Unknown: When you're using video to grow your business, it's
important that you look your best. In this video, I'm going
to give you a few tips on how you can do just that.
Everyone, welcome to this channel, my name is Nick
Palkowski. And here we talk all about videography, and live
streaming, and how you can use that to grow your business. And
recently, I did a presentation for a group of local businesses,
where I talked about how to grow their business with live
streaming. And I want to share one section of that presentation
with you where I discuss a few tips on how to look your best on
camera, let's dive in. We're going to jump and talk about
looking at your best, this is going to be a big thing for
people. And I definitely think it's going to be important for
people. So how can you make your live stream look more
professional? How can you make it go? Well, how can you really
get that through and and make sure things work well, and that
you look professional, no matter what type of equipment you have,
we're going to talk about some camera basics, some things that
you can do to get your livestream across the best way
possible. And so with camera basics, let's jump in the first
thing is going to be to really realize that the lens is your
audience. So you're going to notice even right now, you're
notice I'm kind of looking at you directly in the eye, I'm
talking directly to the audience. So many people when
they're on, you know, even zoom webinars or when they're live
streaming, they'll be, they'll be looking here, they're looking
down at the screen, where you're not necessarily talking to the
audience, you're just kind of talking straight to the screen,
if it feels like more natural because you're looking at the
person talking to them. But when you want to drive home a points
you need to realize that the lens really is your audience,
and that that's going to be the best way to connect with them.
You also are going to want to try and have your lens at about
eye level, you want to avoid having those low shots, you know
where your computers on your desk and your laptop screen is
tilted up. Because honestly nobody looks is not flattering
to have the opinion Oh shot on anybody you like we don't want
those shots we want to have, even if it's your iPhone,
whatever it might be, you want to have it. So your lens is at
about eye level. And you also again, want to realize where
your camera is on the phone, you know, it's over towards the
front here or just gets to know where your lens is on your
different camera pieces have at about eye level. If you're using
your laptop, you can raise it up with some books, raise your
desk, find a box, things like that, you might need to be a
little bit creative. But think about how you can get that so
that you have a really nice frame, your cameras at about eye
level you want your head honestly closer to the top of
the frame like mine is here, versus like slouching way down.
Or having Yeah, and I'm sure you've all seen those ones where
like the people like head is like half in in the shot or in
the video, you want to frame things up. So you look more
professional and look better. All right. And now once you
think about your lens, think about kind of where that realize
where your audience is, the next big piece is to know that you
need to bring the energy. So a lot of us might even be used to
speaking in person, this is where being live. And being on
video is going to be very different than even giving a
stage presentation on a stage presentation. There are other
people there you can feed back, you feel the energy, you receive
some of the energy from the people in attendance, you can
kind of feed off that and be nice and high energy. But when
you're alive, it's you in a room. And oftentimes just use it
in there by yourself. Sometimes you won't even necessarily be
getting comments and things like here, at least I know I'm
getting some comments from people, which is good. We'll
dive into the chat later. But yeah, so that's going to be a
huge thing that you need to be able to bring that energy
because you need to kind of just exude extra energy there to make
things work for people. Now let's I want to quickly talk
just a little bit about what to wear because that is going to
kind of affect the camera a little bit. Things you I'm not
going to give fashion advice overall. But I want to help make
sure that you look the best on camera, you're going to want to
avoid small patterns. I have a really nice blazer I love that
has that's gray with lots of little really tiny white dots
all over. Well, if I was if I was to wear that on here, you
know, some of you might think you're having a stroke because
like the lines will start moving it does this weird optical
illusion and that can happen with any small pattern. So
checkers or any thing like that. If it's big enough, we'll be
fine. But if it's smaller, it can start having weird motion,
just naturally kind of produced from the camera and from the
video. So you're You're going to want to avoid that. If you're in
doubt, go ahead and test it out, check it out, see how that
works.
Other things to think about, generally solid colors are going
to be great. So like a Navy, a dark blue, grays, blacks, those
are generally really solid gray colors, but most solid colors
will play well on camera will look well. Other thing to avoid
is any like dangly or be careful about your accessories. If you
have a microphone on or something like a dangly necklace
or earrings might be hitting that microphone, like if I were
to wear French cuffs, it's not something I'm gonna want to do.
Because every time someone hands down, there'd be a big click,
and you'd hear that through the microphone. So you want to avoid
some of those things and kind of just realize that now when we're
talking about looking your best on camera, big overwhelm here is
going to be gear. And that's going to thing that's going to
hold a lot of people back, I want to briefly run through some
of the stuff because we can talk about gear for days, that could
easily be a full day event kind of thing. But I want to make
sure you don't just buy random gear or something that you hear,
you want to really think about where you want to get to. And
you want to know what's possible with the with the live stream.
And where you want to do is you want to eventually have a
multiple camera in person interview sets, where you have
multiple mics and you have graphics and can add in videos
and all those kinds of things. If you want that, then you need
to know where that's where you want to get to. But you need to
start wherever you are. For many of us, that's going to be the
phone, your mobile phone that will do great live streaming for
most of you for a minute assume all of you. So that's going to
be a great way great spot to start, start there know what's
possible, and then be upgrade focus. So think about along the
lines, how can I continue to improve things can need to grow
things, and how can I make smart purchases along the way,
oftentimes, it's much better to spend to save and spend more
money on a higher quality piece of equipment that's going to fit
within your upgrade of your of where you eventually want to go
than it is to buy something cheaper. Now, that might give
you small improvements. But ultimately break in a couple of
months, believe me, I've done that I've made the mistake way
too many times, you want to have those smart purchases, that's
going to be the biggest thing. So now with this, don't let gear
in general overwhelm you, I want you to really be focused on
adding complexity, slowly getting adding those extra
things in, you're not going to jump in and on your first live
stream, try and do all the things try and have multiple
cameras do all the stuff. I definitely didn't start where I
am right now. I you know things start, start right where you
are, if you're not used to going live, be first time just go
live. Second time work on bringing in the cameras,
bringing or bringing in the comments or answering or
responding to people's comments, whatever it might be, slowly
build on the things that you're doing, don't try to do it all at
once. You're going to get better by consistently repeating this
process by learning by slowly growing. So really focus on just
adding complexity to things as you go along. We're going to
cover gear very briefly, let's first talk about sound. Sound is
one of the most important things when it comes to video. Live
Streaming especially but video in general, people will stick
around if you have bad video, if it's a little choppy, and they
can hear you just fine, good quality audio divar gonna stick
around gonna kind of push through that. Whereas it's the
complete opposite. With videos, the videos, videos, buttery
smooth 4k, but your sound is cutting in and out or a little
bit choppy, people are going to leave that live stream, they're
not going to care about it, they're not going to be able to
watch it, they're more tolerant of bad video than the hour of
bad audio. What I want to encourage you to do is one of
the things is to try to move away from the internal mic as
soon as you can. Just hoarsely it's just bad quality audio.
They have gotten better, significantly better over the
years. But you're gonna want to kind of be careful. And I want
to encourage you to possibly move away from that internal mic
on your laptop or desktop to something external, or something
a little bit higher quality, whether that's
one of the iPhone earbuds or some other headset microphone or
a USB microphone or boom microphone or anything like
that. I want you to just kind of slowly try to move away from
that internal one. But even probably bigger than your actual
mic is going to be the environment that you have the
The more you can create the right environment, the better
your audio is going to sound even on cheaper microphones. So
like if you're doing your last stream in a big, empty room.
room with lots of hard hardwood floors and glass wall and like
lots of windows everywhere, it's going to echo, you're just gonna
get a lot of echoey sound no matter what kind of microphone
you use, you want to try and create the right space. So
simple things you can do is like, honestly, the best
location for sound wise in your entire house is going to be your
closet. I'm not necessarily suggesting you spend all your
time live streaming from your closet, no one wants to see you,
you know, my fashion choices. I don't want to have you expose
other people that either. But you're going to want to think
about how can I add in things that are going to improve my
environment. So that might be soundproofing. You know, in the
studio here, I actually have, we can I can even show you this a
little bit later. But we have obviously not on this one, these
two walls, or at least there's parts in the camera. But
everything else that's not in the camera right now is
basically covered in moving blankets, it's there to help
dampen the sound moving blankets work really well. We have carpet
in here, I have blackout curtains on the windows that are
going to help absorb sound. So we want to have other things
that are going to kind of absorb sound. So blankets, even
grabbing some of those throwing them on the floor pillows, if
you have those, you can throw those around, you know when
working with clients will even bring out like a moving blanket
or it could be another type of blanket and just kind of drape
it again out of the view of the camera, but have it kind of
cutting off those other sides to help dampen some of that sound.
So that's going to be kind of thing, the key thing is really
think about what can you do to kind of dampen that sound. And
then just think about some of your mic options. There's lots
of really great USB mics out there. I'm going to recommend
kind of a great starter one as the ATR 2100, I believe it's x
now they have some sort of letter X or E always forget. But
that's a great, great little microphone, at a fairly
reasonable price. That's a good one if you're looking to make a
purchase, but otherwise you can find headphones that have mics
in them that will be be a little bit better. Just start thinking
about ways to improve your sound. Lighting is going to be
another big key. Another big thing that you can do to really
help improve things.
Lighting makes anything, any type of camera, it's going to
make it look better, whether it's your iPhone, whether it's a
fancier camera, whether it's a webcam, having good lighting
will make it look better. Now, many people are going to start
out using natural light, perfectly fine, great way to go
about it. The key thing is a couple key things you're going
to realize with natural light is yes, sitting in front of a
really nice open window is going to be great for light, it's
going to be a great way to kind of bring that in. You want to
make sure that light is in front of you that's going to be a
general rule here that I'll kind of list for everyone you don't
want a lot of you don't want lights behind you, it will kind
of throw off the exposure people won't be able to see you very
well you'll just be backlit it won't be won't be a good luck.
Now if you really start knowing what you're doing, people are
talking about adding lights the backdrops to create separation
or hair lights, things like that. But in general, start with
lights in front of you. You know whether that's natural lights,
whatever if you're looking to make purchases, again, try to
find good high quality lights, LED lights that are going to
grow with you when you're going about doing that. Now let's jump
into some just camera recommendations. Now you're
gonna notice I want to first of all call this out. We didn't
start with camera recommendations. A lot of times
people want to jump to cameras talk about cameras, they're
always my favorite to talk about to this because they are the
most interesting I feel in terms of equipment. But as long as you
have an acceptable camera, sound and lighting should be the first
things you really invest in first things you look to improve
on because you're going to get more bang for your buck on those
you're going to see higher quality improvement initially
and then start bringing in some higher quality cameras. But even
if you have a really amazing camera or read or anything like
that, if you don't have a lit properly if the sounds bad, is
the overall video is going to be bad. So you're going to want to
first start with a good camera. I recommend trying to jump away
from your computer webcam when as soon as you can. kind of
thing like it'll definitely work. But they're notoriously
bad. Luckily on the latest computers, Apple has started to
improve their webcams which has been great. Very needed right
now in these days. But see if you can find even an external
webcam I really like the Logitech ones. You can also
bring in for Canon cameras for Sony cameras now to just
recently, you can actually if you have any of those DSLRs
around there if you're able to connect them directly to your
computer without a capture card or anything like that you need
to download some software. I actually have a full video on my
YouTube channel that kind of walks through using your Canon
camera as a webcam. So if you want to check that out, I highly
recommend you do so like the entire story. Step in process.
But if you have that DSLR lying around and want to up your
webcam game, definitely recommend checking that out.
Sony does it too, a few others will as well. But one from
there, you can also start looking into talking about
studio cameras and a few different types of studio
cameras. But now that we talked about cameras, let's talk a
little bit. First of all, huge topic again, I could go on for a
long time, I don't want to do that. So Nick Palkowski comm
slash gear guide, I have a full list of all kinds of the gear
that I recommend. But you're also going to want to start
thinking about your background for just kind of your general
scene what that looks like. You want to really be intentional
with your background, think about what are is it that I want
to display, you want to show a little bit of your business
branding, like you wanna do want that to come through on your
background, do you want your personality to come through and
your background really think about those things. And then I
like to try and add some depth to background when when I'm able
to. So like even even here right now I have the desk is turned
sideways and we're actually at an angle in the room just so I
could get a little bit more depth between myself and the
camera, and then the background kind of behind me just as a
little more professional quality to there. Now hopefully you're
ready to look your best on camera and grow your business
with video. Now, to get started with Facebook Live, I want to
encourage you to go check out this playlist right here. Or if
you're ready to learn more about YouTube live streaming, check
out this video right here and be sure to subscribe the
channel and I'll see you in the next video.