Home video calls aren't going away any time soon — so it’s time to clean up your backgrounds

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/04/home-video-calls-arent-going.html

Argh! I discovered and bought this just last weekend at full price… oh well, can confirm that it does a surprisingly good job of ‘green screen without the green’. Works great with video background as well.

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Windoze only :slightly_frowning_face:

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Would make a good HGTV show, remodeling your room for video.

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I give BB a fair amount of shit over some of their deals, so fair is fair:

This is an excellent product at a considerable discount. I am using Xsplit VCam all the time with Skype, Google apps, and WebEx. If I can’t visit the Eiffel Tower or Tatooine right now, I can at least look like I am.

Xsplit also has a wonderful feature/bug (depends on your webcam’s features): if you have a background up, and someone walks into the frame, as soon as the webcam recognizes that there’s a new face, they magically appear in front of the background without passing through it. Pop! There they are. They just appear as if they’re Star Trek’s Q.

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My colleagues LIKE seeing my background, and I like seeing theirs. It helps replace some of the human connection that we inevitably lose by not being in the same place, drinking coffee together etc…

Nothing against this product.

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I have a desire to clean my den (where my videoconferencing takes place), snap a good photo then let my den become the mess it’s always been.

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Amazing, the strange futures I get to…witness.

Now, people pay to create entire fake realities, with their own presences inserted. Because of course we should be ashamed of our true ones.

Such vanity drives my world of fools

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Haha, yes. I will say that video calls mean my home office is far tidier than it would be otherwise. And there are two ‘zones of disaster’ that sit just outside the visible angle of my webcam on both sides…

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So I’m weighing up the cost of the app vs the time to clean up behind my desk . . . Maybe I can just move the stuff out of frame?

Seems like it also requires a subscription service to remove a watermark from videos? Oof.

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