The sad result is, the background looks better, but you look worse, so the virtual background is counterproductive. The background may look great, but look of the person’s face is off. To make things worse, unless your lighting is spot on, when the virtual background feature is turned on, a white sheen often is placed over the person’s face. I’ve even seen professional TV commercials done against a greenscreen in a studio where you can easily see an outline around the body and it doesn’t look natural. In addition to the shadows that can kill your online look, there often is an outline around your head and shoulders, especially if you don’t have proper lighting.
They use virtual backgrounds to look better, but they actually make you look worse. Here’s the other thing that most people don’t understand. To make matters worse, they often don’t know. Unfortunately, as soon as they move their head, or get their hands into the shot, that good look turns into something weird. People check their virtual look by staring into the camera and they look fine. Here’s short part of the video I released last week showing what can happen. Unless you have good lighting and a greenscreen (solid green background) and a good computer, you likely are not going to have a good look.
Or perhaps somebody has a golf photo behind them and they tell co-workers “Let’s hurry up and get this meeting over, because I have a 2pm tee time.” Ha ha ha ha. “I’m taking in the meeting from the beach guys.” Ha ha ha ha. They’re kind of cute and we’ve all heard the comments from people who have that Zoom beach video behind them. If you have a messy bookshelf, a bland off-white wall, or a bunch of junk behind you, you can quickly eliminate it all and fill the background with a nice photo. People soon discovered a feature on Zoom and other virtual meeting platforms where you can insert a photo or video behind you on the screen. We’ve learned a lot about computer technology over the past year and unfortunately when it comes to virtual backgrounds, some people have learned too much. When the pandemic hit around 50 weeks ago, most people had never used Zoom, or knew what virtual backgrounds were. The main point you need to understand is, virtual backgrounds usually make you look worse instead of better. I may offend some people who love their virtual backgrounds, but hopefully inform others. I talked about this last week in a short video I did for my Media Training Minute series and got such a strong reaction I decided to expand my thoughts in a blog. Saying I hate virtual backgrounds may go a little too far, but I do hate most of them.
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