By Scott Moomaw, COLRS Multimedia Communications Specialist
If you read our earlier post on making your Zoom sessions and home recordings look their best, you already know some of the technical details for making quality videos from your home office. You know about lighting, backgrounds, and camera angles.
But what about other, more practical things you can do?
One thing that often gets overlooked is the clothes you wear. Of course, we all know what it means to wear professional attire. But even then, certain colors or patterns are better avoided. Bright white shirts or blouses, because of how they reflect light, can overwhelm the rest of the screen, sometimes even giving you a ghostly outer glow that could distract or disengage the viewer.
Depending on where the video will be hosted or how broad its reach is expected to be, certain shades of green should also be left in the closet. Most chroma effects rely on green screen technology to create their backgrounds. In a studio setting, a green shirt, or even a necktie, can cause you to literally disappear in the background. In other settings, wearing green can merely invite online mischief.
You should also try to avoid prints and patterns. Ornate patterns and plaids, because of the way they move with you and reflect light, can sometimes “trick” the photo receptors in a video camera (particularly the webcam on your computer, which is not a higher-grade receptor), resulting in a flicker effect that will again be distracting to the viewer.