Make sure to mute your microphone, as anything you say won’t match the video on the screen. When you connect, your boss and coworkers should see the video of you and never know the difference. You’re now ready to join that boring company meeting. Remember to tape over your laptop’s webcam. If your laptop has a privacy shutter, close it, or just put some opaque tape over the camera. Zoom will automatically place anything from your webcam over this video, so your boss will immediately know something is up if you’re on the screen twice. Remember, this virtual video background is a video of you paying attention. There’s one final step, and that’s to cover your webcam.
Navigate to the folder where you store your videos and add them to Zoom to use for a virtual background. Zoom will always look to this folder for your backgrounds, so if you move that folder in a desktop cleanup, your backgrounds will go missing. We recommend that you put any Zoom virtual backgrounds in one place that won’t be moved. Point it toward the location where your edited video is. Select the Virtual Background category on the lefthand side, click the + button and select Add Video.Īdd your spoof video to Zoom’s virtual background gallery. Click the gear icon in the upper righthand corner of the Zoom window. To do this, start Zoom (it’s likely minimized in the Windows system tray, so double-click it), and you should be presented with the familiar four icons. The last step is to add the video back into Zoom. Click Export and send it to the folder where you keep your Zoom backgrounds. ZoomĬlick Finish video in the upper righthand side of Video Editor and select the default 1080p / High Quality options. Accept this, then select where you want the finished video to go. Windows will now export the video. Windows should default to 1080p and High Quality. Select Finish video in the upper-right corner of the Video Editor. ZoomĬarefully move the blue trim bar on the lower lefthand side of the screen until it’s just past the black frames, then click Done.Ĭlick Done in the Trim mode, which will bring you back to the main Video Editor screen. If, for example, you flubbed a portion of your recording at the end, you can trim it by dragging the trimmer on the right to a cut-off point. Video Editor will cut off anything before the blue trim indicators on either end of the video.
Once that’s done, drag the blue trim indicator below it to match the scrubber. First grab the little circle and line-scrub cursor on the timeline on the bottom and drag it just past the black screens in the video. Windows will now open that individual file in the Trim mode, which lets you cut off sections you don’t want. Right-click on the video in the Storyboard and select Trim. To do that, right-click on the video you just dragged into the Storyboard and select Trim. Normally you’d string multiple videos together here in the Storyboard, adding music or effects, but all we need today is to trim the black frames. To trim the video, drag it from the Project library to the storyboard. In Video Editor, Click + Add under the Project Library, select From this PC, and point it to the location where your Zoom recording is stored.Īdd your video from the folder to Video Editor, then drag it into the Storyboard. It’s actually part of Windows’ underrated Photos app, and should be included for free in the more recent builds of Windows. Just click the Windows button and search for Video Editor. We used Windows 10’s built-in Video Editor to remove it. While some people may chalk it up to videoconference weirdness, this known behavior might make your boss suspicious. This will cause the screen to black out for just a second every time it restarts. Zoom unfortunately inserts black frames at the beginning of recorded video. Zoom’s recorded video inserts a black frame, at the beginning, so we’ll use Windows 10’s built-in Video Editor to cut that out. Copy this file to a folder of your choice. When you exit the meeting by pressing Alt+Q, Zoom will automatically convert the recorded video and then open the folder where it is stored. Once you’re finished recording your video and you have exited the meeting, Zoom will automatically convert the video to a video format that can be dropped back into Zoom.