Level up your Zoom game

When Zoom first came into the conversation, we used it for remote meetings but a certain pandemic suddenly brought Zoom into a much sharper focus, and many of us are now using it for all parts of our job. So whilst my job has always meant a large percentage of my time was delivering content over Zoom, for many others, their use of Zoom has morphed from “occasional meeting” to “delivering presentations to work colleagues/customers/etc”, which often needs to be recorded to give those colleagues a “catch up” or “watch-on-demand” capability.  If this description matches you – then here’s a quick tip to make sure that Zoom recording is much more engaging when your colleagues come to watch it.

In your Zoom webinar, when you share your screen or a window on your screen, your own display will typically look something like this:

When you are recording your own session (so that it can be made available later), the recording will typically reflect the size ratio between the shared windows/screen and the webcam, so the video will end up like below:

You (the speaker) can often end up being incredibly small, which might be OK if you’re running a demo, but if you’re presenting slides for your team mates, then that will make for a pretty boring video because it is almost impossible to see you speaking.

There is a workaround to this – the webcam video window can be resized during your Zoom session. If you hover at just the right spot in the lower corners, you can stretch out the video:

Your webcam can be increased in size to approximately double the default, eg

The critical thing here is that this larger size is also captured in the recording, resulting in a much more engaging video for your co-workers.

Similarly, if you untick the “side by side” setting in your Zoom recording preferences:

Then the recording will come out with a nice “overlay” effect which is best combined with making sure that you have no content on your slides on the top right corner.

Happy Zooming!