Tech Tips for Zoomers: Getting the Most From Your Next Video Conference

OK, Zoomers. Having spent the last couple months teaching multiple online workshops, as well as hosting many Zoom calls, I’ve collected a few shortcuts and tech tips learned along the way. Feel free to add your own in the comments!

Before Your Call/Webinar:

·        Check your lighting and layout. You can create a fake zoom meeting (using either your current account or a free one) with no one in it but you in order to see what your camera sees. You may need to tidy up the room behind you, or reposition your computer/camera so the background isn’t distracting. If your calls will be at varied times of day or evening, check what the lighting will look like at that time and have additional lights available if needed. Don’t worry, you don’t need to buy one of those ring lights everyone is getting. A small lamp on your desktop will help. Make sure your camera is not looking up your nose at the ceiling—very common with laptops due to the positioning of the camera.

·        Practice talking to your camera! Most of us naturally talk to the people in the “room” but from their perspective, when you do this you are not making eye contact. So you have to get used to talking to your computer camera. I keep a smiley face on a sticky note next to mine to remind myself.

·        Optimize your audio setup. If you are planning to be a primary speaker or presenter, consider investing in an external mic to minimize distortion and extraneous noise. There are many low-cost options. (See my blog post here on audio tips for computer calls and mobile video recordings.) Arriving early for a call, you can have Zoom check to see how your audio sounds to the other listeners. Do this by clicking the little up-carrot next to the microphone picture at the bottom left of your screen. Right-click and select "Test Speaker & Microphone" and follow the directions for an easy mic test.

·        Check your internet connection. A wired connection is ideal. If you have wifi, be sure your router isn’t hiding behind or inside a piece of furniture, as this blocks the signal. Get to where you have the strongest signal area for your calls. If you use a VPN, turn it off. If you are having issues with your wifi, it’s not a bad idea to reboot your router. You might have neighbors riding on your network, some malware, or just slow connectivity. Here’s a good explanation of reasons for a reboot.

·        Turn off notifications. Silence your computer and phone. Especially if you’re presenting. Those dings and dongs are really distracting!

·        Really important: Turn off any cloud syncing apps, such as Dropbox. I’ve had that awful experience of someone uploading large video and photo files to a shared Dropbox and bang, my computer crawls. Which is why I’ve switched to Box.com. But that’s another article.

·        If you are a presenter, also register as a participant (you may need to register with a secondary email address). Set up a second computer or laptop near your primary location so that on the day of your presentation, you can log in as a participant. This allows you to see how everything looks and sounds to the participants. (But after you check, remember to mute that secondary system audio, so you don’t create an echo). For ipad users, that will not show you the entire screen the same way as it would be seen on a computer, FYI.

·        When presenting, I personally like to open the chat and Q&A windows on a secondary screen if I’m presenting a Powerpoint or other screen-share from my main desktop. Especially when presenting Powerpoint or Keynote, I’ve noticed the VRAM may not keep up and participants could “see” these windows as simply a grey box covering part of the presentation, yuck.

During Your Call/Webinar:

·        If you are having trouble with your connection, exit the meeting and re-enter. This is the Zoom equivalent of a computer reboot. Generally, this helps. If everyone on the meeting or webinar is still having issues, ask everyone who doesn’t need to be seen to turn off their cameras. This decreases bandwidth needs.

·        If you want a recording of your webinar, be sure to make both a cloud recording and a local recording. The cloud recording will look like crap. The better local recording will need to render for a few minutes after your meeting or webinar ends (don’t close any Zoom windows while it does this), and then will appear in a Documents/Zoom folder on your root directory for Windows users.

·        If you want a better quality recording, select “Enable HD” and “Optimize for 3rd Party Editor” before you record. This increases the data rate and quality of your recording.

·       Make two important selections when you screen-share video from your computer and want people to be able to hear the video sound: right after you hit Share Screen remember to click on the two boxes that appear in the next window: “Share Computer Sound” and “Optimize Screen Sharing for Video Clip”.

A Word About Greenscreens:

I know everyone is enamored of putting sandy beaches behind them during a Zoom call. That’s fine for a Happy Hour. But for business? Maybe not the best look. Especially if you do not have what we call in the video business a “clean key” (the clear digital separation of the foreground image pixels from the background). This is common if you don’t have sufficient even lighting, and if you don’t have enough distance between you and your green screen or background. The result is an image where your edges look blurry and every time you move, your image becomes “laggy” (tech slang for bandwidth not keeping up and dropping pixels out of your image as you move). Quite distracting. Also, your foreground image is likely to be much fuzzier than your background image. Also very distracting. If you need a simple, professional-looking background for not too much cost, you could buy a Westcott backdrop kit and stand.

Handy Shortcuts:

• To quickly unmute yourself, use Alt-A.
• To quickly screenshare, use Alt-S.
• To get to the chat box, Alt-H
• To quickly record to cloud, Alt-C
• To quickly start recording locally, Alt-R

Amy DeLouise is a video producer who helps organizations tell a better story, including coaching leaders on how to present themselves online.