History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Posting Video of Readings


Late last year, I was invited to participate in the Girl Cooties website, which features science fiction (and other speculative fiction) for women, by women. One of the suggestions for how I could contribute was by recording some of my stories. Initially, I thought “great! I just tested out recording in my closet for some songs I was singing on, so this will be a snap!” Then I poked at the website a bit and realized that they wanted video of me reading my stories, not just audio. The really dark closet was not going to work for that.

So instead, I set up a little reading nook in our spare bedroom, where I could have a mostly white background behind me, and used my webcam to record several videos of me reading my stories. In doing so, I learned a handful of things, some of which you can see in the embedded video.

  1. Anti-reflective coating on glasses + computer screen = blue-purple lenses. I love having anti-reflective coating on my glasses, as it makes driving at night a lot easier and safer. But it does give my glasses a strange blue-purple hue, especially when light of some sort (like, say, from my laptop screen) is shining right at them. Try as I might, I can’t really read from my monitor without my glasses, and even if I read from a tablet, Kindle, or paper book, I still have the light from my webcam hitting my glasses. If you don’t wear glasses, this one doesn’t really apply to you. If you don’t have anti-reflective coating, same deal. But if you do need glasses and do have anti-reflective coating, be warned that this is a thing that will likely drive you nuts, until you decide that maybe you’re just a Fremen in disguise. The spice must flow.
  2. There may be an unadvertised lead time on your recording software. My webcam software (that came with my laptop) gives me a countdown to when it’s going to start recording. This is a lie. The first time I tried to use it, I started speaking immediately after the countdown was over. I recorded just a short intro so I could check the sound quality and such, and it turns out that my intro lost the first 5 or 10 seconds. So now I know to watch the countdown, and then take a deep breath, and then get started.
  3. Webcams are kind of like mirrors. At least in their default configurations. See that still image of me above? See how my hair appears to be parted on my right-hand side? Mirror image–I part my hair on the left. And if you watch about half a minute of the video, you’ll see me hold up a couple of books, which are also mirror-imaged. There is a way to flip this on my webcam software, but it didn’t even occur to me to test out that feature before I recorded. I didn’t even notice until I got to the end of my reading and rewatched the beginning of the video. And at that point, the last thing I wanted to do was go back and re-do the whole thing. So the books are forever preserved in mirror image.

I’m sure there’s a lot more for me to learn. Like how to angle the camera so that it doesn’t look like I’ve hung pictures crooked on the wall (it’s the angle, I promise). But starting with these three tips can help you avoid the mistakes I made when I was getting started.


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