Did you know that you can seem to be broadcasting your Adobe Connect Virtual Classroom camera feed from anywhere you want? Hosting, presenting or broadcasting from a home office can appear to be as professional as a studio production even on a small budget with a little creativity. Or maybe, more humbly, you just want to camouflage the camera background while hosting from a temporary work space; starting with the latter however, you may find yourself quickly adept enough to attain the former; customizing a camera background is not difficult; it is easily done. In these times when we may need to quickly improvise a broadcast studio with limited resources to captivate a dispersed audience, inexpensive desktop lighting options and virtual camera backgrounds will help improve your remote seminar or classroom experience.

Let’s begin with lighting around your camera feed: There are very inexpensive and simple lighting options that can help with your presentation in a camera feed whether live or recorded. Here is one example on the low end among many; this is by Logitech and is available from a number of online outlets including Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Webcam-Light-Stream-Selfie-Logitech/dp/B07G379ZBH

It is as simple as it looks and the price is under $30.00. It will flood your camera image with varying levels of lighting and since it is driven by USB power, you may take it off to remote locations and run it on a simple battery-pack phone charger.

There are many other options on this theme and much good advice and tutorials on usage available for review on YouTube and elsewhere.

Another lighting option on the slightly higher end around $50 is: https://www.amazon.com/Neewer-Dimmable-Adjustable-Tabletop-Photography/dp/B07T8FBZC2

To customize your camera backgrounds, ManyCam is a great tool: https://manycam.com/

Rather than merely settling for the plaster wall of your home office as a backdrop for your live camera feed, ManyCam allows you to use virtually any background from anywhere. For example, is today’s history topic centered on the Cold War Russian invasion of Prague? Well then why not appear to be broadcasting your class from set of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” with Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin and Daniel day Lewis? Liven things up a bit! Use your imagination along with some simple and inexpensive tools (and copyright permission of course)!

Adding a green screen is not a tall order, a small portable green screen backgrounds work in tandem with ManyCam to put you on scene where your topic demands. They may be small enough to attach to the back of your chair or larger to screen the entire back of your broadcast area to allow greater motion and large background images: https://www.amazon.com/slp/video-green-screen/nqrpgp7afkhk93j

Here’s what the Adobe XD Evangelist, Howard Pinsky uses: https://twitter.com/Pinsky/status/1238857761208893440

The options are endless. A cursory search online will uncover the right tools and there are many tutorials on techniques appropriate to enable and enhance your use case. Break out of the mundane simple webcam broadcast and get creative on a shoestring. Your students will love you for it and you will have fun doing it.