 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hey, welcome everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today. It's been a crazy couple of weeks. The things seem to have settled and one of the results of what's happening is everyone now is sheltering at home, working from home. So we wanted to take a few minutes to talk about some of the best practices that we've seen when you are joining a video from home. If we've got you scheduled for a CUBE interview in the next several months, we'll probably be doing it remotely with you dialing in from your laptop. I'm sure you're doing lots of Zoom meetings and Skype meetings and WebEx meetings and all the other meetings. So we wanted to go through really a couple of key things to help you have a better quality video experience and there's really six things that we're gonna cover today. Number one, you gotta get a hard line. Bandwidth is super, super important and there's some other things we'll talk about in terms of firewalls, et cetera. Number two, camera position. Really, really important. It goes a long way in really improving the experience for you, but also the people on the other side of the conversation. Number three, we'll go into audio and really best practices on audio. Audio is super important. For background, something that's often forgot about, but really can make a big difference in what's going on. Five, we'll talk a little bit about lighting and six, clothing, which is kind of at the end of the list in a situation like today. One, on bandwidth, a hard line makes a huge difference. Go out, get yourself a dongle. If you don't have a dongle, my favorite brand is Anker, but when you have a consistent hard line, it's gonna make everything work a lot better. At the same time, you also wanna plug your computer in, plug the laptop in. There's all kinds of battery saving functions and power functions that are disabled when you're running on battery power, so plug it in. Talk about camera position. Really, it's all about having the camera at eye level so that when you're looking at your laptop, it looks like you're looking at the people. You need to look into the camera that really helps experience in terms of not looking down or having the camera look up your nose, which is not only an unflattering position, but it's just not a good look. The third thing we'll talk about is audio. Whether you have AirPods, if you're an Apple person, or if you're a gamer and you've got a hard line with a headset and a microphone, this is not a place to skimp. You can use the microphone in your laptop, but it's better if you have a stand-alone microphone. Third thing is background. We'll wait till we get into the other room to show that. And then lighting and clothing. So with that, let's get off this beautiful, well-lit studio and go to an actual situation. Okay, so the first thing we see all the time is people have their laptop on the table. Usually the tops tip back a little bit. It's kind of an up the nose shot. Not very flattering. Nobody wants to see that shot. So a really simple way to get the camera eye level the same as your regular eyes are these handy things called books. So what we'll do is we'll take a stack of books, we'll slip it under the laptop, and what that will enable me to do is get a really good shot. And now I can look at the laptop, I can pay attention to the presentation, and also looking at the camera, it's really close together, and it's a much better experience. Okay, the next thing that we wanted to talk about really is the audio. So you can use the audio on the laptop. It's usually not that great. There's a lot of echo in the room potentially, and there might be a little bit of a lag. So we strongly recommend that you either go with Apple Air Buds, if that's what your thing is, or you get a gamer headset. You want one that has both the microphone and the over ear. The next thing is what's going on in the background? Couple of things you really want to watch out for. Number one, top secret whiteboards. You don't want your whiteboard. In the background, make sure your background is clear of that type of material. But more importantly is really the lighting. What you want to do is make it easy for your camera light, and the way you make it easy for your camera light is to have a minimum amount of super darks and super lights. So one of the things we see all the time with really bright backgrounds is windows. So if I swing my setup here, and if I was to sit with my back to the window, you can see much harder challenge for the camera. It's really not a good look. So if you have a window in your home office, make sure you pull the curtains, put some shades. It's really tough for the camera. Now by simply switching either 90 degrees to the position where I was before, or even 180, which is even better, now I have the benefit of the light from the window coming through, and not as a backdrop, much better look, much better look, adjust the headroom, and here we are. So the next thing I want to talk about is lighting. And lighting is really, really important. So if you can have natural light coming in, turn on all the lights in your room, but you still might want a spotlight for the front of your face. I'm a big fan of what's called a loom cube. Full disclosure, I don't get paid by them. I've never been paid by them. I bought this myself. But I like the loom cube because it's really small. It's really simple, three-chargable, and mainly because it's got a six-step, or excuse me, a 10-step brightness function. And I can get diffusers and filters and all this other fun stuff. So what I could do is put this slightly off to the side. I already have pretty good light coming in from the window, and I can add a little fill with the loom cube. And you can see as I step that up, it gets brighter and brighter. Try to position it so we don't have any clear off the glasses, but you can see that's a nice fill. These things are not that expensive, whether you get a loom cube or some other cube. Go get a little light. It makes a huge difference. Some of them attach to laptops. This one I have on what are called the Joby legs, which are kind of fun little legs. You can stick on any camera. So get a light. Again, this is not only for the cube interview that we look forward to having with you, but it's also for all of your other online meetings, your zooms, your WebEx. The last thing I wanna talk about really is clothing. This clothes is actually a little bit dark. I got the dark blue and black underneath. Again, what you wanna do is make it easy on the camera. So you wanna avoid tight patterns. You wanna avoid tight stripes. You wanna avoid green and try to have something that's pretty easy for the camera to deal with. It's not too bright, not too dark. It's something that is really easy for the camera to pick up. So hopefully you've enjoyed some of these tips. Hopefully this will help you be more productive in your Zoom calls, in your cube interviews, in your Skypes, in your WebExs, et cetera. We look forward to catching up. Everybody hang in there. This too will pass. We'll get through these tough days and just help out your friends, help everybody out. Great to see you. We'll see you next time. Thanks for checking in.