459 Simple Video Advice for Accounting Firms

Today we're getting into video still the best way to like asynchronously connect with people, be it clients, be it prospective clients. And I know we don't identify as like this video personality. We compare ourselves to all the people that do this stuff really, really well. And so today, like, this is not 400 level stuff. This is how to make it as accessible as possible, how to not waste a bunch of time. We're going to talk about the best software for cranking out video in really simple ways. The best hardware for, I. E. How far can I get with a webcam? And if I want to go further, like, what are the next couple things to buy? But also just like a whole bunch of practical nuts and bolts from me having done video the last five years, but also taking that time machine back to when I was real busy running a firm, and where did I use video and where did I not use video? So we're talking about today. Let's get into it, superstar. You're going to be looking so good. People are going to be watching these videos. Like, who's this person? Wow, that's your accountant. Okay, straight off the top, just worth saying aloud. Production value will always be secondary to subject matter. But what we do is we see other videos that are really, really good and we're like, okay, so what I need to do in order to have good videos that people will watch is for my videos to look like that. When in reality production value is very much secondary. In fact, there's a number of business channels now that are like super, super lo fi, like basically loom videos, like very basic screen recordings, little talking head bubble that have blown up to get really big. In fact, Alex Hormozi back in the day, he grew his channel with like virtually no production value. So let's not get trapped on this too much and keep perspective of what's ultimately most important, which is, am I saying something that's valuable to a specific type of person? Saying things that are universally valuable, extremely hard. But the more specific type of person we're speaking to, the easier it is to give them something really, really valuable. Now what would you even make videos about? I generally recommend that people start with like lower stakes internal types of videos. So let's say a weekly routine, something you got to do every single week in your firm that could be done over video instead of over an email, just over text or phone call or something like that. We've talked a lot about video delivery. That's been like one of the biggest unlocks, folks have gotten from my content is delivering tax returns, delivering month end closes over video. Short, simple three minute videos. Don't overthink it. The clients love it. The clients who didn't open your email or didn't look at the PDF before, spoiler alert, they won't look at the video. But those aren't the people that we're trying to optimize for. And in this day and age, like we are just. I feel like we are heading down the highway like out of control into an AI era where there's just so much slop and we are already seeing it so many places where what is the, the sort of counter to this? How does this change human behavior? I think if you look at Covid for example, and us all having to work from home when we bounce back from that there was such a hunger for any type of in person experience, right. And that was a product just of being starved of that. And as more content in the world and more support experiences and email interactions and more and more things, things day to day are like we're interacting with AI as that proliferates everything. I think the reaction, the very natural human reaction to that is just a longing for connection and an actual human being showing up on video and saying something of value there. There's something just like biologically in us that attaches oursel to that. So I think this is only getting stronger. And yes, you can create like AI avatars that are pretty convincing of yourself saying things. But I think for all the reasons I just ran through, I don't know that those long term are very interesting. I mean this is something that we could have done on my podcast years ago just having an AI version of me on video. But we don't and I think the level of connection is completely different. Ryan Lozanus let's pick on Losanis. I think he still does this. He uses 11 labs to generate the audio for his podcast and his content is really good. But just know if you're going to do something else like that, that in my mind that really raises the bar for how good your content ought to be. Because at the end of the day that's basically akin to selecting a bunch of text on a browser page or something like that and saying, you know, read aloud to me this text little different cause it's in like you can tailor to actually be in your voice. But the, the best medium for connection like it's, it's video. Well that's not true. The best medium for connection is actually like in person stuff with people, the second best is video. And the upside of video is it can be either synchronous, that is happening live, talking with someone over zoom or something like that, or asynchronous recording a video and sending it to them. And asynchronous video gang, it is such an unlock just using it for tax return or bookkeeping deliveries. Like that's just scratching the surface of the cool ways that we can use asynchronous video. I mean as simple as the next time you're going to send somebody a thank you text or something like that, send them a 10 second video instead. Like it's, it's just completely different. Now is there a counter argument here that that's like higher friction and more annoying and harder to consume? Sometimes. But in the context of our business, like when we are delivering stuff to clients, that's a situation where the alternative might be a live meeting or like this is an important thing where the attention span, like we always have to be mindful of what are people, how much attention span are people willing to commit to consume this thing. Delivering something to your clients, we can approach that with a different expectation than a random person scrolling social media, right? Like when they provide the quote of like, well, 8 out of 10 people scrolling social media have auto off, audio off and they just read captions. Why in 2025 would I send my client a video explaining financial statements? Because this is, these are not the same thing, somebody scrolling a social media algorithm. Very different than like your trusted advisor sending you something. And yes, not all clients assign the same value to that. And we can unpack that, you know, a hundred different ways. And that, that usually comes down to like the client's perceived value of what you do. It's just not, it's not very much. Which means you haven't found the client profile yet that like gets excited every time you send them an email because the problems you solve are so painful for them. All that is to say, don't be afraid to send your clients videos. Like not about trivial things, don't waste their time, but don't be afraid to get on video. Okay, There's a hundred steps after that from like making YouTube videos new and short form content and social media and all that. The reality is 99% of accountants, like we're not even doing the very basic versions, internal video and video for our clients, which is the place to start. So I, I'm just going to focus on that since that's where most people are and the other stuff are like kind of logical progressions from there and you can find an abundance of thought leadership on short form content and YouTube videos and all that. You don't really need me for that one resource actually I gave away last week I think it was that I'm quite proud of. It's 30 chat GPT prompts for your meeting transcripts. We could put a link to this resource down below. Go swipe it. Basically there's a ton of really valuable things that you can harvest from your meeting transcripts. And if you're unsure of what to even make a video about or if right now you're willing to say make a client video every single day using AI with your meeting transcripts can give you some fresh ideas for what you could make a video about. So some examples I'll pick out from this. And again you can swipe this down in the show notes. Here's a a a prompt post idea generator. Generate a numbered list of 10 LinkedIn posts I could write about the advice I provided in this meeting. Focus on non obvious lessons. It could be framed up with a good hook. Just gimme the concept and hook. Don't write the post podcast outline or create a podcast outline that reorganizes the advice I gave in this meeting into a logical pro progression. I'll use the outline to record a 30 minute podcast. Just give me the hierarchical structure of points to hit on. Bunch of other ideas in here from like Framework Builder. It'll build a framework around sort of the things you said as you were advising. Those are a few of the marketing prompts, some more advisory oriented prompts. Need assessor. It'll extract maybe some needs the client's communicating that we aren't addressing. Just a tactical analysis of everything that came up to see if there's any other ideas that I could give them. You could like exercise this video muscle by sending a client a day a video and a really good source for what am I going to send this client a video about. Could be your most recent meeting transcript with them. Let's get down to brass Dax Software, hardware and just some tips around video starting with software. Don't overthink this. The easiest way to capture video it's Loom. Has been for a long time and still is. Loom kind of invented the talking head bubble format. And what it does really really well is it not only records the video, it also hosts the video for you. So as soon as you're done shooting that little video, you've got a link that anybody can go out and see that video at as opposed to say recording a video on Zoom, well, then you have to like go put it somewhere where someone can see it. Or if you record a video on your phone or with a camera or something like that, you still have to take that file and put it somewhere where people can watch it. That's kind of the novelty of Zoom of Loom. That is just loom.com we'll have links down below for all this stuff. So capturing, hosting like Loom makes all that easy. Although like the Loom software, it has always kind of been buggy. Unfortunately I haven't found any better alternatives. Still. Now, the cool stuff that Loom also does now is it will do things like use AI to create an SOP from the transcript. So like, if you're talking about a process inside of your firm, how to do X, Y, Z, it auto creates a transcript that is the text of everything you said. Then it will also use AI to create an SOP that is like a kind of a step by step structuring of the thing that you just said. That's pretty cool. But for the purposes of video, the most useful thing that it has is the ability to make quick edits to a video. That is you can clip stuff out, cut stuff off the beginning, off the end of the video. And it's so quick and so easy to do. Requires no video editing skills. Like you literally just go to the spot on the timeline, you hit the little scissors and you can get rid of anything you want to get rid of. Which brings me to probably my biggest, most useful video tip that I can give you. Which is if you're trying to deliver something specific, like maybe you scripted it, or you just really overthinking it and you make a mistake and you say the wrong thing, which everybody does in the beginning, the very best thing that you can do is not stop the whole process and start over from the beginning. But if you make a mistake, just. Just take a deep breath and go back to the beginning of the last statement and keep going. So don't start over from scratch, just resay that same sentence. And then with Loom, when you get to the end of the video, you can clip out that one sentence, like where the first time you tried to say it, you made a mistake. So once you start recording, you don't stop until you've said all of the things that you need to say. But then if you make any mistakes throughout there, take another take, like say the same thing again and then at the end just remove any of the mistakes that you have. So it's all one big recording. The alternative is like you try to do it in one shot and you start over again from the beginning every single time. Almost everyone does this when they're trying to start video and that gets really frustrating, really sweaty. End up trying it 10 times and you're just, you're not happy with what you've got. Instead, record it beginning to end and if you make any mistakes, just do a retake and then you clip out the mistakes in the end. And that hasn't always been possible because we haven't had a really simple like built in editor like Loom has, but because when you get to the end, it's as simple as just clipping out those mistakes. It's really easy. And don't overthink this to think like, oh well, the. Will the, the viewer be able to see the cut in the video? Like it's going to look, I don't know, overproduced or they'll notice that there's a jump. Like nobody gives a crap. Like really great to keep in mind with video is you are your own worst enemy here. Nobody cares what you look like. They don't care about stuff like cuts in the video. Like the only reason they're sitting there and watching that is because they think they can get something of value from it. That's genuinely all that matters. Now there's some stuff like you don't want it to look unprofessional. We do talk about how like clients will form their opinions about the part of the process that they do understand because they don't understand the technical stuff and how you deliver over video, like how polished it looks. It does make a bit of, bit of a difference. It's no different than like coming in and having an office in your waiting room being a, you know, a total mess versus having kind of a nice setup. It, it's part of the overall experience. So we, we need to pay some attention to it. But oftentimes we put, we project way more onto it than the client actually thinks. Like, they're not thinking about how your hair looks. Don't overthink that stuff. Today's episode is sponsored in part by TeamUp, the people who help you find talented accountants in the Philippines and hire them directly. Did you know in the Philippines there's actually some really good tax talent out there? What did he just say? You can hire tax professionals in the Philippines? Of course you can. You can hire any type of talent. In fact, Big Four's regionals, they all have huge offices in the Philippines. Hiring there looks. I mean it looks a lot like hiring in the States. Let me give you the profile of a recent an actual hire team up made for a firm who was looking for a senior tax accountant. They had over 20 years of accounting experience. The last eight with US accounting firms working on tax they'd done it all. Partnerships S Corp. C Corps Individuals trusts proficient with QBO Lacert Go System Tax RS oh gross. CCH Engagement sureprep Tax Caddy Nice firm hired this person. What do you think they cost? Drumroll please. 2,700 USD a month salary for a senior tax accountant in the Philippines. Usually going to come between $2,220 $800 USD per month. A lot of folks worry about whether this jeopardizes like your onshore pipeline. I always tell folks doing the two things they are not mutually exclusive. I need to be building talent onshore. But when this sort of talent is about a quarter of the cost offshore, the reality is I also need to be building talent offshore. I got to be doing both. Team up. They just work with accounting firms. Great place to start to learn more about them. Check out the link down in the show notes. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Makers Sub. I took some heat on social media lately because I said that nobody's crushing accounting AI. And if you think about it, the tech in the accounting vertical, there's like, I hate to say this, there's kind of no cool AI happening there. The cool AI is like meeting recorders, chatgpt stuff outside the accounting vertical. But there's one exception to that. And the exception is Inside accounts payable. MakerSub arguably the leader here. They're like an AI first accounts payable, like bill pay solution. They are driving innovation on what is literally the fastest changing part of accounting. The part of accounting AI is most disrupting AP and it's because vision models combined with large language models can get us way further than OCR ever could. Visual models, they can read everything down to like handwriting. Way more accurate than OCR was. But then large language models, they can use a bit of intelligence to be like, does this pass the sniff test? Like, does this actually look correct? And the combination of those two things, like it can, it can take it way further than ever before. Maker Sub especially good at really hairy stuff. Pulling a huge number of like itemized things. All the, all the dumb ways that people invoice you that are like off the wall. Done some demos of Makers Hub actually on my YouTube channel if you want to See how it works in like five minutes. It is very, very good. To learn more about maker sub, check that out or check out the link to them down in the show notes. Now if you want to take this further and honestly I recommend that you don't like the for every single one of these things we should be optimizing for repetitions because the biggest thing that will improve the quality of your videos is how many you have done. And the most common trap I see is and accountants, we love to overthink everything we plan. We do like three months of planning and we buy all this gear and we make it hard and it either all sits in the box and you never set it up, or you set it all up and it's a bunch of work to do it and so you never use it. So name of the game is simplicity. I need to be from where I am to shooting something in 15 seconds or less because if it's any more than that, like you won't use it. We we perpetually underestimate how lazy our future selves are. So just assume that unless this is just stupid easy for future you, you won't do it. And that's why I just super recommend going with loom if you want to go beyond that. The only other software that most people should be looking at is another tool called descript. Descript is just a more powerful editor, but it is still simple enough to where an admin can do it. Like these podcasts for a time were edited on on descript. A lot of like very popular YouTube stuff is edited on descript. So the ceiling is much higher with descript. But the important thing for me is it's still usable by a non video professional. Because as soon as you jump from an admin to like a professional video person, you're talking like 3 to 5x the cost. So if you're going to do a podcast, for example, for your accounting firm, going to a podcast agency, you're going to pay a lot of freaking money for every single episode to be edited. As opposed to hiring an assistant, like an offshore va, something like that. They can use it to script, they can edit this. Like the last 10% won't be perfect. It won't be as good as what a what most professional agencies will do, but you'll get the 80% version at like 10% or less of the cost. If you're looking more that direction then descript is a slightly more powerful tool that could help you. Links for both of those below. Now that's software. Let's talk about hardware. Step one on hardware is whatever you've got, like, don't overthink it. I'm personally not a very big fan of using smartphones for video unless you're in the Mac ecosystem. With smartphones, you have the problem of how do I get the video from from A to B. And the really nice thing about Loom, if you remember, is you can shoot it. And the moment you're done shooting, you have a link you can copy and then share that with with anyone. But with a smartphone, like, you still have to get that video file somewhere. The best version of this is Mac, where I can just airdrop a file from my phone to a computer, and that's pretty quick and easy, but I still have to put it somewhere where it can be shared. So, for example, I could still go out to Loom and then upload the video that I just shared from my phone to my computer. But that's like two or three steps that usually don't make much of a difference, like the quality of what my smartphone will record versus whatever hardware I have. So this might be a laptop webcam. That's probably the worst of all the options. But again, at step one, like, start with whatever you've got. Think about what's the fastest path to getting my first hundred crappy videos out of the way. Like, that should really be the goal is how do I get through those as quickly as possible. It's like back to the kind of the story of, like, the people making pots where you. I don't know if this actually ever happened or not. I imagine it didn't. But the idea you have two different groups of people. The first group spends a hundred days on making one pot. That's amazing. The second group makes a hundred pots, and all those pots are worse. But like, every single day, they make a new pot. And by day hundred, their pot that takes one day to make is way better than any of the people's pots who spent like a hundred days on one pot. Right. So same thing with videos we're looking for repetitions. Don't make it super hard to do. Make it as easy as possible. So step one, make a bunch of videos with whatever you've got. If you're not making videos right now, don't go to step two. Step two, it's probably, I think, the only webcam worth buying right now. It's called the Elgato facecam link in the show notes, It's 150 bucks. It's a little more than, like your Entry level, sort of Logitech. That's about 80 bucks for me. If I'm willing to buy something to do this, another 70. Like that's not a inhibitive investment for me. One thing with Elgato products is the software is very, very good. Most webcams, Logitech included, come with awful software that just is, is not very good. Elgato does a great job with the software that supports the device. The face cam. It's the only webcam I would fuss with until I want to go up to a mirrorless or dslr. Basically a camera that has both a separate B body and a lens. So like the face cam is the only one I'm going to worry about until I'm going to. Until I'm willing to spend maybe a th000 bucks on camera gear. The differences are just going to be so marginal for anything between that range. So step one is whatever you've got. Step two is no gotta face camp. Step three is not a better camera. It's lights. It's learning how to use lights. And the little like consumer ring lights and the crap on Amazon, like is not even worth buying. It really isn't. It's really bad. It's not powerful enough to be able to light you from very far away. And the quality of the light is very, very poor. So not all lights are made the same. For example, the lights we have in this room, like they are professional production lights. Like that goes way beyond say light temperature, for example, from like the blue to the yellow hue. It is like genuinely the quality of the light. It looks very, very different on video. A poor quality light versus a high quality light. There's a bunch of factors here, but the biggest one is called cri. And it's basically like, so when a light shines off you, what you're actually seeing is the reflection of that light off of the thing. And different types of lights will more or less accurately reflect the correct color. So you take a red apple, for example, and shine a crappy light on it and a very good light on it. That color of red will actually look completely different in a camera with a good light versus a bad light. The crap on Amazon, like it's just all junk lights and they're generally not powerful enough to be useful. So step three here is the very, very entry level, like prosumer lights. And they're not that expensive. It's from a company called Aputure. Aputure makes professional lights, but they have a more like pro sumer line called Amaran the entry level light for Amaran, it's called a 60D. I've got a link to it down below. It's 170 bucks. But with a light like this, you have to put what's called a modifier on the front of it. And the modifier basically controls what happens to the light once it shoots out of the thing. It's kind of like a big, more expensive camera that has to have a lens. Think of the modifier as the lens for the light. And so what I've shared in the show notes is like the entry level light, that's 170 bucks. An entry level modifier that is 90 bucks. But then you also need a light stand that is basically like a tripod but for lights to then put that light on. All in all, you're into this 300 to 350 bucks. So like if you bought an Elgato face cam for 150 bucks and you're like, I'm ready to go bigger, I'm going to spend 400 bucks on a camera or something like that. That's the purpose of this. Step three, don't buy another camera. Buy like entry level prosumer lighting that will have a way bigger impact on how you look even just using that Elgato face cam still. And if you buy, if you spend a thousand bucks on a camera but you don't have any sort of lighting, it's going to look really bad. My first videos with a DSLR back in the day, like they did not look any better than my webcam videos because I hadn't learned how lighting actually works and framing and all that. So when you're like, once you're two step three and you've got some like entry level prosumer lights like this and you want to go further, the next jumps probably a thousand bucks to a better camera. Sony's got some good offerings there, but I won't even go down that path because most of us are still just working on a webcam. So don't go for a $300 camera. Like there's genuinely no camera that is worthwhile in that 200 to like thousand dollar range. Generally you're better off spending your money in that range on lights. Last, just a practical rundown of kind of the most important things to look out for with any camera, any lighting, anything like that. Framing is incredibly important. So your eyes should always be about 2/3 of the way up the frame or just above that. 80% of the people you get on a zoom call with their Eyes are too low in the frame. Try to pay attention to this. Makes a big difference. The other thing is the camera height relative to the height of your eyeballs, like the height from the ground. So if a camera is too high, and this is the most common thing we see for desktop webcam users, is the camera is looking down on you. This has, like, a real psychological effect on how you perceive the person over video. Like, you are looking down at them, and there's sort of this sort of diminutive perception. Similarly, if that camera's way too low and it's like looking up your nostrils, that's just weird, too. And honestly, I think what we. What we perceive this as is, has kind of been shaped by, like, laptop webcam users or, like, confused people trying to use a device and holding it way too low and, like, looking down at it. So, like, there's definitely negative connotations with that camera being too low. Best way to do this, your camera should be kind of just below your eyeline, so it's just looking a bit up at you. And so, like this camera right now, for example, it's, you know, maybe three or four inches below my eyeline. The psychology of this is you're looking up a bit at me, and there's like, this mammalian sort of evolutionary thing where looking up at something assigns a different level of kind of importance and. And intimidation is probably too strong of a word, but like, that. That stuff is real as opposed to looking down at something. So when the camera is slightly below your eyes, you look just more authoritative. Now, I'll say it again. The subject matter is the biggest thing at the end of the day. But if you're really looking to dial that video, stuff like that, it is worth keeping in mind. Ensure that your eyes are around two thirds up the frame and that the camera is just below your eyes. Logistically, this can be a real pain for your desk setup because you're like, well, I don't. I can only put my webcam on top of my monitor, and I can't move that. This is a great argument for monitor arms. Monitor arms can go all the way down to have that monitor all the way on the top of your desk. Monitor arms can go way up. So you hop on a video call, you just adjust that monitor, but you slide it down a little bit lower than you would normally want to have it. In fact, the best ergonomic position for a monitor is actually for your monitor to be slightly above your eyeliner. This can actually improve your energy levels as you work if your monitor is just above your eyeline, most monitor stands, they will position your monitor to actually be quite a bit below your eyeline. And like our brains, this actually has an effect on like our body's energy levels. If we are looking down versus whether we are looking for looking down. Like it can actually make you feel more groggy. If that monitor is just above your eyeliding eyeline, then your eyes are looking up and it can actually make you feel more alert. Anyways, another argument for monitor arms. If you have a webcam on top of that monitor, then you can just lower the monitor down a bit so that the webcam is at the right eye level. Anytime you hop onto a video conference or create a little video. Good example of I gotta be able to do it within 15 seconds otherwise it's gonna be too much work as opposed to like a camera that's off in front of my desk and I have to like get up and hit record and fiddle with and get it to the right height. We want to keep this as simple as possible. This episode is sponsored in part by Canopy, the practice management system. You may have seen a lot of the content I've been putting out around building your tech stack from scratch and why the order in which you pick your tech is so important. Because your core tools, you want them to do as many things as possible for you. And Canopy, bro, Canopy's got features for days and not all just like bolted on, sort of half baked features. Pretty polished stuff. Everything from like really, really well done document management to a super polished like client portal. All the client facing stuff is not going to be embarrassing. It looks really nice, a level of depth and workflow management down to things like like on the views, just being able to customize all of the columns and and save those views. You know, you work with apps, sometimes it's like those views are super locked down. So irritating. Canopy's got a lot of those details, right, the flexibility there that you need. And they're one of the only tools, cloud practice management systems that scale really well beyond like 30 or 40 employees. No tool can do everything perfectly for your firm. But when you're trying to build a more lean tech stack, a practice management system like Canopy that'll do a lot of things for you can help you run a more organized firm. Got some demos we've done of Canopy on my YouTube channel if you want to see how it works in like five minutes. Otherwise, check out the link down in the show notes to learn more about Canopy. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub, the practice management system that delivers WOW seasons year round, not busy season seasons that will dazzle your clients for two reasons. One, Client Hub is drop dead simple man. If you're too tired of a practice management system that just feels like you gotta have a PhD in learning something new, ClientHub, you hop in, the vibes are great, it just all makes sense. But two, remember there's a second reason Client Hub offers a game changing client experience that is you can actually get clients to like collaborate with you and be helpful on the platform because the portal wasn't this like afterthought. Bolt on now. Very cool. Recent development in ClientHub Magic Books review Twinkle sounds so Client Hub syncs in the transactions from your QuickBooks file. You can run an AI analysis on it like from inside of Client Hub. It'll highlight any potential issues you can mark like on the balance sheet in the P and L, you mark each account one by one whether or not it's been reviewed. But if you wanna troubleshoot, it'll pull you straight back into QuickBooks like so you'd have to learn like a whole new troubleshooting tool if you'd rather sort that stuff out. And Quick QuickBooks other cool stuff it'll identify automatically. Expense inconsistencies, purchases without a payee, purchases in parent accounts. Why is, why can we not disable that QuickBooks Large transactions, new accounts, new vendors, new customers. It's Magic Books Review inside of ClientHub I think you might like it. Learn more about ClientHub check out the link down in the show notes. A couple thoughts on like your background all the stuff that's happening in your room, there's definitely an optimal orientation for your desk if you're thinking about video. And that is to orient your face not directly towards a window like 12 o', clock, but you want the window to be like 1 or 2 o' clock or 10 or 11 o', clock kind of just off center. What makes like really nicer looking video look appealing is actually lighting fall off across the face. So a nice smooth wraparound of one side of the face is lighter and and one side of the face is darker. And that's why you don't want your the window to be like dead ahead of you if possible. It just ends up being a very flat lighting across your entire face. Similarly, if possible, you don't want your background to just be a flat wall. You actually want depth and dimension to a wall. If possible, try to figure out how to have that back Wall like have several layers of depth or actually be shooting at an angle kind of back towards a corner. That's a much more interesting background than just a completely flat one. Also, if possible, try to avoid having a door in your background. A door kind of like actually invites sort of mental distraction or reminds the other person of like where you are and that there's other things going on. I'm getting pretty deep into like the psychological stuff here. And in all likelihood you won't be able to factor every single one of these things into your setup. I just get throw a bunch of stuff at you, so it's kind of bouncing around and factors into what you land on. But if you've got kind of the roam of the range in your room, the most important thing to consider is where am I oriented to relative to a window? For example, if a window's behind you, your face will always be perpetually dark because it's much brighter behind you. Every camera has basically a light range that it's capable of capturing from the brightest things it can see to the darkest things that it can see. And small cameras like webcams have itty bitty sensors, so that range can't be very much. And this is why, like bright stuff may look totally blown out, totally white, and dark stuff, like there won't be any detail and it will look totally dark. And so the less we ask of the camera, the better. So like, the less light range there is in what it's looking at, the more likely it'll actually be able to like show it all and make it look good, rather than stuff being blown out, stuff being too dark. So for example, if I'm sitting right in front of a window and have all the lights off in the room, your face is going to be crazy white and the rest of the room is going to be crazy dark. So as much as possible, we kind of try to even that out. Now that your ceiling lights, if you have overhead lights in your office, they will make your video look way worse. In fact, oftentimes you can sit if you're facing. You know, if you have a window somewhere in front of you, oftentimes your video will look much, much better with your overhead lights off and no lights on in the room besides the window than with your overhead lights on. Your overhead lights cast really nasty shadows over your eyebrows onto your eyes, and just in a really unappealing way. And it's because all the professional video that we see and movies and TV and all that people are lit from the front. They're not lit over the top. And our brains have kind of been programmed to think that good looking video looks like what we see on tv. TV video is never lit from the top. It's always lit from the front of the person. And so by turning your overhead lights off in your room, oftentimes what you see is much more pleasing. I guess we never got super into like what's happening in your background. Worth thinking about. Most backgrounds are wildly messy and that's because webcams are really wide angled. And so the wider angle a camera is, that is it can see more and more of the room in the background. Just the more stuff is going to be visible as opposed to a really narrow angled, like more pinpoint camera where it can't see as much of the background. Then because it can't see as much of the background, there's not as much busyness going on back there. One of the things with the Elgato facecam is in the software you can actually control the field of view to be very wide or more narrow. This also makes how far you are from the back wall a consideration. So if it's 20ft to the wall behind you, you're going to see a ton of the wall behind you, which means it's probably going to look really busy and cluttered or you're just going to have to have like huge props in the background. If you are three feet from the, from the wall behind you, you're not going to see as much of the wall in the background. So it just naturally won't look as cluttered. And like set design in movies and videos, basically they say if there's anything smaller than the size of your fist, throw it out. It just looks like clutter. And just the way webcams are because they're so wide, usually you see tons of stuff behind you. And so it just looks very kind of busy and messy. The coolest looking like YouTube setups and movie shots and all that, they have way fewer things in the background. They're usually larger. And there's also oftentimes like a lot of light variation in the background. So for example, if you get to step three here and you've bought these lights before, I bought a bigger and better camera. Drop a thousand bucks on camera, I probably buy another light. And then you actually use that light on the background to have like some sort of cascading texture or something like that to create some lighting interest in the background. That's very common. Almost any shot you see on TV and film, like pay attention There will be bright parts in the background and darker parts in the background. And the goal is just to make the background not look super static and flat. And oftentimes, in fact, on the old set we had, we did that a lot. We don't do that as much with this set now, but lighting variations across your background that can just kind of make it look a little more interesting. Boy, we went. We geeked on this one pretty hard. Remember, production value at the end of the day, not that big of a thing. Do you have something meaningful to say? The folks that you look at now that are like prolific at video, they only got there because there was a day when they were doing very low production value stuff and people liked it and then they invested in production. So most of us are still at the stage where we're like, do we have something useful to say to a specific type of person? Start there. Get your first hundred crappy videos out of the way and then maybe consider investing more in production. If it doesn't get in the way of you just getting stuff out the door and helping people again, you're not gonna be able to like factor every single one of these things into your work setup. It is, it is a product of all sorts of different trade offs from the actual office space. You have to like, what are you gonna enjoy doing to will being able to look out a window make me happier and make all this more enjoyable to do? Because I can tell you like a setup like I have now, which is like an entire studio with complete light control. Like it feels like a real cave and it's just a massive mess. So there's for sure trade offs and what's gonna be worth doing, what's not gonna be worth doing. But I would rather you be informed and like, know the right way to do it and intentionally make those trade offs rather than see something and not really like it and maybe not understand why you don't like it. There you go. Video for accounting firms. Hopefully you got a couple helpful tidbits there. I'll see you in the next one.