Filming from Home

With a number of interviews on TV programmes now resorting to filming from home to reduce social distancing, is there any examples of the good, the bad and the downright awful that people have seen either recently or in the past.

The most recent example I can think of is Iain Duncan Smith on Newsnight last week, looked like he hasn't upgraded his webcam or computer in quite some time.
https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight/status/1242584028399702016

It reminds me of something...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqVFnxHWnlc

Seriously though the quality was awful.

To be fair to IDS the framing of the shot and the audio there are much better than a lot examples we’ve seen.

True but a bit of thought could have gone into the setting up.

Well presumably the needed quick trip Currys was off the cards.

The Iain Duncan Smith webcam seems to look to me like he's got his screen brightness up far too high and its reflecting off his face, and the correction algoryh... algorhythmim.. algo.. software is overcompensating in its white light balance.

But of course far more likely his webcam is crap, but crap webcams tend to have more jerky/jumpy videos and lower resolution and that was relatively smooth compared to a lot I've seen.

To be honest domestic webcams are all crap to an extent because (particularly the integrated ones like you see in laptops) they're cheap. Picture quality of most of them for this sort of interview technique could be improved massively if people didn't sit with the (daylight) window behind them and they had a decent light source - ie not "energy saving".

Surprised they didn't ask him to use his phone camera..

Given how good front facing cameras on smartphones are these days, it's surprising most don't just rely on those.

A good quality example of how to do it well was Phillip Glenister's interview on This Morning, the quality on that was very good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYdWMC5TwbU

It raises an interesting point. Obviously webcam manufacturers couldn't have forseen what has happened but with the explosion in Skype and various videoconferencing programs it might have made sense to increase the oomph of webcams.

In mitigation though it was a late-ish night interview so natural light wasn't available.

Sky News had the best set-up in Washington which Krishnan Guru-Murthy followed today:

For those that asked about the DC home studios in our last post, here’s a few behind the science shots from @duncsharp of the set ups he built. pic.twitter.com/7x9lhpiwy2

— Sky News Tech Team (@NewsTech) March 29, 2020

To be honest, the lack of basic knowledge about composition and lighting is frustrating.

Matt Deegan of Folder Media published a good guide for home interview set-ups:

https://medium.com/@matt/tips-for-being-interviewed-on-tv-over-skype-55cafe71f5b3

The problem with Skype and Zoom and whatever else is also that because of the way the technology works the bulk of the problem isn't always the hardware, but the compression used along the way.

You can have the greatest hardware on the planet, and once Skype gets its hands on it and compresses the crap out of it it'll soon look like a YouTube video from 2006. Then of course the broadcasters are feeding this through their own systems and upscaling, and it soon looks like an explosion in an artefact factory.

It's interesting that things like Instagram Live or Facebook Live can sometime produce better imagery compared to something like Skype or Zoom.