Greetings all,
Tonight I want to talk about controlling exposure for your webcam video with iGlasses. So often I use my webcam to make a screencast with a webcam picture-in-picture and get a very bad webcam shot in my video. After doing very many EdTech Moment episodes as well as screencasts for my middle school and APU classes I have come up with a process that seems to produce consistent results.
So here is a quick video showing the process that I use to get good webcam shots using iGlasses from ecamm.
First, when setting up the session in Camtasia or Screen you flow choose iGlasses as your video source. In iGlasses select the camera that you want to capture from. What iGlasses does is to capture the video feed from the camera, give you control of the settings, and then pass that on to the recording application. Then, before playing with your settings in iGlasses, go ahead and begin recording in your screencast program. (The reason for this is that I’ve had several experiences where the exposure lock was reset when starting the recording session.) So I start the recording, and then pause it, I’ll adjust all my iGlasses settings, and then resume the recording.
In order to adjust the settings in iGlasses you will need to open an application that will give you a screen that you can see the feed from the webcam, so I open Quicktime Player and a new Movie Recording so that I can see the results of the aadjustments in iGlasses. In iGlasses I the most important thing you will need to do to get a high quality image is to get the exposure set correctly and lock it. To do this I will grab a piece of white paper and hold it up in front of the camera. This will help it to white balance a little bit, and then expose correctly for the amount of light coming back to it. Move the paper closer and further from the camera to manipulate the camera to adjusting the exposure to what you like, and the check the box in iGlasses to lock the exposure.
From there you can adjust the brightness, contrast, sharpness, and white balance to get things keyed in just the way you want and then continue with your screencast recording.
Comment below or on the YouTube channel if you have any questions or feedback about this. Let me know if I’ve done something wrong or if you have a better method. I do these videos to help others as well as learn from you all as well so be sure to let me know what you think.
