing you want people to see. Ideally you will have a light source in front of you, though above you can also work.
But you also don’t want just any light source. What you want is a diffuse light source. A point light source will give off shadows that may not be the most flattering. Your nose will cast its profile over your face, and every pore or dimple on your face will be accentuated by variable lighting. But a diffuse light source will light up your entire face evenly, in a much more attractive fashion. You can achieve this by pointing your light at a white wall and use the reflective light instead of pointing it directly at you.
Music
Ok, that’s enough obsessing over what you look like. Another fun thing you can do through video conferencing is playing some background music while everyone is gathering. After all, even on a well coordinated team it will take several minutes for everyone to join the meeting, and in the meantime it can get a bit awkward just staring at each other in uncomfortable silence.
With Zoom in particular it’s pretty easy to share your computer’s sound, even if it is a bit hidden in the current version. You just have to click on the share screen button. If you have content you are going to share during the actual meeting click on the “Share sound” checkbox and then share as normal. If not, go to the “Advanced” tab and click “Music or Computer Sound Only”. Then open up Spotify and play away.
Maybe this is isn’t the best place blast death metal at the highest volume. Or maybe it is, I don’t know your team. And even if it isn’t, just lowering the volume can make it a much more acceptable experience for people with a less evolved taste in music.
Other ideas?
Have your own suggestions? Leave them in the comments.