Tips for High-Quality Audio/Video in the Age of COVID-19

Most pressure by teachers, instructors, professors, and trainers to develop and release high-quality online materials instantaneously in this age of self-isolation is self-imposed. Most full-time online instructors put six months to a year of effort into their online courses before they run an online course for the first time. You really don’t need to fake the kind of production values and planning that come out the work done with that sort of lead time. Don’t try, because you’ll just end up driving yourself into a wound up ball of anxiety.

Having said that, one area that people find very frustrating to deal with but is relatively easy to fix is audio and video quality. If you’re moving to a primarily Zoom, YouTube Live, or Twitch teaching or videoconferencing solution, this is something you should spend at least a few minutes thinking about. If your students and colleagues just see you as a blur, you might as well not show yourself at all, and they can’t hear you, you might as well communicate solely through email.

If you’re already having audio-video problems, I’m guessing you probably have this sort of startup process for online synchronous teaching:

1. Sit down in an office chair with a laptop on a table in front of you wherever seems convenient.
2. Open Zoom/OBS/whatever
3. Click Record / Start Meeting

Blasphemy! To make matters worse, your camera/microphone solution is probably something like this:

Quelle horreur!

Putting yourself at the mercy of the light and audio situation of wherever you happen to sit down plus using a laptop webcam is a formula for video you’re not happy with.

Laptop cameras in particular are usually designed for the sole purpose of allowing the laptop manufacturer to claim that their laptops have webcams in them, not to actually produce high quality video.

Fortunately, there are two sets of things you can do to improve your audio and video, and both are quite easy: optimize your recording space and invest in hardware upgrades.

Optimize Your Recording Space

Without training in videography, it can be a bit difficult to understand why the space you record in is so important. But think of it this way: why would film studios develop entire custom-designed buildings if they could just always record outside? Why do soundstages exist?

The answer is that most existing indoor spaces are minefields of weird problems for video and audio recording. You can without realizing it end up with grainy video, stuttering audio, background noise, or a host of other problems.

Fortunately, you can also just follow the list of recommendations below to avoid most of these problems. Following these recommendations will increase even the quality of laptop webcams pretty dramatically, perhaps even to the point that you don’t need to buy a new webcam to get the quality level you want. High quality cameras, in a sense, give you greater flexibility and leeway for recording in non-ideal recording conditions. But if you can create perfect recording conditions, then your camera may not matter quite so much (to a point!).

Here are two general procedures to follow, to optimize for the two issues you’re trying to address.

Maximizing Video Quality

For all of this, I’m assuming you want to record on a laptop. If you only have a desktop, you have fewer options. Before you check the steps below, open your laptop so that you can see your own camera (e.g., the Camera app on Windows 10) and then move around the space you have for recording until you can satisfy as many of these conditions as possible.

1. You will want to record (and test right now!) during the middle of the day, in a room with a window, whether it’s cloudy or clear out. If you find yourself needing to record in the evening, night, or early morning, you may want to invest in some indirect studio light kits like these.
2. Find a room or space with bright indirect light, where you can sit with that light mostly in front of you, and preferably slightly to the side. For example, you might sit directly in front of a window but then turn your laptop and body about 10 degrees to the left or right. Indirect light means that there’s not a light source shining directly on any visible surfaces – think about why we use lamp shades instead of bare bulbs, because it diffuses direct light into indirect light. I personally use a room where I can turn toward a south-facing window with a transparent window shade (which I keep closed on sunny days and open on cloudy days).
3. Ensure that there is no direct sunlight shining in frame and no reflective surfaces. Direct sunlight and reflections of the sun will blind your camera and kill picture quality.
4. Ensure there are no light sources behind you. This means no backlighting. In rooms with lots of windows, this can be a challenge.
5. Once you’ve found this space, look at the video feed and check for uneven lighting. Your webcam software will use a lot of tricks to try to compensate for too little or too much light, but it is very bad at doing this if your lighting is not consistent all the way across the frame. So if you see any bright or dark spots, try to get rid of them, either by moving or rearranging the room.
6. Once you’ve done this, check how much the color of your face is being affected by the color of your screen. Most of the time, you’ll have lots of white background visible, which will cause your face to appear somewhat blue in relation to the things around and behind you. The easiest solution to this problem is to put the laptop further away from you. If that’s not an option, install a blue-light management program like my personal favorite, Flux. Inside Flux, lower the temperature of white light on your computer screen until it is similar to the color of the world around you. For example, Flux will start at “full blue light”, which is around 6500K, so if the world around you is yellow-ish, perhaps try dropping it down to 4400K.

Maximizing Audio Quality

This is a little trickier, since you’ll need to record yourself and then listen to the recording to see how it sounds. Use headphones. I’d recommend the Voice Recorder app if you’re on Windows 10 (which comes pre-installed) for Step 3.

1. Be absolutely silent, close your eyes, and listen for sources of constant or intermittent background noise in the space you’re in. A non-exhaustive list includes:
   1. Air conditioner/heater hum
   2. Ceiling fans
   3. Flushing toilets
   4. Water rushing through pipes
   5. Road noise from street-facing windows
   6. Open windows in general (close all windows!)
   7. Background conversations/chatter
   8. Your own computer’s internal fan
2. To the extent that these sources of noise can be shut off or avoided by moving to another room, do so. For example, when I recorded videos for my online classes in my last place of residence, I would turn off the air conditioning at the thermostat during recording because the best place in the house for light was also right next to the furnace/blower. After an hour (and a 5-10 degrees warmer house), I’d turn it back on. Sometimes I would even set the thermostat 5 degrees below normal and let the whole house cool down before turning it off, to minimize discomfort during recording. If your laptop’s fan is too loud, try moving your microphone away from your laptop (which requires an external microphone).
3. Once you’ve found a promising space, try recording yourself talking, and then listen to yourself speak on headphone with the volume way up. This is how many students will listen to you, so you should simulate that environment. It will also help you hear any remaining background noise more clearly. One other thing to listen for at this stage is echo. If you have echo, that means you probably have a lot of hard surfaces all around you. You can reduce this by either moving to a larger room or by putting a lot of soft surfaces in the room to absorb errant sound waves. Even lining the floor with pillows will help more than you might guess!

As a warning to perfectionists, you will not be able to eliminate 100% of background noise. This is where a high quality microphone, likes the ones I described above, will help, as they will do most of the rest of the job for you. It still won’t be perfect, but it can be very close. And if you’re recording your videos rather than live streaming, you may even have options depending upon your editing software to use adaptive noise reduction to eliminate even the faintest background hum.

All of these optimizations will allow you to take advantage of your hardware to its full potential. But what if your hardware isn’t that good to begin with? Well, that’s what the next section is for.

Invest in Hardware Upgrades

First of all, let me say that if you are on a limited or zero teaching budget, especially if you are underpaid adjunct, you should feel zero pressure to get new hardware. This will make the most sense to people who plan to teach online more in the future and want to build a portfolio of online teaching content, or those who are frequently in online video conferences where people can’t see or hear them clearly, or for those who have some extra teaching dollars available (hahahaha!).

As a preview of prices in the next sections, you can a nice quality microphone for $45 that will help more than any other single change you can make to your recording situation. If you want to trick out your recording space and quality, you can easily spend several hundred, and if you go really high quality, you can get to professional-grade and spend thousands. So there is a huge range, depending upon interest and resources.

Most fundamentally, two pieces of hardware will help more than anything else, and one will help more than the other.

Most Important: A Nice USB Cardioid Microphone

A high quality microphone is, above all else, the most importance piece of hardware you can upgrade. Laptop microphones are notoriously horrible in terms of quality – if you’ve ever heard someone that always sounded muffled and dropped in and out randomly, it’s probably because they were using a laptop mic.

High quality USB microphones for our purposes here have two major characteristics: noise reduction features and unidirectionality. Almost any microphone with both of those will have all of the other features a microphone needs (e.g., high sampling rate, good captures of low, mids, and highs, etc.), but if you go beyond the ones I recommend below, you will probably want to investigate those features yourself just to be sure.

Noise reduction refers to the reduction of background noise in the recorded audio stream, such as humming from air conditioners and heaters. The louder the background noise, the more you will be drowned out by it, so you want to get rid of it automatically as much as possible. Noise reduction means that there is some sort of hardware or software process being used to reduce noise in real time, similar to the way “active” noise-cancelling headphones work. It’s fairly difficult to determine how good a microphone is at noise reduction without looking at reviews – you want to see that it handles both loud recordings and quiet recordings equally well. That’s a major sign that it’s been designed to deal with varying levels of background noise.

Directionality refers to the direction the microphone captures sound from. Generally speaking, there are two major types of microphones: omnidirectional and unidirectional. Omnidirectional microphones are generally cheaper and do what it sounds like: they capture sound in all directions. The problem with an omnidirectional microphone is that it captures sound behind it. When you’re sitting at a laptop at your desk with an omnidirectional microphone, what’s behind it? Usually the wall! And walls are essentially giant sound-reflecting surfaces that will grab every scrape, every hum, every tiny noise in your entire room and beyond.

The solution to this is a unidirectional microphone, the most common of which is a cardioid microphone (named so because the sound capture area roughly resembles the shape of a heart – see the diagram on the left). With a cardioid mic, sound capture comes primarily from the direction the mic is pointing, which should hopefully be toward your face! Thus, good cardioid mics also cut way down on background noise independently of their noise reduction abilities.

So how much do these things run? Fortunately, not too bad! If you want an inexpensive but quality cardioid mic, I would suggest this one, the Blue Snowball iCE , currently around $45 on Amazon (notice the 10K+ ratings!), which I used for several years. It’s a classic favorite of entry-level YouTubers and podcasts.

If you want to move a step up in quality, the Blue Snowball (not iCE) has a slightly better sound quality for about $20 more (see this YouTube video for the specific differences), but I myself recently upgraded to the Blue Yeti, currently around $130 on Amazon, which has better sound quality than either of the Snowballs and slightly more focused directionality, which will matter more in non-optimal sound recording environments. You even have the option to switch between omnidirectional, cardioid, and even stereo modes (which is great in certain contexts), making it quite versatile later down the road. Much more comparing Snowball with Yeti in this video. In any case, this microphone is definitely way overkill if you don’t plan to talk online a lot.

Second Most Important: A Nice USB Camera

High quality webcams have high resolution capture at high frame rates.

In real terms, high resolution means your picture will be more crisp, and high frame rate means your movements will be more fluid. Frame rate particularly matters if you want people to stare at you while you’re talking, so that your lips are perfectly synchronized with the audio.

Even the best webcams still have tiny microphones, so you don’t want to upgrade the webcam and expect your sound to improve. A webcam’s microphone may be better than your laptop’s, but it will be nowhere near the quality of a standalone microphone.

In evaluating webcams, you want one with a picture and frame rate comparable to what people now expect in decent-quality YouTube videos.

For resolution, you can go up to 4K, and all 4K cameras have decent to great framerates. This is also way overkill, but if you want to do it, I won’t stop you – try out Logitech’s Brio, which is over $230, and let me know how much you like it! But be warned that you need a fairly modern computer with a decent video card to handle the sheer quantity of data that a 4K video stream will create and need to be processed.

A step down from that, which is what I use currently, is the Logitech C930e, which seems to be backordered at Amazon but for good reason. The C930e is a 1080p camera (which means sufficiently high definition where a student or other learner could watch you full screen on their laptop without any graininess) at 30 frames per second (fps; the frame rate), which is the minimum frame rate you want for online video.

If you want to move beyond Logitech webcams, I don’t have much experience, but you will want that combination of technical features: at least 1080p resolution at 30 fps. Be warned that some cameras advertise 1080p and 30fps as independent features. For example, the camera may support up to 1080p photos but can only reach 30fps at lower resolutions. So be sure you can find some documentation somewhere saying 1080p @ 30fps specifically.

Less Important: Convenience Hardware

Once you have a new microphone and webcam, you have a huge range of options for accessories to make your life slightly better.

My biggest suggestion is a tabletop webcam tripod. One of the biggest annoyances I have when watching video is when a laptop gets tapped and it causes the video feed to bounce up and down. If you get one of the Logitech cameras I named above, you can get any webcam tripod with a traditional camera attachment, which looks like a tiny bolt. You can see what I’m talking about clearly in the image for this tabletop tripod. In general, you want a tripod that can put your webcam at roughly nose level – you generally want to look very slightly down at your camera, if possible.

A second piece of hardware that can be convenient is a pop filter. These are most important if you tend to pop your p’s, which causes a very unpleasant noise on the listener’s end. There are many varieties, but I’d suggest a generic one that can bolt to any generic microphone base. If you really want to get deep into pop filters (and who doesn’t!), try watching this video.

A third piece of hardware that’s usually more for fun is a green screen, which technically doesn’t need to be green. I use this one and find it convenient for it to auto-spring open when I want it and fold down when I don’t. You can also for much less money just buy a giant green cloth and drape it over furniture behind you. There’s not really much point to green screens in this context except to replace the background behind you with something more fun. But if there’s anything we all need right now, it might be a little more fun.

The fourth piece of hardware I might suggest is that if you don’t want to take up too much desk space, consider getting a suspension mic boom. Suspension booms allow you to permanently or temporarily bolt your microphone to the side of your desk, out of the way, and then pull it down only when you need it. If you lack desk space and find that you don’t have anywhere to store your mic, a boom can be a great accessory.

A Word of Caution

Once you install all of this shiny, new hardware, remember that you now have multiple cameras and multiple microphones on your computer. That means in Zoom, or OBS, or WebEx, or wherever, you need to tell your computer to pick the camera and microphone that you actually want to be using, which may not be what it does by default.

This is usually quite obvious for the camera, since if it’s set incorrectly, you won’t be recording from where you think you’re recording (i.e., you’ll look at your Logitech webcam but the video feed will show you looking off to the side).

This is much less obvious for the audio, as buying a dedicated microphone and external camera means you will now probably have at least four audio sources on your laptop: a traditional 2.5mm or 3.5mm plug, the old webcam mic, the new webcam mic, and the external mic. So be sure, whenever you open a recording program, to double-check that your audio has defaulted to your nice mic!

Summary

Overall, you’re going to get the greatest bang-for-your-buck by optimizing your recording space for light and sound, which is free. You may even find that you get enough of a quality boost that you don’t want to invest in any new hardware.

If it isn’t enough, a nice microphone is going to give you the biggest obvious improvement in recording quality, followed closely by a nice camera.

Beyond that, get whatever whatever accessories make recording easier or make you happier (green screen, I’m looking at you!).

In general, remember that even the nicest hardware can be sabotaged by a poor recording space, and even the best recording space can’t overcome junk hardware. Balance in everything, as usual.

That’s it! I hope this helps you create video content you are proud of!