- This is what most people look like in Zoom.
But what if you didn't have to?
What if you could look like this (snaps fingers)?
This is a much better way to spend
eight hours or nine hours a day.
And I'm going to teach you how to do it right now.
(gentle music)
Of course, you start with the camera.
Any camera will do that has HDMI out.
And a lens, a large aperture wide angle is preferred.
The Elgato Cam Link 4K lets you hook up that camera
to your computer, and treat it as a webcam.
And finally, this mess of wires is a dummy battery.
So it allows you to run your mirrorless camera
without running batteries the whole time.
And this is actually my set up.
You'll notice my Sony a7R4.
I got a 35 1.2, so that is probably
one of the widest 35 millimeter lenses
that has ever existed, which is pretty sweet
for that sweet, sweet swirly background.
I have it set up on actually a micro travel tripod.
Basically any cheap tripod that will fit
behind your monitor will work just fine.
And the two things that you'll notice connected here
are the dummy battery port, and yes, it's totally fine
for that battery port to be open, it'll work just fine.
Over here I have the micro HDMI output.
And you'll notice that it's just hooked up right over here
to my Elgato Cam Link, right there.
So pretty straight forward, hooked up right
into my MacBook Pro, it's good to go.
Now when you first start out you
might see this on the screen.
Don't panic, there's a way to turn it off.
And I'ma show you how right now.
Go into your menu and settings.
Go to Setup3, go to HDMI Settings,
and then go down to HDMI Info Display,
just flip that to off, and you're good to go.
How do you set Zoom up?
It's pretty straight forward.
You just go into Preferences.
You can go into Video, and hello,
just make sure Cam Link 4K is on.
You can enable HD, but it probably
doesn't matter that much actually.
That's pretty much it,
you're up and running with the camera.
Okay, what about settings?
Well, I'll keep it really simple.
If you want this really sweet blurry background
you want as big an aperture as possible.
And when it comes to aperture,
we're talking about F-stop here.
Right now I have an f/1.2.
A lot of lenses that I recommend are f/1.4.
If you have a zoom lens the best one might be an f/2.8.
All of those are perfectly good numbers.
Where it gets worse is around f/4, f/5.
If you're using a kit lens with your camera,
that might be what you get, I recommend upgrading your lens.
This is what it looks like at 2.8.
And then this is what it looks like at eight.
And so you can see, as you increase
the aperture the depth of field becomes much deeper.
When it comes to Zoom, I like it like this.
That's pretty good.
- [Woman] Are you available?
- Yes.
(upbeat music)
Okay well, we're all going through a lot right now.
We have no childcare, so my wife
and I have to sort of trade off.
And I'm sure a lot of you are sort of in the same situation.
The good thing is, we're going to get through this.
The other thing is our tools
are actually getting a lot better.
Today is actually the launch day
for one of our best portfolio companies, Around.
They're actually a teleconferencing
service that replaces Zoom.
So if you just upgraded your camera,
well, now you got to upgrade your software.
Earlier today I sat down with the founder of Around,
not in person, but actually using Around.
You'll see how unique it is, so let's go check it out.
Dom, thanks for hanging out, man.
- Super excited to go live.
We've been working on Around for two years in stealth.
So I'm really excited to show this technology to the world.
We have a lot of cool stuff
with audio processing and how we work with video.
The traditional video tries to maximize visual presence.
But I think the way work happens has changed.
We want to make space for apps,
while you're doing a quick call
maybe you need to work on a Google Document
together, or maybe review some stuff.
- We're sitting here in front of a web browser,
and we can actually collaborate directly about
whether it's code or a collaborative document,
browsing together, it's really what should happen
when it comes to how people should work together,
especially now when we're not even
allowed to be in the same place.
- Typically when you do have people with multiple laptops
in one space, you get the annoying echo,
where you have to figure out which microphone can be on,
and you have to do that whole gymnastics.
We figured out how to address that.
And so with our audio engine, we call it Echo Terminator,
you may have multiple laptops in one space,
all the microphones are on, and all the speakers
are on, it's perfectly synchronized.
Eventually we sort of go back to office environments.
And some people are remote, some people are at the office.
People are going to realize how seamless it is
in Around to just like connect
wherever you are, you don't have to worry
about the echo problem, and you just go.
- There might be five or six,
10 people, 15 people working together.
Instead of seeing everything about their room,
it's really just their presence, their face.
- We're also trying to make it
feel very equal for everybody.
So like the way our face is shown, we try to center it,
zoom it and pan it so that we all
sort of look visually equally present.
Also, if maybe I sit a little bit like this,
it still, the panning mechanism,
the AI face detection still tries to make us appear equal.
- So today's the launch, go to around.co and sign up.
So I hope you liked this video.
Definitely go to around.co, check it out,
sign up for the beta, it's definitely worth it.
And if you like this video please click like,
and please click subscribe, hit the bell icon.
I've been doing this for about three or four months.
I really enjoy doing it, actually.
I hope this was both informative and interesting.
And I hope you learned about some new things
you didn't know how to do before.
Look, this whole country is going through a lot.
And you know what, I believe in us.
We're going to get through it, be well.
(gentle music)