Providing online chat and video conferencing services were quickly adopted by many organizations as a way to quickly and easily scale remote communications solutions for teams who now found themselves working at a distance from one another. As the pandemic drags on and the platform starts to play important roles in other business activities, users have identified a need for leveraging Zoom in recording and rebroadcasting meetings and conferences. And because we’re in the modern era where quality is just as important as content, users must understand how to get high-quality video recordings from Zoom.

This means that digital marketing agencies such as SolidLIne Media find themselves more often having to provide support to clients on the platform and showing them video techniques for shooting in high definition. In this article, we will discuss best practices for recording a zoom meeting and how to best set up office space to ensure users can achieve an HD presentation despite the challenging spaces around them.

Treating Zoom as

Your New Virtual Office Space

Zoom is the office space that goes where you go. You’ll be dialing into Zoom calls from wherever you happen to be working for the day. This could be from a well-lit home office, where you have all the necessary speakers and lighting to control your visual presentation. Or it could be from the corner of a poorly lit Cafe or shared office space. Regardless of the venue, you have to take into account several settings and configurations as you prepare to broadcast in high definition or record a meeting in HD.

Do You Need a Backdrop?

You’ll be broadcasting at different times of the day from various settings if you work from the field. Try to plan so that you’re able to broadcast from a setting that you have control over your surroundings, such as a home office. If you’re looking to record in HD, you need to do the preparation up-front to acquire lighting and cameras that are designed for professional-level video streaming. If you can’t do that, consider using either a physical backdrop to limit visual noise and control the impact of lighting in the background, or use a digital backdrop in the settings menu, which is designed as a way to control visually where you appear to be broadcasting from, but these can be tricky. If your computer or camera can’t support the virtual backgrounds, you’ll appear choppy.

Configure Video Output

Whether you’re using your device’s built-in camera or an external camera, you can configure under the settings for Zoom the recording quality resolution. For high definition broadcasts, you’ll want to choose between Standard HD (720p) or Full HD (1080p), whichever option is supported by your account that provides the best presentation. Anything below this will appear washed out and unacceptable for professional advertising use or rebroadcast. For security and utility later, use a paid Zoom account to be able to record directly to Cloud storage, where the file can later be streamed or downloaded.  

Audio

While your device will often have a built-in microphone, if you’re planning to record an HD presentation, you’ll want a professional-level microphone designed for pod-casts, radio recording, and the like, as these microphones are designed to automatically filter out background noise and provide the cleanest signals for HD presentations.  

Lighting

If you’re not using a digital background, then it’s important that you properly light your space. In addition to the built-in features of your camera to filter and adjust output settings when you configure your system for recording, you can also use 3 external LED lights to properly illuminate the office space around you. By placing one light in front of you, and one light each to the left and right at about 45-degrees, you’ll eliminate glare from other sources and you’ll prevent overhead lighting from washing out the image.  

Need Help in Pre- or Post-Production? SolidLine Media Can Help

Quarantine measures and limitations on business interactions mean that SolidLine Media’s clients are having to do more of the recording work on the front-end before we can contribute to ensuring the final video product is the high-quality you need to make an impact on clients and potential customers. To learn about our remote production services and how we can help you better prepare for recording and rebroadcasting video productions using Zoom, contact our offices today.

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