How to Improve your Zoom Meetings

1. Things you can do that you already have.

If you are hosting a meeting or you are the speaker, having a few things in mind will improve the "look" of your presentation.

If possible use 2 devices for your meeting, your phone for the camera on an elevated position, about your eyes elevation, a view from the bottom is not a good view, sometimes your belly or nostrils become the object of attention of your meetings.

The second device to control your audience, see who raises their hand and control the meeting, if you have a second person helping you to do that would be nicer for you to focus on the presentation.

2. Have a Co-Host

Have a Co-host, prepare in advance to have videos, graphics, powerpoint presentations and other media presented by a co-host sharing their own screen instead of yours.

They can also help you manage when you call on someone raising their hand and if you call on them, you cohost can un-mute and mute again when needed.

3. Light is (almost) everything

If you can only improve 1 thing, it should be lightning.

At least 3 main ones.

1- left

2- right

3- your background.

and don't neglect your phone lens. Clean it, so many phones and tablets are moved around so much and camera lenses get dirty then your video will be cloudy. DO NOT FORGET to clean your lens.

4. Get some Gear

Now that you did with what you have, you can start investing in some simple gadgets to get better results.

Get a tripod that can place the phone at your eye level, either by itself or by placing it on a table. With a phone holder like this one

or iPad holder

and a tripod like this one

Tripod does not need to be expensive, but tall to be at your eye level if you are standing, which looks better.

5. Your sound matters

The better you sound across the meeting the better your presentation will be.

UPDATE: microphone setup is a bit more complex because of the different plugs and devices. Specific intructions can be found here - https://www.digitaltech-inc.com/how-to-improve-online-meetings-with-better-audio/

You have 3 options,

1. stay with your device microphone.

2. us a "boom" microphone that you can place on top of the phone like the previous phot sample, this is that microphone.

3. use a lavalier microphone, a fancy name for a clip on lapel mic. wired inexpensive

or full wireless, depends how much you want to spend

UPDATE - I wrote that this grey Na&um set was good, inexpensive set, but its works half the time.

Sorry if you bought it. With Amazon you can still return it. I am really considering paying for the more expensive one and get consistency.

You WILL need this to connect your micropone

You won't be able to use your fancy new mic with your phone or iPad without this adapter ( you won't need this one if you get the wireless microphone set mentioned above because is included in that kit.)

This cable adapter has labels to show you what to connect and where. NOTE: connect your microphone AND any headphones to the labeled inputs, if you only plug the microphone, the device won't recognize and it won't work unless headphones are plugged on the headphone end.

6. Your video viewing angle matters

Your phone's camera is usually wide, and the image is has a close perspective. Newer phones have telephoto lenses, so you can use them for this, now that you have a nice microphone, place your phone far with the zoom lens, the perspective of how you look on camera changes, the proportion of your face is different, and people won't be able to tell why but they will see a better looking you

If you don't have such phone, a set of clip on inexpensive lenses will help you with that.

You only need the telephoto lens, but this kit is a great price and comes with all of them. You don't need anything better than this because you are not taking high resolution photos.

7. The Ultimate Upgrade

And finally if you are all in, your last upgrade would be the camera you use, phones are great but...

Having a great better camera with a crisp focus and nice nice lens will improve the colors and overall feel of your meeting presentation.

So you need a camera with good quality video, it can be a mirrorless, I like Sony Alpha 6600 with the 18 to 135 kit lens

I personally bought this kit after hours of research, the camera has input and output for microphone and headphones to check on the quality of the sound and recording, screen flips up completely so you can see you are in frame. This kit comes with the microphone mentioned above and a short tripod you can place on a table and a box to get it high enough.

But here comes the kicker, you need 2 more devices to work with this camera,

a micro hdmi to hdmi cable

and

2. a device to capture the video from the camera into your computer. A HDMI video capture card. If you came all the way, you don't want to go cheap here. You are looking for low latency and hi resolution.

I found this ClonerAlliance Chert 4KC, HDMI to USB-C Video Capture Dongle, after reading some reviews and noted that the bad reviews most likely were due to user fail to realize that their computer is old.

Now that I have tried it, I love it works amazing, I have a 2017 MacBook Pro and worked out of the box, shows immediately on the available cameras of your zoom meeting.

One thing to note on your camera is that the HDMI settings - HDMI Info. Display - should be off.

Off course there are more ways you can get better and go to the professional end, that is after many thousands of dollars and hiring experts e.t.c. so this is where we end our trip today on this endless improvement road. I hope you got some useful information. Let us know if we can help you set it up.

🙂

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