Gray MacKenzie shows how to improve webcam quality using the Eyeglasses app by eCamm. The demo covers practical camera settings adjustments for better video calls, useful for anyone doing frequent video conferencing.
Welcome back to episode number 14 of Agency Toolbox. I'm your host, Gray MacKenzie and this week I'm going to be sharing with you guys a way that I figured out how to get the most out of your webcam using an awesome app called Eyeglasses. What the heck is Eyeglasses and why is it spelled that way? Great question. Eyeglasses is an app from a company called eCamm. I think their flagship product, at least in my world, has been Call Recorder. They make the Call Recorder tool for Skype. They also make one for FaceTime that they launched within the past year. And those tools are absolutely amazing. If you're doing a podcast and you use Skype interviews, their Call Recorder tool is well worth the 30 bucks that it is. We have been using it since we started with all of our podcasts and absolutely love it. But they also make this app called Eyeglasses and a couple other products. They make a webcam called IQB and some other apps for your computer. But the whole point of Eyeglasses is just to help you optimize the settings easily, kind of improve the quality of your video settings. So I, at least in my life, I do a ton of audio and video calls, conference calls on a daily basis. You guys probably do that as well. And a lot of times I like to have the video on for that. On these conference calls, I find the one thing that drives me, drives me the most crazy is when folks have terrible audio. But then number two is when they either don't show their video or they show their video and it's a little wonky. I'm not saying like I get crazy upset or crazy angry or anything, but it's just, it makes the, I guess maybe it's the flip side. I appreciate it a lot when they have high quality audio and high quality video. So Eyeglasses, I'm going to take you guys behind the scenes, show you how it works and what the product is. Key, give you the link if you want to buy it. It is a paid product. I think it's 20 bucks, well worth the investment. It's going to instantly improve all your video. Alright, here we are on the Eyeglasses page and you can kind of get a preview of what this is going to look like when you're using your webcam. So you can use all kinds of these crazy effects, but you can mostly just fine tune the video settings that you have with your camera so that your video looks a lot better than, than it did previously. So this is the page that they have for it. I'll link this up in the YouTube description and in the show notes. You can see some of the other apps they have over here. Call recorder, all these different things. So at the time I'm recording this, eyeglasses is only $19.95. It is a deal. So let's jump over to appear.in. we use appear.in a decent amount for just real quick video calls, especially with the team or folks who are working closely with. I don't know if you guys are using that right now, but. But that's one tool that we're big fans of. So basically, let me pull up eyeglasses here, pop this open. All right, so that is popped open. You get this little dialog box right here where you can make all kinds of adjustments. So I've got a video screenshot that's paused right now and I did that just by hitting this pause camera. You can pick obviously what camera you have. I'm using an external camera right now which we can get into as well, but the HD Pro webcam C920. This is an awesome camera. Amazon. If you guys put this in your cart at some point or add it to a wish list, you'll probably get notified every once in a while. It just goes on like 50% off deals. Either way, it'd be worth the money. It's an awesome external camera to have, but that's a great camera. But I digress. Meanwhile, back to Eyeglasses. So you can see, I can change the brightness, for example, darken up my picture over here. I know this is going to be a little bit hard to see, set the temperature, obviously play with all this stuff. If you want to get crazy, you can. Here's what I do. I almost always just go to the either standard or depending on my lighting, I'll change it around, maybe enhanced where it'll kind of auto balance your picture out for you to improve the quality there. You can do all kinds of crazy effects in here. If you want to see what I look like as a chipmunk, we can play around with that. I know what you're thinking, that's probably a great look. The frog look. Hello. Let's go. So anyways, you've got all these effects that you can do if you want to be silly and play around. But really most of the time I just pick a setting. You can play with this and customize it and roll with that one. And that is going to improve your video quality. If you're in a low light situation, you need to brighten it up or something that just makes the whole experience more fun for everybody. So eyeglasses, it is inexpensive, it's an awesome little product and I just want to share that with you as something that this isn't the make your life 10 times better today type of tool, but this is a solid little inexpensive tool to just improve the video quality on those calls for you. Alright, let me know if you've used this. If you found another tool that you like that does this same thing. If you wind up buying it, let me know what your experience is like and if there's something else that I should. I don't even know all the things that this tool does yet, so if there's other stuff that you guys have discovered that you want to share and highlight, let me know. We can share that in a future episode. All right, well, until next time, I hope you guys have a great week. If you have any feedback on a tool you'd like covered or problem you'd like to solve, you don't know what the tool is that you need, let me know. You can shoot me an email grayoinbound.com as always, you can get the show notes@doinbound.com toolbox and would appreciate it if you guys just let me know your thoughts on how to make this podcast better.
