Impression management is essential for every business. You wouldn’t show up to a job interview at a bank in a tank-top, board shorts, and flip-flops. You can’t have your communications infrastructure immediately turning off potential clients or customers.
Do you look as good as you can? Do you sound as good as you can?
You may have a 16-seat mahogany table and cases full of leather-bound books, but is that magnificence transmitted over video conferencing?
In this blog, we give actionable advice on improving the impression that you make with your video conferencing system.
How to Control the Impression that Your Video Conferencing System Makes
When people, including us, use the term “video conferencing,” we place the emphasis on the “video” part. But the audio aspect is just as important. This is why you’ll sometimes see the term “virtual meeting” instead.
The goal of professional video conferencing isn’t just to hold a remote meeting and get the job done. It’s to replicate the in-person meeting experience as closely as possible, to enable conversation, inspire collaboration, and display your business’s personality.
So let’s consider each of these aspects in turn: video and audio.
Improving Video Quality in the Conference Room
High-definition video, well-framed and well-lit, with the capacity for effective group coverage and detailed views of individual faces is the goal.
Think of a hybrid meeting where there are many people on both ends of the video call. People in the room see your crisp, new suit but no one on the far end can see it — you don’t want this. You need good video quality.
Let’s start with the video conferencing camera. A webcam is great for personal use but doesn’t cut it in the conference room with groups of people. Figures will be pixelated and look awful: a really bad impression.
During the pandemic, many businesses bought webcams as a stopgap as business rapidly migrated to video conferencing. Many of those businesses have kept the webcams as their primary driver for video collaboration. It’s time to upgrade.
You need a professional video conferencing camera.
It might be a separate device or integrated into a video bar: there are excellent choices both ways. How do you find the best video conferencing camera for your business? Here’s some advice.
Video resolution is a big choice. Most video conferencing platforms today offer 1080p Full HD (or 2MP) video conferencing, and not 4K Ultra HD (or 8 MP), due to bandwidth restraints. So having at least a 1080p Full HD camera is essential. However, having a 4K Ultra HD camera (or better) can be highly useful, because the extra resolution can improve pixel density, the number of pixels used by a camera sensor to capture a given object. Greater pixel density leads to better detail. So if you use a 4K camera and zoom in to, for example, see a face better, you’ll retain better detail.
There are two basic aspects to consider: group coverage and individual faces. Find a camera that fits the meeting room space. If people are closer to the display, you’ll need a wide-angle camera — though be aware that distortion can be a problem towards the edges. If people are arranged along a long, narrow table, you’ll want a camera with a narrower field of view and probably one with good zoom.
There are two types of zoom to be aware of: optical zoom and digital zoom. Optical zoom means the camera is physically zooming in. You might see telephoto lens or tele-lens — that refers to optical zoom. Optical zoom is the gold-standard because there is no loss of detail: the full camera sensor is used at every level of zoom. Digital zoom, on the other hand, means that the camera is taking a section of what a camera sensor is sensing and enlarges it. In essence, this is the same thing as cropping a photo, although some camera systems use intelligent methods to enhance the image quality beyond a simple crop.
If you need zoom, look for a PTZ video conferencing camera. Pan-tilt-zoom: that’s what PTZ stands for. A PTZ camera always offers optical zoom, and usually digital zoom on top of that for extra reach. Panning (moving sideways) and tilting (moving vertically) help you get the adjust the angle that the camera is pointing to improve the shot.
If you see the term ePTZ, that means the camera uses digital methods to pan, tilt, and zoom. The zoom will be digital. Due to advances in camera technology, some ePTZ cameras are almost as good as PTZ cameras.
Look for a PTZ camera that supports presets. Test your conference room before real meetings and find the best angles for showing everyone clearly. Then, during a meeting, it’s as simple as tapping a button to get the right shot. The experience will hopefully be seamless — the far-end won’t even notice it, and the impression you project will be much improved.
Even better: many companies now offer intelligent camera technologies that give you an experience like having a director in the room without you having to do anything. These technologies have a bunch of names: speaker tracking, presenter tracking, auto framing, and so on.
Poly now calls their suite of automatic camera technologies DirectorAI. Logitech uses names like AI Viewfinder and RightSight to talk about their solutions. (Many companies now use “AI” instead of what they used to use: “smart” or “intelligent.”) Yealink is more generic, using terms like auto framing.
Automatic speaker tracking uses beamforming microphones to pinpoint who the active speaker is, then focuses the camera on that person. Seeing facial expressions and lips moving greatly improves comprehension. In terms of impression management, it also communicates the speaker’s personality: they’re not just a distant figure, they’re a vibrant human being. Automatic presenter tracking is dynamic speaker tracking. If the active speaker moves, the camera follows them, keeping them framed perfectly even as their physical location changes.
Framing is essential for a good shot. You don’t want to show a small group of people with a huge amount of wasted space around the edges showing walls or bookcases or windows. Instead, you want the picture frame to encompass all the participants without the frame being too tight or too broad. Automatic framing or automatic group framing means that camera interprets which objects in its field of view are humans and adjusts the framing accordingly. Appropriate framing can really help your group leave a much better impression.
Proper lighting in a conference room is very important and often overlooked. In terms of lighting for video, there are general rules. Strong backlighting is extremely damaging to video quality, but strong top lighting — especially from fluorescent bulbs — can leave people looking far from their best. Having strong but soft ambient lighting is a good general principle. Test out lighting arrangements to see if people are in shadows or too brightly lit. Are your bulbs too white and should be replaced by warmer, more natural bulbs? Look for bulbs with a warmer color temperature.
To help with lighting, there are other intelligent camera technologies to look for. In particular, look for automatic white balance, which adjusts the image quality for more natural skin tones. Automatic backlight compensation is also useful to look for. It sets the light levels to people rather than, for example, windows, so you’ll always get facial detail.
For more information on how to set up a video conferencing room effectively, check out our clear, detailed Video Conferencing Buyer’s Guide. We have a whole section dedicated to setting up professional video conferencing meeting spaces.
For extra-large spaces, you really should consider a multi-camera system rather than using a single wide-angle camera. You might need to use a dedicated AV server like Yealink AVHub to connect and manage the camera feeds, or you might need to connect multiple cameras to a network server. Because of optics, wide-angle cameras distort the picture more and more as you approach the edge of the picture. By having multiple cameras covering the extra-large room, you greatly reduce distortion. If you use PTZ video conferencing cameras, you also can pick out individual faces from the crowd effectively.
We covered one method of setting up a multi-camera system for Zoom video conferencing in our blog, “How to Set Up a Multi-Camera Zoom Rooms Video Conferencing System.” Much of the information in that blog applies generally.
Improving Audio for Video Conferencing
Video conferencing also requires professional audio quality. When thinking about the impression you’re giving, you particularly need to think about your microphones. You can’t rely on a webcam’s internal microphone for a whole group of people. You’ll sound both muffled and noisy — bad for your business’s image.
Look for microphones that cover the entire video conferencing space effectively. Most microphones will have coverage ratings given either as area in square feet or square meters or as ranges given in feet or meters.
For smaller spaces, video bars are an excellent choice. They combine camera, microphone, and speaker in a single device (and often a codec as well). Their microphones generally have between 10 and 20 feet of reach. Often, they’re beamforming microphone arrays, which home in on active speakers to highlight their voices and eliminate background distractions.
For larger spaces, you’ll need external microphones, which can be installed audio solutions like ceiling microphones or flexible placement solutions like wired microphones or wireless microphones.
For even larger spaces, you should look into video conferencing systems that support multiple expansion microphones. Certain video bars support expansion microphones to extend the reach of the system. As with multi-camera setups, you might need an AV server or network server for connecting the microphones. The exact setup varies depending on the video conferencing system and devices you’re using.
When thinking through what microphone will leave the best impression for clients, the most important feature is coverage. You want microphones to be close to speakers. For spaces where people don’t have settled places, wireless microphones allow you to position microphones close to speakers wherever they’re seated. If your conference room is more settled, wired microphones are an excellent option.
Most external video conferencing microphones provide 360° coverage, like a conference phone (which in certain cases can also act as an external microphone for video conferencing). Look for mics with beamforming technology. Beamforming simply means that the microphone array senses where audio is coming from due to differences in sound pressure and focuses on that location. It uses machine intelligence to determine the difference between voices and other sounds.
Speaking of which, there are a whole range of audio enhancing technologies that can greatly improve the impression that your business makes.
For audio, these technologies are oriented towards audio clarity. The primary disruptor in video conferences is noise: people eating food, rustling papers, walking in the background — you know what we mean.
Manufacturers have many names for the audio enhancements. Poly has Acoustic Fence, NoiseBlockAI, and more. Yealink has Acoustic Shield. And so on. These technologies build on industry standard background noise reduction, echo cancellation, and such.
One method is to use the microphones to sense how far away a sound is originating from. The system then eliminates any sound from beyond a given perimeter. In other words, it creates a virtual soundproof wall around your conversation. This feature is particularly useful in open-plan offices, in spaces with busy hallways next to the conference room, and similar locations where background noise is a problem.
Another method is to automatically mute and unmute the microphone depending on if someone near the mic is speaking or not. Most microphones will have a mute button, but you know how easy it is to forget you’re on mute. Or you forget to mute and chomp down on some almonds, making a racket. If you want to avoid this, look for a technology like Poly NoiseBlockAI that dynamically mutes and unmutes the microphone based on the human voice. This technology greatly reduces the transmission of unwanted sounds.
Want personal advice about how your business can better manage the impression that your video conferencing system gives you? Get in touch with our friendly experts today!