- I am a firm believer in the 80/20 rule
and once again, it is proving itself to be true.
This time, in the comments that we are getting on YouTube
around Zoom, and the questions more specifically,
the questions that we are getting
in the YouTube comments about Zoom.
I think we've done now maybe 10, 12 videos
on video conferencing in general and Zoom specifically.
And it seems to me that so many questions
specifically about Zoom are falling
into just two categories which I would like
to address here on the video today.
What are those questions?
Allow me to show you a few examples
to sort of set the stage.
"Does the quality of the camera affect the effect
"on the background?"
"Unfortunately they do not give you the green screen option
in Ireland," which by the way, editorial comment,
is not true, but we will explain why,
where he's confused here.
"It seems to be offered to US customers
"unless there's something, some setting
"that needs to be switched."
Well, that's a good question.
Another question.
"I don't get it.
"Is there a paid version?
"My Zoom doesn't have the same stuff
"at the bottom of the screen
"and there's no settings?"
(sighs)
Let's take a look at another question.
"You choose the little crosshair tool at 9:37.
"What little crosshair tool?"
This one, specifically again,
asking questions about one of our main themes,
the virtual background.
And finally,
"So I used my new green screen today on a Zoom call
"and there were many times where my hand disappeared
"or my hair looked psychedelic.
"What do you think I am doing?"
Oh, by the way her dog Mia definitely did not like
the opening of her green screen
which my dog doesn't like either.
We will deal with that as well.
But as you can see, there's two basic themes
that people have questions about.
One, is about the settings.
It is about how they configure Zoom
and why their version of Zoom looks different
than this version of Zoom that I'm showing here,
and people wonder if that's geographically based
or paid versus free, and it's neither.
It's how you set up Zoom.
We will show you how to fix that today.
The other question people have
is about the virtual background.
So many questions about the virtual background.
I will endeavor to answer those questions for you today.
That's all coming up on Dotto Tech.
(upbeat music)
Steve Dotto here, how the heck you doin'
at this fine day?
And today, as I mentioned on the show I'd like
to handle the two most prominent questions
that we have been getting on YouTube about Zoom,
and I am not exaggerating when I say I have answered
these questions dozens if not hundreds of times.
People seem to get lost in the same places in Zoom.
So I will put a time code in
where if you are concerned about the green screen
and virtual background options,
to jump ahead in the video.
But we're gonna start by talking about the Zoom account
in the settings and what options you have available,
because there is so much confusion
about how the Zoom settings work
and whether or not features are available
for you if you're using the free version
or if you happen to be in another country,
people tend to get confused about this.
And I think it's more the way Zoom
has set things up than individuals' problems.
And the problem is,
you can, most people are first introduced to Zoom
by being invited into a meeting
where they don't need to have an account at all.
You can be, if you're invited into a meeting
and sent a Zoom link, you click on that link
and whether you have a Zoom account or not,
you can still go into that meeting and participate
in that meeting.
So people think that that is everything that there is
to Zoom, but it's not.
Zoom is broken down into two components:
your account, and the application.
The application is where the meeting actually occurs,
but your account is where most of the settings occur.
It's where you set up most of the different features
and determines whether or not you're in the free version
or the paid version of Zoom.
So let me take you into that and show you the difference
and show you where the different settings are
so you don't get lost in Zoom anymore.
Sound like a plan?
It does.
We will begin by showing you how a Zoom account works.
Now this is, if you are setting up
and hosting your own meeting.
This is when you create a Zoom account.
And you go to the Zoom homepage
and you either sign in or you sign up at the Zoom homepage.
When you sign into your existing account,
allow me to do that, and I signed into my paid account,
to my main account here,
you are brought into your account settings.
This page within your web browser
is where you set all of the global settings
for the Zoom app itself.
The Zoom app, which I will invoke here.
Let me just open a new window and I will start a meeting,
and I've got it set as a keyboard shortcut,
I'm going to start a meeting so that we have the Zoom app
open at the same time.
The Zoom app is where the actual meeting occurs.
It's a download that happens on your computer
and you can see it running here.
This is very familiar.
This is where the meeting occurs.
But all of the settings that we are gonna talk about
happen here in the Zoom account.
The question that people have,
that we've seen over and over again,
is I show different features here in the Zoom app,
down here in the bottom.
I show different features along the bottom
and they say, "I don't have those features.
"It must be the fact that I haven't got the paid version."
Well, in fact the paid version and the free version
are virtually identical
with only a few featured differences.
For the most part, all of the features are there,
but they aren't always turned on,
because Zoom has within the account settings,
two places that you set meeting parameters,
that you set kind of how your meeting is set up
and how your app works.
When you create a brand new meeting
right from the start, you can go in
and if you schedule a new meeting
as opposed to just starting one ad hoc, like on the fly,
if you schedule a meeting,
you've got all of these different settings
that allow you to invite people into them,
create a meeting description,
schedule a time for it to start,
and do some more advanced features
such as having everybody muted upon entry
which is a great way to control,
especially a large meeting and not make it too busy,
to have all of your participants muted,
you can choose to only have authenticated users
or people with accounts sign in,
you can assign breakout rooms
if you've got breakout rooms turned on.
So you've got some settings here
that are meeting-specific
for an individual meeting you're going into.
To set up all of the parameters
for the app itself, to set up what, you know,
what settings we see here along the bottom,
what tools we have access to.
For example, as well as others,
for that, from the account window,
we go into settings.
And this is the place that most people don't go
and this is really kind of,
it's like Aladdin's cave.
We go in here and we find all of the magic
that we're looking for in order
to customize the Zoom app when we launch the Zoom app,
with the goodies that I've been showing you
in all of our videos.
If you scroll through this,
you will see that you have in here,
let me show you a few examples,
you have the ability to turn on and off
the requirement to have a password before you join.
Scrolling down a little bit more,
let's look at some of the ones that people
specifically are having issues with.
If we go into the basic meeting tools here,
you can turn on and off chat here,
you can allow or prevent the attendees from saving the chat.
Do you see how we have control of that?
You can turn on private chat between individuals
within the meeting so that they can chat privately
and the entire group doesn't know it.
See, all of these features are here,
and by turning on and off these toggle switches,
you can enable or disable it.
If you wanna have, be able to have people transfer files
to offer files for download, you can turn this on here.
Going through it, you can turn on and off the ability
to add a co-host.
The polling feature is one that is only available
in the paid version, but you go here to turn it on,
and that's a question we get a lot.
(light screaming)
'Cause I think I might've said at one point
that polling was included for free.
If I did, my apologies.
I was wrong.
Continuing on through, we can turn on and off
the ability to have the whiteboard.
Again, all of these, not all of these are turned on.
And the reason not all of them are turned on,
really comes down to, I think, these tools here.
The breakout room and the remote support.
The breakout room is one that allows you
to take all of your participants within the Zoom meeting
and divide them into smaller working groups
and then bring them back together at the end.
If you've got that turned on,
you can't have remote support turned on.
Remote support, we've just recently done a video on
is where it allows you to take over control
over remote computer if you're doing technical support
or teaching somebody, and you wanna show them
on their computer themselves.
It's a great feature for doing
all sorts of different support and training,
but you can't have it
and the breakout room turned on at the same time.
So basically what Zoom does
is they give you access to all of the tools in here,
but they only turn on the basic ones
when you set up your account,
and they allow you to customize your own app
for your own purposes.
So you wanna spend time, go through it,
they're all well-explained.
Or we have videos on many of these different tools,
but if I show something here in the Zoom screen
that you don't have access to,
you go into your account settings
and once again, I'll navigate you into it.
You go into your account, go into settings,
and there you will find the ability
to have all of these different features available to you.
So all of your global settings
and your meeting-specific settings
are set up in your account before you launch a meeting.
But you still have, once you launch a meeting,
another area of control.
And that is, you can go in once you're in the meeting
and I'm here in the app now, I'm not in the account,
but I'm in the app itself,
you can then make yourself familiar
with what's available to you here in the preferences menu
within the app itself.
And this allows you to override several of the settings
that you set previously in the account settings
and then also granularly deal
with the individual settings
that you might want to tweak
for the meeting that you are in specifically.
So they have general settings
which allows things like using dual monitors,
asking whether you wanna be confirmed
when you're exiting a meeting.
So, it gives you a confirmation screen,
those sorts of things.
And again, I'm not gonna go through all of these right now,
but you should make yourself familiar with these.
Now, let me deal with the other big question
and that is the question about the virtual background.
So many questions about the virtual background.
And I gotta tell you,
just as a purely editorial thing,
I'm really past the whole virtual background thing.
I realize that for branding purposes,
you might wanna have a virtual background
to kinda have your business logo.
And for those of you who are
in a less than optimal recording environment,
maybe you've got a little bit of a messy background
or it doesn't look really professional,
and you wanna blur our, kinda change that background,
change the impression, I get it for that.
And I would rather you use Zoom
and participate in the meeting.
But if you've got a nice background like I have here,
I set this up for video, I don't see the point
in using a virtual background.
I would rather not have to ask my computer
to do all of the machinations,
and not go through all of the virtual background stuff,
but that's a purely editorial comment.
Let me show you how you can make it work,
because the virtual background and green screen
are kissin' cousins but they aren't the same thing.
So, question number one.
I don't have the same options
as you in the virtual background.
Why not?
The reason is nothing to do with paid version.
It's nothing to do with regional version.
It's to do with how much processing power your computer has.
It takes a lot of processing for Zoom
to take this background image
and convert it to this image here,
to change it and put that in place.
It just takes a lot of processing power to do that,
and actually, it's doin' a pretty good job right now.
But still, you can see it's still kinda blurring.
But that's because I have a fairly powerful computer
that I am running this with.
If you don't have a very powerful computer,
Zoom will struggle with it and so Zoom won't even try.
If you don't have enough horsepower in your computer,
it won't give you the option
to say have a video running in the background.
So Zoom will check your computer,
see how much processing power there is.
Chances are, it will give you this option here
of being able to give you a virtual background
with a still image.
Most computers today are gonna be handle that,
able to handle that.
But it may not give you this option here
which is to run a video in the background
which you can see running here.
So it might not give you that option.
But Zoom has to work very hard.
The reason that you kinda see things breaking
and kinda blurring around the edge
is Zoom does a lot of work in order to make
this look semi-decent.
And of course, the less I move the better it looks,
because it's basically gotta process that information
every time you make a move.
That is for the virtual background.
Now, let's talk about the green screen option
which is similar to the virtual background,
but it's a little bit different.
There is a few different settings.
So let me dive in and show you exactly what those are.
Now, I'm not gonna bother setting up my green screen.
I did it before in this other video.
You can check out the previous video that I did it in.
I hate setting up the green screen,
but here's how you use it.
You turn on the green screen.
Once you've got it set up, now it could be green screen,
it can be a blue screen behind you.
Once you've turned that on,
and you choose a background you wanna use,
what will happen is Zoom will try and find the color
and it will tell you what the color is right here.
If you take a look down here, this little dot here,
this is where Zoom gives you the opportunity
to kinda create an eyedropper tool
where you click on it, and then you click
on whatever the background color is gonna be.
Click on the green screen, and that will determine
the background color.
If not, it tries and figures it out.
Now, obviously it's a mess here going on right now,
because I don't have a green screen,
but for example if my orange shirt
was the green screen I can click on it.
And you see now my orange shirt
is working pretty well.
That's a green screen showing the background through.
But it's always going to struggle
unless you determine exactly,
and you can actually see,
see the little bit of an orange color
being shown right there?
So it's gonna look for the green screen this way.
And then by clicking there,
and then clicking on the screen itself on the green area,
you will properly set up your green screen key
and your background image.
Whatever you've loaded in,
or whatever you're using as your background image
will display elegantly and properly through it.
That's the key to setting up the green screen.
That's it.
I hope that you've found this video today to be useful.
I believe we have answered the two biggest questions
people have about using Zoom.
And if you have any other questions
or you want to master Zoom in other ways,
we have a plethora of other videos
for you to peruse in order
to up your Zoom game specifically.
I encourage you to watch each and every one of them
and if you find them valuable,
as if you've found this one valuable,
please give us a thumbs up
and comment on them on YouTube.
I do read each and every comment
and if you have questions,
I do my best to answer them as I think we did here
in today's video.
So I look forward to seeing your comments online.
If you've not yet subscribed to this channel,
I have one question for you,
what the heck are you waiting for?
Please click on that subscribe button,
ring that notification bell,
and I will see you next time for more Dotto Tech.
Until then, I'm Steve Dotto.
Have fun stormin' the castle.