I work in a closet, it's in a London converted Victorian terrace house, a flat. The closet is 1.3m wide, 1.8m long... it is small, but it works.
There is background noise, from my partner, and occasionally neighbours and building work in their homes which can be as close as 2-3m from my window, but it works.
I attribute this working to several things:
1. buy a great microphone such as a Shure SM7B with a tight polar pattern focused on the person speaking as this will prevent the pickup of virtually all noise outside of that. this mic needs to be an inch or two from your mouth so you need a decent mic arm. any near-field studio monitor speakers are adequate, your mic will _not_ pick up the sound due to the polar pattern.
2. buy decent lighting, there's a lot online but you can default to Elgato Key Lights and these can do daylight temperatures as well as evening / night temperatures. you want two of these positioned around 45-40' angle offset in front of you on either side and just above the camera (you will not be staring into a blinding light), and one to light up the space behind you. alternatively a single key light with an umbrella / dome, and then 2 lights doing the environmental. this is a useful YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpEeYwrkBPU
3. if you happen to wear glasses and you have a DSLR as a webcam then consider getting a circular polarizing filter, as then you can remove screen reflections from your glasses trivially.
I do not use sound dampening / conditioning in the room, I have some books on a shelf which helps to reduce / prevent echoes, but otherwise I've done nothing despite it being a box closet / room.
I do agree 100% with Pamela that air quality is the biggest issue... everything else can be changed easily. Any CO2 meter, i.e. the Aranet 4 or equivalent, will tell you when to open the window a little, if the CO2 level goes above 700 I open the window.
The office is tiny, there's a lot of equipment in here... and so I never need to heat this room even when it's below freezing outside. In the Summer I need to aircon it, I use a portable aircon... and despite it being noisy for me, the Shure SM7B is basically miraculous and the sound of the portable aircon is extremely low and all of the noise reduction software works perfectly against it (I use Nvidia Broadcast noise reduction only during the Summer when I run the aircon).
Thanks for the recs, especially given your familiarity with Elgato. What OS do you use Shure with? I’ve had suggestions for AV before that ended up working poorly with my Mac M1 so I’d love to know if you’re using Shure with Mac.
A windows laptop, a mac laptop, and also a Linux one.
I've got everything connected to a CalDigit TS4 dock, and a single thunderbolt cable connects any of my laptops to it, that cable also charges the laptop at the same time as connecting the AV and monitor.
I'd probably say I'm mostly Mac and windows, but I've in a while it's Linux... So a 45/45/10 split.
I do prefer the windows laptop if I'm running Aircon in the same room and not using online video conferencing, as then I need Nvidia broadcast for noise cancelling on recordings. But this is entirely due to the portable Aircon and nothing to do with anything else.
There is background noise, from my partner, and occasionally neighbours and building work in their homes which can be as close as 2-3m from my window, but it works.
I attribute this working to several things:
1. buy a great microphone such as a Shure SM7B with a tight polar pattern focused on the person speaking as this will prevent the pickup of virtually all noise outside of that. this mic needs to be an inch or two from your mouth so you need a decent mic arm. any near-field studio monitor speakers are adequate, your mic will _not_ pick up the sound due to the polar pattern.
2. buy decent lighting, there's a lot online but you can default to Elgato Key Lights and these can do daylight temperatures as well as evening / night temperatures. you want two of these positioned around 45-40' angle offset in front of you on either side and just above the camera (you will not be staring into a blinding light), and one to light up the space behind you. alternatively a single key light with an umbrella / dome, and then 2 lights doing the environmental. this is a useful YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpEeYwrkBPU
3. if you happen to wear glasses and you have a DSLR as a webcam then consider getting a circular polarizing filter, as then you can remove screen reflections from your glasses trivially.
I do not use sound dampening / conditioning in the room, I have some books on a shelf which helps to reduce / prevent echoes, but otherwise I've done nothing despite it being a box closet / room.
I do agree 100% with Pamela that air quality is the biggest issue... everything else can be changed easily. Any CO2 meter, i.e. the Aranet 4 or equivalent, will tell you when to open the window a little, if the CO2 level goes above 700 I open the window.
The office is tiny, there's a lot of equipment in here... and so I never need to heat this room even when it's below freezing outside. In the Summer I need to aircon it, I use a portable aircon... and despite it being noisy for me, the Shure SM7B is basically miraculous and the sound of the portable aircon is extremely low and all of the noise reduction software works perfectly against it (I use Nvidia Broadcast noise reduction only during the Summer when I run the aircon).
Closet offices can work, but the microphone is virtually everything. it looks like Pamela is using the Elgato Wave, it's an OK mic and has a lot of gimmicks... but truly, just changing to a Shure SM7B https://www.shure.com/en-GB/products/microphones/sm7b and combining it with an audio interface like the SSL2 https://solidstatelogic.com/products/ssl2 with a FetHead on the cable https://www.tritonaudio.com/fethead would've cured most of the problems.
Only the air quality is hard to solve.