How to fill the screen when a podcast guest has no camera
Upload the recording and send a photograph of whoever had no camera. Vizard Agent scans the whole file for the stretches where a camera is off or frozen, and puts a branded layout with that person's photograph on screen for exactly those stretches and no others.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Say who has no video and hand over the photograph. Vizard Agent works out when to show it, so what it needs from you is who the photograph belongs to and what the frame should look like around it. You don't need to note timestamps, and the intro and outro can come as separate audio files.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
One participant with the camera off makes an episode unpublishable as video: half of it is a black rectangle with a name in it. A photograph in a branded frame, shown only for the camera-off stretches, fixes it, and finding every one of those stretches is the real work. In the session behind this article it:
- Sampled frames from the recording and pulled a full-size one to look closely, while the transcript ran in the background.
- Scanned the whole recording for stretches where a camera was off or frozen, and checked the transcript against what it found.
- Downloaded the separate intro and outro audio and measured the levels, loudness and lead-in silence across all three sources, so the joins would not jump.
- Sampled the brand colours, the fonts and the dead air, located the font files and built the branded layout background.
- Reviewed the layout design before assembling anything, and delivered the edit with the photograph only on the camera-off stretches and the dead air trimmed.
When does this not work well?
A photograph is a static object on a screen the audience expects to move, and there's a limit to how long anybody will keep looking at one. One photo cannot hold ten minutes of audio, a low-resolution photo shows at full frame, and cameras that drop constantly make the switching distracting. Captions or a waveform can help.
Common questions
Do I need the timestamps? No. Vizard Agent scans the recording and finds them itself.
What if the camera froze rather than turned off? It catches both. Vizard Agent looks for frozen picture as well as absent picture.
Will the intro sound right? Yes. Vizard Agent measures all three sources and levels them together.