Randy Dean shows how to use a plain wall instead of a green screen for Zoom backgrounds. A blank wall creates cleaner results with less pixelation than a green tarp, and wearing a shirt that matches the wall color produces a ghost-like effect where the background shows through your body.
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Alright, hi everybody. I wanted to do a really quick addendum to my Zoom video from earlier this week. Once again, I'm Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert, and this is super quick. What I wanted to show you is this. Look behind me. I have a blank wall. And now what I want to show you is this. I'm going to go into my video settings right up here at the top. I'm going to go into video settings, and what I want to do is go into virtual background. And when I go into Virtual Background, you'll see that it has none. But watch this. I'm going to go back into my home office. Hey, look at that. That actually brings in the bookshelf. Or hey, let's go see my friend the moose again. Heh heh. Or let's go up here. Now I'm in Alaska. And the reason I wanted to do this is I wanted to show you that last video I had a green tarp behind me. One of my clients watched the video and he goes, "You know, Randy, I think you can just do it on a blank wall." And so this is an option. What you can do is basically find a good blank wall and notice that what this system will do is it'll try to match the color of your wall. And if it matches the color of your wall, you can use just any blank wall as a basic green screen, which is really sort of cool. And that'll give you a much more solid background color. You know, the last video I had a little pixelation because my tarp had a little bit of wrinkles in it. You got a blank wall, it's going to be very clean. And so you can actually go in and have a lot of fun with this and just drive people crazy by switching your backgrounds all the time. So have some fun with this and realize that just a good blank wall— one last tip, I had to change my shirt because when I was testing this out on my video, one of the things that happened was the shirt was too close to the wall color and I was getting some of the green screen coming through my body. So if you want to have some fun with people, you could wear something that exactly matches the wall and have have the video go through you with your head floating. That's fun too. Alright, that was my little addendum. I hope you enjoyed this. I'm gonna go ahead and close this thing up. Once again, this is Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert, and if you'd like to find out more about me and my programs, including my online streaming programs and my new program, How to Run Better Virtual Meetings, as well as How to Work Better Virtually from Home, Go ahead and check out my website, randy@randaldean.com. And if you like this video, subscribe. And if you'd like to get some bonus tip sheets on how to better manage your time, your projects, your email, your Outlook, your Google Apps, your smartphones, and your tablets, send me an email, randy@randaldean.com. Put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll get that right over to you. Thanks, everyone.
