Check your video and audio settings

- Now it may seems obvious, but if you want to join, or host a Zoom meeting, you'll need at least a microphone if you want to be heard and a camera it it's a video meeting and you want to be seen as well. Most laptops, and many desktop computers, have those built in, and if don't have them built in, you can connect an inexpensive USB webcam, and that will add a camera and a microphone at the same time. But, it's a really good idea to test your system to make sure the camera, microphone, and other hardware are compatible and working with Zoom. And again, you should do this sort of thing well before you try to enter your first meeting, so you're not troubleshooting when you should be in your meeting. So here in the Zoom app, I'm going to come up to the settings button and I'm going to select video. And now you're seeing me through me webcam. If you have more than one camera connected you can click the camera menu here and select the one you want to use, you can see I just have the one in this case, and they're several other options you can play around with here. For example we have this touch up my appearance check box, which actually adds, sort of, a soft focus to the camera and can smooth out skin tones. Below that, if you want to make sure your camera doesn't turn on automatically whenever you enter a meeting, you check turn off my video when joining a meeting. And, you can always manually enable it when you're ready for people to see you in the meeting. I'm going to switch over to the audio tap, and here you can check that you have the audio app that you want to use selected. For example, you might have built-in speakers or headphones on your computer and you can choose which one you want to use, from this menu. What you see here is going to depend on what devices you have connected to your computer. You can also click test speaker to make sure you can hear sound coming from your selected source. (lighthearted music) And, you can use the app with the volume slider here to adjust the volume. Then, make sure you have the microphone you want to use selected as well. Again, this might be a built-in microphone, or the microphone on your webcam, or a USB microphone. You can select the one you want to use and then click test mic. It'll make a short recording and you can check the levels here. You want to make sure that the level doesn't get too far over to the right. It'll make a short recording and you can check the levels here. All right, so you can see there that it made a short recording of me talking and then I was able to listen back to make sure that my level was okay, it wasn't too quiet or too loud. And if necessary, I can adjust the input volume slide here, as well. Now in my case, I'm using special hardware to record this movie you're watching. So, I'm not actually going to adjust any of these sliders but, in most cases, as you're talking you'll be able to see the volume here in the input level and you can use the slider here to make your adjustments. And again, you have a couple of options here at the bottom. For example you can choose mute microphone when joining a meeting, if you don't want your mic to be live as soon as you connect and you can enable it when you're ready to talk. There's also the option here to hold the space bar when you want to talk. Letting go of the space bar, will mute you again. I'm going to leave those both unchecked for now but, this is where you can find them. All right so again, it's important to take the time to make sure your camera and microphone are working well before your meeting is scheduled to start to make sure you can connect and jump into things right away, when the meeting time arrives.