20 Tips For Using Zoom On Your Mac

Many of us are using Zoom on our Macs for meetings, classes or get-togethers. Zoom is a powerful video conferencing app with many useful hidden features. Learn how to test your audio before a meeting, use a video background, send reactions and nonverbal feedback and start breakout meetings.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary at MacMost.com. Today let me show you some tips for using Zoom on your Mac.
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So Zoom is clearly the most popular tool right now for gathering on line whether it's for business meetings, for classes for school, or just for getting together with friends. If you're using Zoom on your Mac here some useful tips. Now most of these work for anybody using Zoom. But some require you to have a subscription to have the more advanced features. 
So first let's start off by looking at backgrounds because you see people using all sorts of different backgrounds. Here's how you can do that. Go to Zoom Preferences and then go to Backgrounds & Filters. There you will see a preview of yourself with your camera. Now below you will see virtual backgrounds and you can choose from some default ones that Zoom has. So I can change it to this one for instance. But you could actually use any image you want. For instance here I've got an image from a photo that I took. I can use that as my background. To add you own image click the Plus button here and select Add Image and then select an image. It will add it to the list and you can see how it looks. 
Another tip is you don't have to use an image. You can use a video. So you can see there are a few that Zoom includes so it's actually an animated background behind you. Now you can use your own videos or ones that you've downloaded. For instance you can go to a site here like Pixabay and then you can go and look at their videos that you can download for free. Then you can select one and download it. So, for instance, if I download this one here then back in Zoom click the Plus button, Add Video, and select that video. Now it adds it and you can see I've got that video background behind me. I can even add the video background that I used to create my tutorials and I'll have the behind me. You can easily switch between these even while you're in the middle of a meeting.
Here's another tip. You can see here I have a green screen checked here and I do actually have a green screen. If I click None here you can see the green screen behind me. Now because I have a green screen virtual backgrounds look a lot better for me than for a lot of people on Zoom. For instance if I switch back to this and I turn Off I have a green screen it's going to try to figure out what's the background and what's me. So I turn it Off and now you could see as I wave my hand here how bad it was. But if I turn it On, I have a green screen, then it actually picks up the green screen behind me and it looks a lot better.
You could even put here to adjust, so if you have say a blue screen or maybe just a white background, you can select the color. You don't have to get a professional green screen or anything like that. Just a green or blue tablecloth hung on the wall behind you will work. Or even if you have just a blank wall. Paint it a color that won't conflict with your skin or the clothes that you're wearing.
Here's some other video tips. There are bunch of things under Settings, Video that you can change. One is Enable HD. So by default it's going to be standard definition video. After all this is going to stream over the internet. So if you're a participant in a meeting you just want to leave that Off. But if you're leading a meeting or making a presentation then you may want to turn that On since you're the one person that probably everybody is going to be watching.
There's also Touch Up My Appearance which actually will soften your skin a bit. Get rid of blemishes. So depending upon what you want you're able to turn that on and adjust it quite a bit. The other adjustment I want to show you here is Adjust for Low Light. A lot of us don't have low lights like I do in my studio. So if you have low light you may want to try turning this on and seeing how it improves your image. Then you could set it for Manual, Auto, and Make Adjustments. So play around with that because you want to set it to get the best possible image across even if you're just participating in a meeting.
Let's look at some audio things. One of the things I like to use is Test Mic. You don't have to go into a meeting and then ask, oh am I loud enough or can you hear me okay. All of that. You can test this yourself before you ever enter the meeting. So just click Test Mic and it will record you for a few seconds and then play it back for you just like someone else would hear you. So this is me talking, how do I sound. 
One of the cool things Zoom does is it does echo cancellation. So when you have your microphone and your speaker and your microphone is picking up what you're saying over the speaker and what other people are saying it's cancelling that out. You notice sometimes when you go to some other things that aren't Zoom sometimes they're an echo issue and some people use headsets just to get around that. But Zoom kind of takes care of it. However if it doesn't seem to be taking care of it for you click on Advanced here and then you'll see an Echo Cancellation setting. You can go and switch it from Auto to Aggressive  and see if that makes things better.
Now while we're in here in Preferences go to Keyboard Shortcuts. Obviously it's very useful to learn the keyboard shortcuts for using Zoom. But notice these check boxes here on the right. If you check any of these it becomes a global keyboard shortcut. In other words if you switch out of Zoom into another app you can still use it. This is very useful if you're in a meeting and you're paying attention to it but you actually have another app that's the front most app then shortcuts won't act on Zoom they'll act on your front most app. But you can turn something like Mute on globally. So the keyboard shortcut will work even if Zoom isn't the front most app.
Now while we're talking about Mute there's one settinghere I want to show you. Press and hold the Space Key to Temporarily unmute. Now you have to make sure that's enabled under Audio. There's a checkbox here for Press and Hold Space Key to temporarily unmute. If you have this turned on you can use Zoom like a walkie-talkie. You can have Mute turned on and then if you want to say something hold the spacebar down and talk and then release the spacebar when you're done. It's very useful if you're just a participant in a meeting that only occasionally needs to talk.
So let's now start a meeting for me to show you more tips. I'm going to click on New Meeting to create a new meeting. Now I'm on. Now there are a bunch of different things I could do while I'm in the meeting. So let's continue talking about muting because there's a really useful function here. If you go to meeting you'll see Ask All to Unmute which is nice. But you could also Mute All. This, of course, is if it's your meeting. This is really useful if you've got a whole bunch of people in a meeting and you're running it and you're all chatting at the beginning and now it's time for you to present something you can just force everybody to Mute instead of asking everybody to mute, waiting for people, trying to get that one person that's not muting to mute and all of that.
Now I'm sure you know that you can click Share Screen and share your screen with everybody in the meeting. But there's another interesting feature that a lot of people overlook and that's Whiteboard. Click that and click Share. Instead of sharing your screen you have this drawing board here and some tools. You can now draw and  everybody in the meeting will see it. You can even add some text. You can create a shape. There's an eraser. Clear everything out. It could be really useful in situations where you want to illustrate something but you don't necessarily have something on your screen to share.
Now also notice that another option under Share Screen is to share an iPhone. You could do it for an iPhone that's connected or one that's over AirPlay. So you click that. Click Share and now basically it turns your Mac into an AirPlay device. Now on my iPhone I can go and turn on AirPlay Mirroring and then choose Zoom, you could see it right there, and now I'll actually be showing my iPhone screen in the meeting. So you can demonstrate something on your iPhone or just show photos or whatever it is you need to do.
I've joined this meeting with another Mac I've got. If I click on participants I'll see the participants here on the right and if I click on Chat I'll see Chat here. Now normally when you chat you're chatting to everybody. So everybody can see it's a group chat. But you can always type a message here and then change the To to a specific person for a private chat. So if you need to send somebody a message and you don't want everybody else to see it you can just use this. 
When you're in a meeting and you want to react to something, like say you like something or don't like something, whatever, you can always click this Reactions button here. Then you get these little emoji here. Now I have more than you would see if you have the free Zoom account. I think you just have the first two if you have the free Zoom account. But you can click that. That will appear in the corner of your window. So it's a good way to say applaud something somebody saying without actually having to flood the Zoom meeting with sound. But notice it's using the default skin tone here. You can change that. Go to Preferences, then to General, and you could see here Reaction Skin Tone. So you could change the skin tone of those emoji.
Now if you're sharing your screen you can annotate what's on the screen. In other words draw on it. Now here on this screen I won't see the Zoom controls and everybody else in the meeting just sees the background. I can click Annotate here and I could draw, just like with the whiteboard, on the screen. Not only that but other people can do it as well. They'll see it under View Options at the top of the screen. They can Click there and turn on Annotate and then I could see them draw and it will appear on my screen there. I could go into More and I could Disable or Enable Annotations for others. That makes it really easy for somebody to ask a question about what you're showing. They can circle something and say what is this.
Now you may have noticed here at the bottom right corner in Chat there's a button for File. Click that and you can actually share a file with somebody or the entire group during the meeting. This is really handy but you have to enable it in the Settings on the Website. So you have to go to Zoom.US and change it there. I'm pretty sure this is a feature that you need to actually have a subscription to do which you would normally if you're running meetings. So here when you log into Zoom you go to Settings and then you go to Meeting. Down here there is a setting for Files. You could see File Transfer and I have that turned on.  You can also set it to Only allow specific file types.
Now you may have also noticed these little buttons here. Yes, No, Go Slower, Go Faster, and a More button with even some more things. If I use one of those it puts that little icon next to my name there. Just to get quick feedback from people or that they're away at the moment or something like that. To enable these for your meeting you need to go into your Settings on the Website here and look for Nonverbal Feedback and turn that on.
Now another setting here you may want to turn on is Breakout Room. Breakout Room is very useful. If you turn that on then in the future your meetings will have this breakout room function. Click on that and you can then divide your meeting up. So you can have a large meeting where you're talking and then decide to break everybody up into groups. So you can create these breakout rooms and assign different people to different rooms. There are all sorts of options that you should explore when creating these. 
So there are a bunch of tips using Zoom on your Mac. Hope you found this useful.

Comments: 14 Responses to “20 Tips For Using Zoom On Your Mac”

Cameron

4 years ago

Are there only certain video formats that can be used as virtual backgrounds? I downloaded a 32-second mp4 from Pixabay, but when I try to select it from Zoom, it's grayed out. And I do have a paid Zoom subscription.
Actually, I just noticed that there are no default background videos included in my Zoom settings, just still images.
What versions of Zoom are you using? I also do not have the "Adjust for low light" setting listed under "Touch up my appearance."

Gary Rosenzweig

Cameron: I'm sure there are as there are millions of combinations of formats, bit rates, and other settings. No app can use "all" formats. Not sure why you are seeing that grayed out. I'm using the latest version, of course, but this feature has been around for a long time. It could have to do with your hardware -- maybe you don't have good enough specs to support backgrounds and lighting effects?

Just spent a fair amount of time with Zoom chat support. Turns out my 2019 MacBook Air with 1.6 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 processor is too wimpy to support video backgrounds in Zoom. Who knew? I never would have suspected this. It would have been a deal breaker for me if I'd known. Guess I'll go Pro next time. Maybe you could add that detail in your next comparison video to help people decide which device is best for them.

Bob

Very timely, Gary, first Zoom meeting tomorrow. Thank you!

Bart

That was one of the most useful videos you have made. My daughter is a professor and is using Zoom this month to teach her classes since the university's program is still buggy. I am sending her a link to this video because it answers most of the questions that neither of us have been able to figure out.

Gene

We use Zoom to chat and play trivia with friends. My wife uses it for club meetings. This video is so insightful. The email that has the link to this and the other videos was great. It was the best bunch of videos in one email and there have been a lot of good ones. I am going to predict that you will have more than 1,000 Patreons in the not too distant future.

Tom j Dolan

Hi Gary, I've been taking some of the official zoom tutorials and having mixed results. Fortunately you step in and offer some xcellent info... I'll re-view several times, also, Bkgds without the Green are awful to watch and your vid demo's the difference. Thanx for the clarity as usual.

Michael Ehrman

Learned some new Zoom tricks Thanks

Grant

What size should I make my Zoom background image? (To best fill the frame?)

Grant: Well if you have a 720p camera, then your video is 1280x720. So it makes sense to do it that size. 1080 would be 1920x1080. If you are making a graphic, and not using a photo, I would make it at least double the size to future-proof it. Why not? But if you are using a photo, just use the photo as-is. No need to resize it.

This is both a general as well as Zoom question. When you want to use a photo (in this case for your Zoom background) that is in your Photos library and the app will not allow you to drag-and-drop how does one access the photo?

Gene: Just export a file and use that.

James Gates

How do I get the green boarder on my participant screen So All people can see me when I talk

James: Sorry, I'm not sure what you are trying to do. Everyone should be able to see you normally. Not sure what a "green border" means.

Comments Closed.

20 Tips For Using Zoom On Your Mac

Comments: 14 Responses to “20 Tips For Using Zoom On Your Mac”

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