No More Working From Home

Its been almost ten years since I posted anything; I guess things got even busier than I realized! Fortunately, I now have a little more time now that I’m not working from home. Or from the office! I greatly enjoyed my time at Google so it was a tough decision to leave, but I’ll save that for Linkedin, maybe. For now, I thought it’d be fun to share the final state of my home office.

I’ve always been the type to do a little work from home, and the Chrome team was highly distributed to begin with, so in many respects we were set up for the pandemic as well as we could be. The one exception is that my home office was in a windowless room in the basement, with a single bulb overhead fixture, so lighting and thus video calls were terrible by default. Fortunately, that’s a fixable problem, though I may have gone a little overboard with the solution:

On the left is my “normal” desk, essentially the same as it’s always been except during my Google time a KVM allowed switching between my personal Windows box, and a corporate Chrome OS machine. On the right is the final iteration of the setup I used for videoconferencing.

Lights, Camera, Action!

A few Google Home integrated smart plugs switch between the default lighting configuration above, and VC mode:

The lights follow a suggestions online for a standard 3-point lighting setup, with a large key light, and smaller fill and (overhead) back lights. Many professionals have books in the background, so you know you’re talking to someone educated. So mine is almost all videogame paraphenalia – no point trying to fool anyone!

From the inside, it looks like a weird three-screen setup:

The trick is that the middle screen is actually the reflection of a a flat display that’s facing up; it’s reflecting off beamsplitter glass that has a camera behind it. As a result, when there’s a meeting in progress, the person you’re talking to appears in front of the camera – so they see you looking directly at them (whereas before, with a big monitor, it really seemed like I was looking off into space when I was looking at their face on screen).

The Tech Pieces

At work I gave the disclaimer that I didn’t spend any of Google’s money on this setup, since it’s frankly a little ridiculous given that a good webcam and key light is 90% of what you need. That said, the setup uses the following:

• Camera: Nikon Z7 II + Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G (via FTZ adapter), using HDMI out. Overkill and not even optimal – the Z6 II would is cheaper and better for video – but it’s the camera I had. Sadly while the Z7 II has USB power, it can’t run continuously on it, so I still use a 3rd party EN-EL15 replacement that runs on AC power.
• Mirror: This is an 18″ x 18″ piece of 60/40 beamsplitter glass, held in place with a Nikon 7070 binocular window mount, with a 15.4″ UPERFECT flat panel display (better than others I tried as it’s 400 nit brightness helps since only half the light is reflected by the glass). The final ingredient was an HDMI left/right inverter (which was hard to find – I finally bought via Newegg as I wasn’t able to purchase it more directly via Alibaba).
• Microphone: Rode PodMic. I’d been using a Blue Yeti USB – which is great, but doesn’t do analog audio (cranking the volume and using it’s headphone port is way too noisy). I connected it via the inexpensive Pyle PMUX9 audio interface, only to discover it needs a ton of gain, and didn’t natively support 48v phantom power, so I was forced to add a Cloudlifter.
• A/V Sync: Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro. Initially I’d set this up to easily switch between showing what’s on my screen vs. the camera feed, but this doesn’t always interact great with videoconferencing software (which will make screen share content large for all participants, but can’t always be told to do the same for a camera feed). It was also supposed to do USB capture – but unfortunately, the version I have is USB2 only (which reduces quality) and had compatibility issues with Chrome OS. So now it’s sole purpose is to combine the video from the camera with the audio from the mic, with a ~2 frame audio delay for A/V sync purposes.
• Capture: The tried-and-true Elgato Camlink (non-4K) allows the HDMI feed to be used in realtime as a webcam – and works fine on Chrome OS.
• Lights: The key light is a Neewer CB60B (70W) with a 34″ Glow softbox. The fill light is a Neewer 660B with collapsible softbox; the back light is a GVM 800D-RGB. They all support color temperature adjustment, and have been really reliable even for days with 8+ hours of continuous use.
• PC: I use an Asus Chromebox 4; while less flexible than a Windows box (e.g. for USB-based control of my camera, or using virtual camera drivers), like most Chrome OS devices it can be enterprise enrolled – so that I can use it securely for work, under Google management – despite being personally purchased.

Much of this complexity would be eliminated using a much less expensive camera with a decent mic input (the Z7 II that I already owned is great in other respects, but has a poor mic input), and usable USB webcam performance. Then you’d just need the lights (there have been Black Friday deals for $200 bundles that give you a 3-point setup), and the mirror. But it was definitely fun to tinker with this setup over the years, and while it’s certainly not Google Beam it is still much cheaper!