- Everyday, more and more of us begin video conferencing.
So, in order to stand apart from the rest of the madding
crowd, it is important for us to up
our video conferencing game.
Now, in my opinion, the best way for you to up
your video conferencing game is to improve
the quality of audio.
But a lot of you are also interested
in improving the quality of your video,
and adding a little bit of interest,
a little bit of panache to your video.
That's what we're gonna take a look at today.
How do you add some panache
to your Zoom videos, on DottoTech.
(upbeat music)
Steve Dotto here;
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
As more of us are gravitating towards Zoom
as a conferencing tool as we are working,
increasingly from home and having to do more and more
video conferencing, I thought I would share with you,
actually, I didn't think I would share with you.
So many people have been asking me, in our comments,
in our other Zoom tutorials,
about how to use the green screen option
and how to use the virtual background,
and the different video options
that are built in to Zoom, so I thought,
we should do a video on that.
That is what we are doing right now.
So the screen that you see me in right now
is actually my Zoom screen.
I just don't happen to have anybody else
in the room with me, but as a host of a room,
this is what you will be facing.
Down here, in the very bottom of that screen
is your video options.
Now actually, there are two places,
within the room itself where you can set up
different video options.
One is down here.
We go down to the bottom and click.
You can choose your different resources.
I have, for example, have two different cameras
that are enabled on my computer.
One is my display iSight, because I'm using a MAC,
so there's a builtin iSight camera,
which frankly sucks.
And my Logitech BRIO, which is my camera of choice,
which you see me talking to you on right now.
We can also go in to the video settings here,
which open this dialogue box that allow us
to control the overall video settings
that we are displaying.
For example, if we want to have the original ratio,
if we have a webcam that doesn't necessarily
broadcast widescreen, or if we're going widescreen.
You could also choose to turn on and enable HD.
The default is not to have HD turned on,
and you'll see the quality difference when I turn off HD.
I would think twice about turning on HD.
It's one thing for me now, when I'm recording this demo
so I have good quality video on YouTube,
but it's an entirely other issue
if you are using your bandwidth to upload your video
and you're in HD as you're broadcasting,
because, as there's so much extra stress
on our systems, you might wanna think about
just broadcasting in standard definition,
because there's so much bandwidth being used up
by all of the different people who are online,
that bandwidth is becoming increasingly dear
and I think we've all noticed a degradation in service
of different applications.
So, turning off HD might be a good idea
for most video conferences.
Just food or thought.
You could also mirror your video here,
which basically flips the video
if it's important to you.
Especially if you're pointing to things,
and you're verbally saying, to the right, to the left,
to the right, to the left,
and it's mirrored, so everybody gets all confused.
Now, if I say to the right, it is gonna be to the right.
If I say, to the left, it's indeed to the left.
But if I turn it back to regular, non-mirroring video,
then it's the opposite.
The right for me is your left,
if that makes sense.
I don't know why they do this,
but they also have this thing,
and let me turn on.
First of all, lemme just show you what my video looks like.
Move off to the side; there's my face.
Hello, here's Steve's face.
Do I need to be touched up?
This is what touching up my appearance does.
Is it softens the focus on my face.
It's sort of like when they used to put Vaseline
on the lens for different Hollywood stars
so that you didn't see the age wrinkles as much.
I'm ready for my closeup now, Mr. DeMille, I might say,
but you can touch up your experience if you choose to.
I don't know.
It's not something that's very important to me.
But you can certainly do that.
What people are really interested in is this.
The virtual background.
And we can choose it from this dialogue box here,
or you can choose it as a popup right here,
saying choose virtual background.
Now Zoom has the capability to be able to discern
what your background is, relatively well,
and key that out.
In other words, block it out,
and bring another background in.
So, if I wanted, and they give you these presets.
So if I wanted the Golden Gate Bridge,
I just choose it.
But as you can see when I move my head around,
it doesn't do a very good job.
The reason, and it would do a good job
if say I had a nice white background,
but I have a very busy background here in my office.
And I've set up my office just like this,
because I wanted to have a living set.
I wanted to have something that brought people
in to my home environment and made them feel comfortable,
and that's why I've got this set
that's set up to be an interesting environment
that I shoot in.
But a lot of you don't necessarily want that.
A lot of you wanna block off the signs of your real life.
Perhaps there's a mess behind you,
or you don't think it's professional to be seen
in your home environment.
So you have the option of using the virtual background.
If you've got a fairly neutral background,
it will work well.
But if you don't have a fairly neutral background,
then you wanna use a green screen,
and I'll show you the green screen in just a minute.
I'll set mine up.
I'll go through the process of setting it up.
It's a pain in the ass.
I don't like doing it all that much,
but I'll do it just for you.
Just because I know you wanna see it.
But before we do that, they give you a whole variety
of options here, small selection of options,
of backgrounds and videos that you can play
in the background if you want to kind of up
your background game.
And you could also put your own backgrounds in.
If you have a branded background that you want
for your business, or you've got an image
that you think is a good idea,
you could upload that image.
Now I did, I went on my walk today,
I took a lovely picture of the marina by my house.
And there it is.
So there I've got the marina in place.
So you could put your own picture in.
Now you can imagine if you're a corporate identity,
you might wanna have your logo and your corporate
information here, so you can use it from a professional
or from a comfort and kind of a personal basis
of adding these images.
Plus, if you do a search online,
you're gonna find dozens of other services
that will allow you to download and purchase backgrounds.
So, you can have yourself on the bridge
of the Starship Enterprise, or any other environment
that you choose that you want.
You can license and you can purchase background images
that are pre-baked for you.
But as I say, looking at the quality, and it does,
it looks kind of, it looks hokey,
because it keeps cutting in and out,
because it's having trouble resolving the background
that I'm against.
So let me show you how it looks
when we set up the green screen.
So I guess I better set up my green screen first.
Just give me a minute here.
It'll take me a few seconds.
I got one of these popup green screens.
It's got a metal band running through it
that's steel that pops open.
It maintains a memory and it holds it taught.
You could also get green screens that are pipe-based
that's basically just a cloth that you pull
in a pipe and you stretch out.
Those are even more awkward to set up than these,
but this is kind of an explosion.
Farley, the dog, hates it when I do this.
I better get my stand ready for this.
So this has got a single point stand
that I can open up.
What I do for you guys.
(squeaky laughing)
Here we go, got it, nobody was hurt.
I'm fine, I'm fine, don't worry about it; it's all good.
There we go.
I need that.
Okay, we got it, I just gotta get it centered.
Just give me a minute here, and I'll get this figured out.
And I gotta go this way here.
There we go.
All right, oh, the dog's here.
Okay, Farley, get out of there.
Get out of there.
You're gonna mess everything up, Farley.
It's not great, it's not terrible.
Oh gosh, okay.
So I'm just gonna show you how the background looks now,
once I use the green screen.
And you see how much better it is now?
Oh, wait a minute.
Lemme get to.
Oh, Farley, off!
He just made a break for it.
(dog barking)
Okay, so now I've got it set up.
So let's, so we can see the green screen here
behind me and what I did is I actually zoomed
my camera in a little bit.
I used my camera settings to zoom it in,
because the field was too wide.
So that's something that you're gonna have to
pay attention to.
But now I can choose that nice background
that I had and look a the beautiful background.
And you see how now, because the green screen
is in place, as I move around, it keys it out nicely,
and looks very natural.
It looks really good.
It looks almost realistic.
Now I should point out that you may have trouble.
It may not pick up the color of your green screen
right away, and if it does, there's a little eyedropper
tool here that, this is what could happen to you.
You could end up with something like this,
which is, when you go to create it,
which is it's picked up the wrong color.
It hasn't recognized the color of your green screen.
And you could use a different color.
You could use a blue screen.
Or you can just use the color of your wall
at that particular case.
But if you puck up the color,
all you do is you go in to the settings here,
you choose this kind of little crosshair tool,
and then you click on, turn it on again,
click on, see how that little plus there,
you click on the green screen,
and that tells the computer what color to key out
in the background.
And you can have something like a still image,
as we said, or you could have, this is very cool.
Look at how cool the Aurora borealis
looks behind me now.
That is pretty awesome, I think.
So, it's pretty easy for you
to change out the background
if you wanna improve the quality
of your video conference.
I think where this is really most important,
it eliminates boredom for us in a lot of cases.
But where this is important, where it works well,
is if you have branding
or you need to set some sort of a corporate identity,
and you wanna include that
and since we don't have the option
of welcoming people in to our offices now,
we can project our office out in to cyber space
to whoever it is we happen to be visiting with.
I hope that you found this useful.
Looking forward to your comments and suggestions.
I read each and every one.
Make sure you give this video a thumbs up.
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We've got a whole series of videos
on how to use Zoom.
I encourage you to watch those
and again, share those.
Till next time, I'm Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.