(logo revs) (logo chiming) - Are you wanting to
add a virtual background to your Zoom meeting? Do you wanna add something
a little flashy like this, or perhaps you wanna add some branding like your logo in the
upper left-hand corner? Well, in today's video, I wanna show you everything you need to know about virtual backgrounds in Zoom. I also wanna show you how to create your own custom background using a tool that you probably already have
installed on your computer. Hello, everyone. Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more
done and enjoy less stress, and I think perhaps the number one reason for using virtual backgrounds in Zoom is that it hides whatever
else is going on behind you, but let's get started
with some prerequisites, and some of you have been asking me why don't I see this
virtual background option. I'm gonna include a link
in the description below for all of the prerequisites
so you can check them yourself, but really the number one reason is that it comes down to
your processing speed. So depending on what machine you are using for Zoom conferencing if you don't have a fast enough processor you might not have virtual
background capability, but let's make sure that you have virtual backgrounds enabled, and in order to do so you wanna
go into your Zoom account, and this is where you would login as a part of your desktop browser, right? You wanna log into your
full Zoom meeting account, and under your account settings we wanna go down to the Admin section. We wanna click on Account Settings which is under Account Management, Admin, Account Management,
Account Settings, and then we wanna scroll down to almost halfway down this page. We wanna find the subheading
which says In Meeting Advanced. There's the subheading. If we scroll down just a little
bit further, there you go. You're gonna see Virtual background. You gotta make sure that this is turned on in order for you to see that option in order for you to
upload your own images. So once that is the
case, you wanna go back to your Zoom desktop client. You wanna open up Zoom
within your computer, hit this little gear icon, and here we have a number
of different settings. Now you may think it's under Video here, and if you have virtual
background turned on, you'll see it here, but this is not actually where you upload or adjust your virtual
background settings. You wanna come down here
to Virtual Background, and here you can play around. They do have a few couple of presets here that you can toy around with. If you do want a video
background, you can do so as well. Here you can see I've got the
Northern Lights behind me. Just be wary, of course, a video background is gonna
take us that much more bandwidth and that much more
processing speed as well. So you might be safer
with using a static image such as this. Now once you've downloaded
a background that you like, all you need to do is
select this plus button here to add an image or video. You need to tell it which
one that you're adding. If I say Add image, I can just go find the image
that I want, uploaded here, and now I can go ahead and start using that virtual background. However, you're probably
saying to yourself, "What if I want something
a little more custom? "What if I want to adjust a few things? "What if I want to add a logo, Scott, "like you have in your
virtual background?" Well, you might be surprised to learn that I've created my custom backgrounds, and in fact, I've created
an awful lot of my graphics over the years in something
called PowerPoint. Yeah, just basic run-of-the-mill
Microsoft PowerPoint. I just find it's a very easy
tool to manipulate images, move things around and
create these types of things. So here you can see I've got
my custom background here, but let me show you how I made it and how you can make your own as well. The nice thing about PowerPoint is that you're gonna have a canvas like this which is 16-by-9 ratio which is pretty standard
for most of our web cams and what you're going to
want to upload as well. The next thing that you
wanna do is go online and actually find an image that you like. Now a place that I go for a
number of royalty free images is a website called Pexels.com, and I actually typed in
a little bit earlier, I just even typed in Zoom backgrounds, and you can filter by color
and that type of thing as well. But found something a little colorful here that I thought I'd like
to try, this one here. Looks like, almost looks like some kind of maybe traffic lights behind glass with some rain. I typically recommend that
you choose a background that is darker in color, and the main reason is
that you're gonna see fewer ghosting lines between yourself and the background image, right? You're not gonna see those
little white separation lines as it tries to figure out
where you end and the rest of the room or the rest
of the background begins. So I'm gonna click on this image here, and whether you go to Pexels, whether you just go to Google Images, wherever you find your
image, in most cases all you need to do is
right click on the image, and then say Copy image. You can do this with
almost any image online. I'm just gonna say Copy image. I'm gonna come back into PowerPoint, and I'm just gonna paste that
image here onto my canvas. Now you can see that
it's not exactly 16 by 9. So what I'm gonna do is I'm
just gonna drag it over here, and then I'm gonna take the
corner and just sort of pull it out of it so it covers the entire space, and now I can bring
this up a bit if I want, if I want that to be a
little more centered here. I can go up to Picture
format and actually make sure it's aligned center and aligned
in the middle like that. So now it's over my entire canvas. You can see a bit of a preview
here on the left-hand side. Now what I could do is now
go ahead and use this image. I could have gone straight from Pexels and just downloaded the
image if I just wanted to go with this image all together, but I wanna add something to it, and that's what I use PowerPoint for. At this stage, I wanna input my logo like you see on one of these slides here. Now instead of just copying it here, all you need to do is go up to Insert. Let's pretend that I don't
have it in this file already. Just say Insert, select
Pictures, save from This Device. In most cases, it's something that you've download
to your device already, and here I've got a
transparent version of my logo. You may not have a transparent
version, and that's okay. You can use something else that you have or something else that you want to use, but I'm gonna use my transparent logo. I'm gonna double click on that which is good to bring
it in to PowerPoint, but that is way too big. I don't want that on
my virtual background. So again, I'm just gonna drag
the corner down to a size that I think is maybe a
little more appropriate. I'm gonna bring it up here
to the top left corner. Now I recommend that you
use the top left corner if you decide to add
some branding or a logo or anything else that you're adding to your virtual background. The reason is this. At the bottom of the screen, two reasons. Number one, people's
names will appear here in the bottom left-hand corner, but number two, and
this may be more obvious is that you and your lower body, right, like your chest and shoulders, are going to be appearing here. So it's gonna block out most things that you have in the
lower part of the frame. So you want it up top, but the reason why I
recommend the top left corner is that in the right-hand side when other Zoom participants
hover over your video, you're gonna see two blue buttons here. You're gonna see the mute/unmute button, and you're also gonna
see a more button here which would cover up anything that is presented on this side. So just to make sure that
it never gets covered up, you can put that logo or
you can put that image in the top left-hand corner. Now, the last thing
that we're gonna do here is we're gonna actually
go into full-screen mode as if we're giving a presentation as if we're giving a
PowerPoint presentation and I'm gonna hit Print Screen. Now I actually have an additional tool that I use here to capture
smaller parts of my screen, but if you don't have such a tool, hitting Print Screen is just gonna capture the entire screen in front of you. It's actually copied to the clipboard. So now we can go anywhere
else that we want to. I use another very simple
tool called Microsoft Paint. Yes, something else that is
probably already installed in your computer, and here
I'm just gonna paste it. I'm just gonna paste it here within Paint. The reason why I bring it in here is that it is so easy just
to go to File, Save as, and now I can choose the
file type, the picture type, that I want to save this file as, and in most cases, you
wanna look at something like PNG or a JPEG. PNG is often the highest
quality that might be available to you in your default program. So I'm gonna say save as PNG picture. That's gonna bring something up here. I'm gonna call this says Zoom sample. Let's call this Zoom
sample two, how about that? And I'm gonna save that to my desktop, and now all we need to do. I can close this now. We can leave this PowerPoint back open. I'm gonna go back into
my Zoom meetings here. I'm gonna open up my settings. Come back down to Virtual background, and let's add this background
that we just created together. I'm gonna hit Plus, Add image. There is Zoom sample two, and, hey, yeah, I better watch
out for the, I don't know, the ambulance or the
vehicle behind me there, and it turns out pretty
good, there you can see. There's not too much ghosting
or shadowing happening amongst my hair or my shoulders
or anything of that nature. Now if for some reason
things have been uploaded in the wrong degree, right, if it's rotated in the wrong area, you can come up here and
select Rotate 90 degrees and push things around
until it finds the one that is right for you. The other thing that you
wanna pay careful attention to is this mirror my video. If this is checked, as you can
see my logo is now backwards, and that is certainly not
what I want others to see. So you may just have to toggle this depending on how it uploaded to Zoom. I'm gonna uncheck that so that my logo comes
across nice and clear. The other check box, you
wanna pay special attention to is that if you're not
using a green screen, do not check this box. This box is only for a green screen only. Why? 'Cause you're gonna look
something crazy like this. So do not check that box unless you have an actual green screen, and for most of us, we don't
have a green screen available or something that we don't
wanna put up from time to time. Again, if you have proper
lighting in front of you against your face and if it's
somewhat darker behind you or at least an even color behind you, you are going to get the best results here within Zoom virtual backgrounds. Well, I hope that you found
today's video helpful, and if you have further questions about Zoom virtual backgrounds or anything related to Zoom meetings, be sure to let me know in
the comments down below. Thank you so much for
watching and remember being productive does
not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
