 Hi, greetings from home office. I've had a few people asking me questions of how do I teach from home and how do I make it look good? Well, you need some gear and I will talk about that gear and I'll talk about my setup in this video. We actually have two different setups for teaching from home. One is just by the desk and then we have a bigger place to shoot videos downstairs. I'll first show this desk setup because this is more feasible for most people. So I have this adjustable desk and it's useful to be able to adjust the height but you can simply, if you don't have one, you can just put books under your laptop or something like that. The important things that you need for home teaching setup are a green screen, some lights, a camera, a cell phone will do and a microphone. I'll start by showing what the green screen looks like and I have this, all this gear, I have links on where to buy it linked on the video description. So this is the green screen and it's a portable thing and it's basically like a green curtain and how you set it up is that you just extend these legs and then you put it on the floor and then you pull it up. So I'm sitting here behind this chair, I'll open it and just pull it up. So that's my green background and how the green background and green screen works is that I have a software on my computer that I'll show in a moment that will eliminate the green background from the video and replace it with whatever is on my screen and this is like 180 tons of 150 centimeters and it's good for one person standing or one person sitting. If you are taller than I am, then you can put some books or something under the green screen to make it a bit taller. Let's go on and see the other gear. So what other gear do you need? Well you need a camera, some people use a DSLR but ours is so that you can't use it for recording video on a computer. So I'm just going to use my cell phone and there are software that you can use to capture the cell phone camera as a webcam. Then what I need to have is a tripod to hold the cell phone and I have this fairly expensive selfie stick. This is like 70 euros. I went for an expensive option because I want the cell phone holder to be sturdy. So I just open it, I put my cell phone here and then I hook it up on my computer using a cable and then position it against the screen. So once this is hooked up I put it in front of the screen so whenever I look at the students who I see on the screen behind it it looks like as if I would be looking at the students when I'm just looking at the camera. So one important thing when you talk to somebody is that you look at them into the eyes and in this case it means that I have to focus on looking at the camera here and one easy way to accomplish that is to make sure that the camera or the lens is somewhere in the middle of my screen. So I see the students on this screen behind the camera and when I talk to the students I look at the camera. Another thing that we need is lights and I have this set of two lights. I got the cheapest possible set of two lights with table stands so these are actually selfie sticks that I could find on Amazon and this set of two lights was about 70 euros so that the two sticks with lights was as expensive as one stick and these are a bit wobbly but it doesn't matter because whether your light source is stable or not is not as important as whether your camera is stable and these connect to a USB power source and I have a power adapter here I'm going to hook it up and then I'm going to position the lights and then we can switch them on. The lights should come at a 45 degree to your face so how I position the lights is that they're going to be around here on the left hand side somewhere here and then it should be symmetric and one important thing in choosing the lights is that you want to be able to adjust the intensity of the light so if the light is too intense then it does not look good so these are adjustable so you can adjust the brightness and I will go for a low setting so something like this would be good in the daylight. Another thing that is worth thinking about is that if you have a dimmer for the lights in your room then for example I have a light right above me so if I can dim that a bit then I don't need to have these lights on such a high setting so this is the lights and then what I still need is a microphone and I have this wireless microphone I wouldn't buy this for home studio setup like if I'm teaching by the desk but I got this for another project that I was doing and for that I needed a wireless version but if you're just teaching by a desk then I think a desk microphone will be better but since I have this wireless microphone that connects to the computer I'm just going to use that. Final thing that I use is this kind of HDMI dongle or HDMI display or fake display so this is just an HDMI plug that you plug into your computer and the computer thinks that there's a third display connected so I have basically three displays I have the laptop display I have the external display and then I have this external display and of course I can see what's on this display but how I use this fake display is that this is what my students see so I'm basically setting up a PowerPoint show and this is my protector and I'll just use video capture on this fake display to stream my presentation that the students it's probably some it sounds a bit weird at this point that I'm a fake display but once I show the software setup then it becomes clear why this is so useful thing these cost on like seven dollars or seven euros for a set of three on Amazon so this is a really expensive piece of gear so altogether this setup is like 150 euros the green screen is another 150 euros so we are talking about the 300 euro investment plus a microphone of course you can try doing without the microphone if you have a quiet room then just using the laptop microphone might be good enough so this is what it looks like from the presenter's perspective and everything is set up and I'm standing a bit behind here so you can see the screen a bit better so I have the lights here and I have the camera then there is the laptop that shows my PowerPoint in the presentation view and on the main screen I will have the controls for the stream and also if I'm using zoom that is also shown on there so that's how I interact with the students using this setup I can I can either be here talking to the students from Lapland or I can change the different scenes I've set up these scenes in a software called OBS or open broadcasting studio and for example if I want to show my PowerPoint presentation I will switch to the dummy monitor here which contains the PowerPoint slide it is like the presentation and then I'm standing here I can see myself on the screen and I can point to things on the slide and the students will see me as if I was in the class in front of it so this is what it looks like and the important thing is that I need to be looking at the camera I'll now switch to a screencast to show how you actually set up this system what kind of software are you? Software that I have is first I have this epoch cam software which turns your cell phone camera in this case an iPhone where it works on Android as well into a webcam so I have a camera connected with a cable it works on Wi-Fi as well but cable is more reliable so you install this software you start the epoch cam app on your phone and then your phone appears as a webcam on your computer it's fairly easy to set up then I have the open broadcaster studio OBS studio which is an open source streaming and broadcasting software so this is basically a software that allows you to do video editing on the go let's take a look at the software side of things so I have the setup now I have the lights here I have the camera over there in front of my main display and I'm capturing my main display so let's take a look at the display arrangement first so I have basically three screens on the computer so when I open the system preferences here I have my main display this is the laptop display and that is where my power point is in so that is the power point presentation controls I have power point on that that screen and I set on the power point to be in present review then this monitor here is not actually a monitor that is the dummy plug and that is where the power point presentation goes so this is what the students see and this is what you see on on my screen behind my background so that is the third screen I have set a screen capture on the third screen but the screen is just a dummy plug it doesn't really exist and then I have the main monitor here so you can see in red this is the other dummy plug this is the main monitor the same name monitor contains the zoom call that you see it's the big window here and then there is the OBS the open broadcaster studio which is set up to work as a virtual bedcam the OBS window is set up to be always on top so I can monitor the stream and I can switch between different scenes so I have set up scenes here for example if I don't want to share my screen I have this this nice background where I'm in lapland if I want to share my my main screen then that is also possible so this is the desktop screen if I want to do something show the students and of course then I would move the OBS window and zoom to the to their laptop monitor because to avoid this this kind of infinite loop so this is the the OBS and I have the camera iPhone and I have the background which is a fail or fail in northern finland that I really like and then I have they are the dummy monitor set up here let's do a dummy test scene so that's an empty scene there is nothing on the scene you just see a black window because there is really nothing added then we need to add a display capture and the display capture we can create a new or add an existing one I'm gonna create a new the good thing about adding existing things is that if you want to for example adjust the effects for your camera which you need to do for cropping and other kinds of things then you can just adjust that once and then use the same source in in all the scenes so this is demo display capture and it just captures one of the screens we will need to check which display it is display number two is our dummy screen which contains the powerpoint presentation I'm just gonna have okay so this is everything that we have now and then we need to add ourselves video capture device we need to pick we are gonna create a new one and what it asks us to do is to choose the device so we have epoch cam which is the cell phone camera we have the laptop camera here so this is the uh the computer's laptop's own camera you can see what the laptop sees and then there is um iPhone I guess that is some kind of a internal iPhone thing but we're going to use epoch cam and then there's obvious virtual camera so the obvious virtual camera is is something that gives whatever we have here on obs as a video source for another software so we're gonna pick epoch we we put the presets at high so we take the full resolution full hd what do we need to do now is that we need to remove the green background and we probably need to crop it a bit what we'll do is we change the filters and first what we add is an effect filter and and chroma key so this removes the green background and I'm just gonna have it named the default that default settings work pretty well so the green background now disappeared you can see instead of the green background you can see my presentation behind me and if you have problems like if you have bad lighting or your color is not exactly recorded green you can adjust these settings and they they can make it better or if you adjust them to be too strict then the green screen starts to show instead of the background so we're just gonna close this now or this is now the proper filter then we need to add another filter we need to add not there we need to add a crop filter so we need to crop out the wall on the side and we need to also crop out this background here so I'm just gonna have a crop here and then we tell how much we crop so we need to crop from the top and so let's it's a bit of trial and error to see what's a good value 40 might work and then we crop let's let's try with 150 that's not enough 160 not quite enough 165 and that crops the side and then it we need to crop the other side so this is all let's try 150 no that's that's the bottom so we we crop 150 here now 160 not enough 180 200 let's try 230 235 and we can see that there's a little bit of extra stuff here so we'll need to adjust the cropping a bit let's do 170 so so this is now the camera is set up we have cropped all the things that we don't want the audience to see we have eliminated the green background and then we just position ourselves this it's a bit laggy now because I'm doing a screen capture and I'm doing this this obvious studio thing so I'm using screen capture on on quick time but normally it works well this is just my computer is eight years old so this is a bit too taxing for the computer so what we do next is that we adjust the position make make myself a bit smaller and let's see if I want to be want to be able to point to the middle of the screen then this is probably the right size and then I can go to the side and just start talking and presenting so how do you make this or then be visible on for example zoom what you need to do is to click on this start virtual camera and it creates us a source that we can use in zoom so if we open zoom here so this is now zoom we can see that there's obvious virtual camera and that allows us to broadcast the things that we see here on zoom and this is a way that you can do kind of like a studio quality presentations or close to them from home where you are standing in front of your slides this is our secondary teaching station or kind of like a home studio that we build into a spare room that we use for for yoga and sports and other kinds of things so what we have here is just like a green curtain you can buy these from photography stores this is a three by three meter and I'm going to cut it to the right length cost like 50 euro and then there is there are the rail on the roof or ceiling that I attach it to to make it uh hand there and I'm going to use some kettlebells here to tighten it so I'll just put the kettlebell against the fabric and it's going to keep it nice and tight and I do the same for the other corner so this is the green screen background and what we use if we need to record something bigger or like do something standing with a bit more space at home or if if my wife is working in the office room and I have a like a teaching day then I can come down here for monitor we got a TV here and I put our old TV on this stand and the TV stand is normally it's normally adjusted to the watching height that she would have but it can be adjusted you can you can raise it so it can be like your face height it's a bit heavy so this way you can watch the students from a big screen while you present so that's one thing and the base is like 150 euros the the screen TV we had two TVs so that's no additional cost and then I also have this uh instrument table I don't know what this is used for I got it from I guess it's some kind of musical instruments I got it from Amazon and eventually uh I got it for free because it was broken in in transport otherwise this was second hand and uh maybe like 30 euros this would be like 70 euros if it was brand new so this this holds the laptop and I got some photos here what the actual setup looks like we have a ring light and we use iPhone as the camera and this works really well pretty much the only problem that we have in the room is that there's a bit of echo as you might hear and we might put a curtain on the wall or just put some some mattresses on the on the walls so this is our home setup I hope you enjoyed the video and I think I hope that this gives you ideas on how you can do green screen teaching based on 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