On Our ‘You've Never Rocked #WFH Like This Before’ Webinar

I present many webinars in my role at Runecast, and it’s honestly one of the most fun aspects of my job. Sometimes they’re focussed on a specific security standard. Sometimes they cover a new feature that we’re bringing to market. Those are both pretty cool, mainly because I have to put my learning hat on in my preparation (no, I don’t just keep this stuff in my head all of the time).

By far the most fun events, though, are those where I get to try something a little different. We did this recently with a webinar focussed on Working From Home. We talked about the challenges that many of us have faced and are still facing.
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‍‍Webinar Description: Be a laser beam: Carve out focus time. Make your workspace the only slave to the grind. Deal with distractions head on. Kev Johnson shares some tips he’s picked up over the years as a home-based worker.

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We covered a lot of ground in that hour. Even though I tried to leave plenty of time for interaction at the end, the audience just kept coming at me with great thoughts and ideas – I was sad to have to wrap up at the top of the hour, and we’ll be back with more like this. 

A question that I get asked a lot on Twitter is about what kind of kit I use in my home office, so I figured that it might be easiest to share here.

• Desk – Flexispot E6 motorised adjustable desk frame, with reclaimed wooden top.
• Computer – 2019 Macbook Pro 16”
• Displays – a pair of LG 27” 4K screens, plus an LG 29WL50S ultrawide mounted vertically
• Camera – Sony Alpha 7 III full-frame camera, with FE 28-700 F3.5-5.6 OSS lens
• Secondary Camera – Sony Alpha 6000, with 16-50 3.5-5.6 OSS lens
• HDMI Switcher – ATEM Mini Pro ISO
• Microphone – a mix of a Blue Yeti for podcasts etc., and Rode Wireless Go (with Lavalier Go) for webinars. There’s a Rode VideoMic Pro (and a deadcat muffler) mounted on the hot-shoe of the primary camera, but I use that primarily for outdoors recordings – mostly of the dog!
• Tablet – iPad Pro (primarily used to keep track of time, but also put into use for whiteboard sessions and even for sketching out terrible images for ideas for infographics etc
• Lighting – 2 x Elgato Keylight
• Field Monitor – Neewer 5.4” field monitor
• Elgato popup chromakey greenscreen
• Clicker – Logitech Spotlight presentation clicker (this thing is incredibly awesome)
• Seat – I don’t know what this is, I bought it about 6 or 7 years ago and dream of replacing it with a Herman Miller Aeron when I win the lottery
  

So that’s probably a bit overkill for most of you, unless you’re a pretty serious YouTuber, but I do get a lot of comments about the how clear my video feed is. The Alpha 7 is an excellent piece of kit, and the glass on the front of it helps. More important than that, though, is the lighting. Absolutely the most cost-effective way to improve video quality for your interminable Zoom calls is to enhance your lighting.

I hope this was useful to you! If you have any feedback about anything in the webinar, ideas about cool topics for us to cover in future webinars or just fancy a chat you can always reach me on Twitter