Many of us have spent a lot of time on Zoom over the past few years, but
unfortunately a lot of our experience looks and sounds like a garbled mess.
So today let's get set to clear things up in your Zoom settings to help your
meetings look and sound their best!
In fact, let's "zoom" right into it. 😬
So today we're not going to go through every single Zoom setting, because
that would take like 12 years. Instead,
we're just going to focus on the ones that will help you improve the
quality of your audio, your video, your screen shares, and your recordings.
And there really are two categories of things we can change to
improve the quality of your Zoom meetings: software and hardware.
And we're going to start with software because these are settings that
you can change right now in the app that will app-solutely amaze you!
And then after that, we can take it a step further by talking about equipment.
Now, as you probably know, within Zoom, there are two
ways to change your settings.
One is within the app and the other is through a browser.
The browser has a lot more settings.
Some of the settings overlap.
It's kind of a weird mess.
So let's start first with the settings that I recommend
you change in the app itself.
First thing under the Video tab, be sure to enable the "HD" option right down there.
And then don't select "Touch up my appearance" and "Adjust for low light."
Those sound like good things,
but again, those are designed for really terrible situations.
And if you're using any kind of decent equipment, those tools are
just going to make you look like a mall glamour portrait from 1986.
So for now, that's all we're going to touch in the Video tab
is making sure that HD is enabled.
And now we're going to go this way and click on Audio.
I'm going to say "adios" to video and click on audio, yo. 👍
The first thing to do is to disable "Automatically adjust microphone volume."
For me, I always use the Rodecaster Pro with my Zoom meetings, but
even some USB microphones have software that works with them,
or you might be using something like Ecamm or OBS where you
can adjust your audio levels.
Or you can just use this little slider right here to adjust your audio.
The reason you probably don't want to use the automatic microphone volume adjustment
is because it can make things change volume in ways that sound very unnatural.
So if you're controlling your volume through a physical mixer or some other
software application, you don't need that.
If you are unsure of your mixing abilities, or you're not quite sure how volume
is going to be working, it is okay
of course, to leave that checked.
But in general, you're going to get better quality if you're
the one adjusting your volume.
And typically you just want to make sure that your volume is
right about halfway in the green over there.
You don't want it to be peaking at the end and you don't want it to be super quiet
where it's not even showing up at all.
If it's in the red and yellow, that means it's not loud enough.
And if it were to be too loud, it would be peaking on the other side over there.
Fortunately, as you take a peek over there, my audio is not peaking. 🥸
Up next, we have the option to "Suppress background noise," and
I just keep that on the low.
And what that means is it's designed for a situation where you really don't have a
lot of background noise, but what that's actually telling Zoom to do is to not use
so much of its very aggressive filter
that's going to try to filter out noise.
That's where things really start to sound garbled,
and you almost sound like you're underwater sometimes because
it's trying to get rid of every distracting noise that there is.
The next option is probably the most important when it comes to audio,
and I am assuming that you're going to be using an external microphone–
I would consider that a non-negotiable if you want to have a high quality Zoom
meeting– what that means is in here, where it says "Music and Professional
Audio," check the box that says "Show in meeting option to enable original sound."
And typically I just leave these other options
all unchecked.
High fidelity music mode is important
if you're doing something that involves you sharing a lot of music,
but otherwise echo cancellation, I would just leave off and stereo audio
you probably want to leave off unless you have a really specific
reason that you want certain sounds coming from certain sides of other
people's headphones or speakers.
And now with that setting turned on, when I'm in a Zoom meeting up here
in the corner, there's a thing that says "Original Sound: Off or On," and
you want to turn original sound on and basically what that's going to.
It says is disable all of Zoom's audio processing.
The reason I say it's "supposed" to do that is because I still think that
I do hear some processing and some weird stuff happening, even when
Original Sound is turned on, but it does sound significantly better.
So in theory, if you're using Original Sound, all of these other
audio settings shouldn't matter because those things should be turned
off when you're using Original Sound,
but with Zoom, I have found that it's best to just play it extra safe and try
to adjust everything as best you can– unless I'm the only person who's ever had
weird things happen during a Zoom meeting?
I'm sure for everybody else, it's always worked perfectly. /s
And now in the application, we can go over to "Share Screen."
The first thing to do here is to click on "Advanced" and make sure that
you have used "Hardware acceleration to optimize video sharing" enabled.
Typically Zoom resolution is bad, but screen sharing is one thing that does
bump it up to 1080 full high definition.
And from there, we're going to go into the "Recording" tab because a lot
of people who run Zoom meetings or participate in Zoom meetings need
to have recordings of the meetings.
And the first thing to do, if you haven't done so already is select a location
where your recordings are going to go,
because a lot of people don't know where their recordings are being
stored and when the meeting's over, they lose it and they have to
search through their whole computer.
So right here where it says "Store, my recordings," you can click
there and choose a new location.
Personally, I like to choose the desktop because as soon as the
meeting is over, it puts the file right there on the desktop and then
I have to deal with it right away.
And I think that that works really well
if you're somebody who does something like workshops or classes where
you need to post a replay of a Zoom meeting as quickly as possible.
And another thing in the Recording tab to have that might be really
important is the option to "Optimize for a third party video editor."
It's usually a good idea just to have that option checked, even if
you don't plan on using that because it's better to need it and not have....
...no, wait, it's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. 💡
So that's pretty much everything we need to change within the app, but there are
some more really important settings to change within the browser, which opens
up a whole new world of possibilities.
There are two easy ways to log into your browser settings.
The first one is just to go to Zoom's website, zoom.us, log into your
account, and then go to Settings.
Or from within the application, you can click on your profile picture and
then click on "My Profile" and then it will open up a browser window where
you can just select your settings.
And then we have a lot more stuff to play with over here.
And some features that you're able to change do depend on what
kind of Zoom account you have.
Obviously the free account is going to be the most limited while the different paid
accounts will have different features.
I have the "Pro" account, which despite its name,
has a lot of cons to it, but it is the cheapest paid account
and for the most part, it lets me do pretty much everything I want to do.
So once we're in settings up here at the top is where we
have all of our different tabs.
Let's start actually with the "Recording" tab
this time.
An important thing to do in the Recording tab is to decide how you
want your recordings to appear.
If you're doing screen shares, you have some different options here, like "Record
active speaker with the shared screen,"
so that means it's going to be the screen share with the person who's talking.
But you can also record gallery view
if you want to see the screen share and a bunch of people who are in
the meeting, or you can record them separately, the active speaker, the
gallery view, and the screen share.
If you plan on editing those together and switching them up later
on, that's kind of a cool thing.
You also have some really cool audio options here,
including isolated audio tracks.
You can record a separate audio file of each participant, which is great.
If you have a meeting and suddenly somebody has
themselves un-muted and they do something really distracting,
you can just get rid of that and save the audio from the speaker
that you actually want to hear from.
So now they've got a recording set up, let's go back into the "Meeting" tab.
And right now we're going to go to "In Meeting (Advanced)."
You can also just scroll down.
There's just sort of, like
this infinite scroll here
that's going to take you through all these different sections, or you can shortcut
click to go straight through them.
Now in the "In Meeting (Advanced)" section, if we scroll down a little
bit more, there's this option right here, which is hugely important,
and that is "Group HD video."
So this is going to enable high definition video for the host and
the participants of a meeting, but there is kind of an asterisk there.
And notice right here, mine says "modified."
If we go to Zoom's plans and pricing, even if we look at the most expensive
option, the Enterprise option, none of these say anything about video resolution.
So if you want to make sure that you always have HD on the highest
resolution possible for your account, you actually need to reach out to
Zoom Technical Support, and I will walk you through that exact process
right now.
So the first step is just to go back to the Zoom homepage.
You can go to zoom.us and then scroll all the way down to the
bottom and click on "Support Center."
Once you're in the Support Center, scroll down again and go all the way
to Technical Support and click on
"Learn more."
Do not use the chat icon over here.
If you scroll down, you're going to see some different phone numbers.
You can definitely give them a call and they will help you over the phone.
I am a shy person who hates talking on the phone,
so I did the Web Ticket Request and it worked great.
Do not use the chatbot because it is a bot,
so all it's going to do is try to point you to articles to help
you solve your problem on your own
and you can't do that.
So if you open a Web Ticket Request, you can do "Technical Support."
The Web Ticket was super fast and easy to use for me.
I received a response in less than an hour, and that was on a Sunday night.
So it was actually very impressed with that.
They kind of hide the option to actually talk to someone, but once
you find it, they're super responsive and super helpful.
So here's what I wrote in my request.
Feel free to copy it.
It is very important to include your account number, which can
be found in your profile page, either in the app or the browser.
Now as soon as I got my response back, they said, "No problem,
your account has been upgraded to 720."
And I said, great.
That's awesome.
But it is 2022 at the time I'm recording this video...
What about full 1080?
And they said that my account, the "Pro" plan only goes up to 720 and
it's the other accounts, the higher end ones that go up to full 1080.
So this is a feature that definitely does depend on which account you
have, but if you have one of the higher end accounts then you can
have full 1080 all the time in Zoom. But now let's also talk about
hardware updates, equipment updates that you can implement as needed,
as possible for your workflow.
We're not going to spend a ton of time on specific equipment, but I will leave
links in the description to the stuff that I recommend specifically
for Zoom.
The first thing, which I think is non-negotiable regardless
of your budget, is getting an external microphone for Zoom.
Please do not use a built-in microphone.
I don't care what computer you're using, or how good you think
the built-in microphone is.
Even if you change nothing else in terms of hardware, please get a good microphone.
That's going to make
everything so much better for you and everybody else that you
interact with on Zoom That can be a simple USB mic like this.
This is the Rode NT-USB Mini, or you could go full on, you know,
mixer/interface/XLR microphone, whole production sound studio.
Even if you get a pretty basic like 30 or $40 USB microphone, it's really going
to level up the quality of your audio.
And when it comes to video, believe it or not, audio is significantly
more important than the video quality.
And it's also very important
once you have that microphone
to spend a little bit of time and learn how to use it.
Don't just plug it in, set it down and assume now you're going to sound
amazing, because you probably won't.
Do you need to get something like a boom arm?
Do you need to get a little stand to put it on? Do some test recordings
and some test meetings to see what sounds the best. Play with some of your
Zoom settings and dial that in before you
try to use it in a meeting without ever having tested it before, because
I promise you something will go wrong
if you do that.
Now, if we do want to move on from audio and level up the quality of
video, please just stop using webcams.
They do have a place
if you just want clear video and that's it, they can get the job done.
But if you want to take it a little bit further and have something that
looks just nicer and stands out a bit,
a webcam will never get the job done for you.
No webcam, no application, nothing will ever look as good as a camera
with an interchangeable lens.
Now, I actually talked a lot about this in my live streaming tips and tricks video,
so I'm going to link that right here and in the description, if you
want more detail on which kind of cameras and why it makes a difference.
There's a lot of overlap between best practices for Zoom and for live
streaming, because in a lot of ways, when you're running a good Zoom meeting,
you're basically doing a live stream.
Now next, I would be deLIGHTed to talk about lighting.
I have a full-on studio with 14 lights on right now, so it looks pretty decent,
and my Zoom meetings look pretty good.
They basically look just like this because I use all the same
equipment for them. But you don't have to get a studio with 14 lights,
you just need to pay a little bit of attention to your lighting.
So here's an example.
Let's turn all these off.
I'm totally blowing my whole point because this kind of looks cool in a way,
although the white balance is totally off.
But a lot of times what people do is they walk into a room,
they flip on an overhead light, and they're done.
I am using a $4,000 camera with a $1,500 lens,
so even this less than ideal lighting situation kind of looks nice.
So at the very least what you want is a good key light– a good, main light.
That could be a dedicated video light, or it might just be something you have
around that you position in a different way, bouncing off a wall or something.
There we go.
I was waiting for mine to turn on.
My key light is a dedicated video light, and it's very bright, but
even if I only have this one light on it makes things look a lot nicer.
And you will need to spend some time positioning your key light to look good.
I have mine bouncing off of a wall so that it's not shining in my face
all day, because that would drive me crazy. 🙃
And it's also running through a small softbox
so that way the light is diffused and really soft. But I'll put
some budget friendly lighting options in the description too.
But for my setup, in addition to just this one light, I also have
a fill light over there to kind of fill things in a little bit.
I even have a light mounted to the ceiling behind me, which
is a hairlight, or a backlight.
And what that does is help separate me from the background a little bit.
It's really unnecessary, but it's one of those small details that
really pushes things over the top.
So now you kind of see, I have like some shine to my hair.
There's some light on my shoulders here.
So that way I'm not just totally blending in to my background.
And speaking of backgrounds, be sure to pay attention to your
background for your meeting.
Even if you just have a plain wall, sometimes that's the best option.
Try to put some distance between yourself and the background, because that way
it's not going to look like someone just shoved you up against a wall.
It's going to kind of give some depth to it, even just a few feet or like a
meter would make a pretty big difference.
I think over the past few years, as we've seen lots of people on TV doing
interviews from their houses, and a lot of people love to have bookshelves
behind them, which is super cool.
It's a great way to showcase your personality and add some texture, but
some people do not pay attention to which books are on their bookshelves
and there are some weird books out there that are on people's bookshelves
that I don't think they're intending for the audience to pay attention to.
So just remember everything that's in the frame
has the potential to grab somebody's attention.
And once you have a pretty background set up, usually then
adding in some accent lights can really help. Even something simple.
like this little lamp right here makes a pretty big difference
in my situation. I have some lights in my cabinets so that it's not just totally
dark, but I've also got all kinds
of other little accent lights that all work together to create the look that
I want for my videos and my meetings.
Now, the good news is you don't have to zoom out and buy a whole
bunch of new stuff for Zoom
right now. You can kind of cherry pick some of these options. If you go
through and you just address a few of the things that I've talked
about in this video, you're going to notice a significant improvement
in the quality of your meetings. And you can add or update things later,
or not at all depending on what works best for you.
But if you're somebody who spends a lot of time on Zoom, having a setup that
really looks good, looks professional,
sounds good,
really helps you stand out and just look and sound awesome.
And speaking of things that stand out and are awesome,
thank you to everyone who helps support my channel through Patreon
and YouTube Channel Memberships.
And now that you're looking and sounding awesome on Zoom, check out these videos
for some more ways to level up your Zoom experience.
Your "Zoomsperience."