Zoom Tutorial & Settings for Musicians, Singers, and Performers | Tim Kashani | Virtual Performing

Hi, my name is Tim Kashani, and today we're going to be looking at some of the Zoom preferences and features specifically for the audio and video portion for you singers, songwriters, musical theater folk out there that want to optimize the Zoom environment to suit your voice or the instruments that you might be playing. First thing I'm going to do is open up a recording of the screen. So we'll go into QuickTime, and from the QuickTime player, I'll cancel and hit a new screen recording. On the screen recording, I have it optimized towards the Zoom window. Make sure that I have my audio input, which I do, and I'll say record. [CLAP] Got a little clap moment there. So I click new meeting, Bring it down. I'm going to go ahead and join with the computer audio, and I'm going to record this. And I'm going to say record on this computer, and I'll show you why here in a moment. So I hit record on this computer, and now you'll see in the upper left-hand corner it is recording. I'd also like you to notice this turn on computer sound. That's something that'll make sense to you here in a moment. Let's go to the upper right-hand corner and choose Preferences. On our General Preference tab, one of the first things you're going to want to look at is Use Dual Monitors if you have them. This will allow you to put your participants in one and your share screen in another window. It's very useful if you have audio or video that you are sharing out of the computer and you want to see how people are reacting to it. We're going to come back to this View More Settings here in a moment. The next thing we're going to look at is the video setting. Now currently I have my built-in camera, but I'm going to change this to a Blackmagic Design-looking camera. And one of the first things that you'll notice is my lips are not synced, and that's because of the audio structure. Right now I'm using an audio interface to bring in the audio. And when you go back and you look at the underlying video, there's a latency that's taking place. And the latency is something that we're dealing with in a number of different areas when you are trying to sing live and play live, or if you're trying to bring other musicians in. This should be syncing properly because I am in the same physical location. What I can do is go back to the audio, and if I change the audio, to the Blackmagic Design, that will then link the camera audio and video all coming into the same signal into the computer. And for a reference point, I'm going to go back to video for a second and put it to the built-in camera so it's— you can see now that's going to be a little bit different on the sync. But if I go in and choose some different choices here, you'll see that it'll sync, but it's also going to sound very different. First of all, we'll go to the built-in audio setting, which is my computer mic. Test number 2, we're going to take an Apogee mic and I'm going to pull it a little bit closer to myself, adjust the gain on it so that we have— yep, everything is green. That's going to give a different sound. And then we'll also go back to the shotgun mic. I have set up right here, and that's the shotgun mic that we have set up. Now, when you start to think this is overwhelming, there's so many pieces of equipment here, it's really not. It's up to you to decide which you need to sound the best. Therefore, I'm going to go back to this because this is my lav, and I'm going to go back to the video setting and choose the Blackmagic Design. While you're taking a look at this window here, I'm actually going to flip the input and you're going to see that all of a sudden even what I'm broadcasting out to the world has changed. And now that I'm broadcasting these pieces, I want to show you the setup that I have going on right here. This is a Blackmagic ATEM Mini. For the price, it's absolutely amazing. For $300, you have a full switching utility in front of you. I've got one of the Atomos monitors there that I'm just using for reference monitor to see what what's being shown and what I'm recording. And then I have the number of different audio faces. This is the Apogee mic that we talked about earlier. What I like about this is I carry it around with my laptop because it fits right in the bag very nicely and definitely gives a much superior sound than a built-in laptop mic. Up top, you're seeing the camera right there. This is the camera that is also right now doubling as the front-of-view camera as we're looking at video from what would be my computer camera. I also have the wireless lav, and I have the little pack here in my pocket for it, and I'm running a little wireless lav here to get a little bit better sound. And then we also have an audio interface, and you can really use any different audio interface that you want. So to be very clear, you can separate out the audio and the video. If I was using this video here, the FaceTime video, everything that is going into my computer will sync properly. That is 3 of the audio interfaces. The built-in audio on my machine, that would be this Apogee mic right here, as that is plugged into the USB port into the machine. Or it would be my shotgun mic over here because that is also directly feeding in through this interface. But if I'm bringing in a whole external unit and switchers tend to have just a little bit of latency in it, then the two to sync up would be my video unit and audio unit on the Blackmagic Design component right here. Now while we're here, let's look at just a few more settings under the video tab. You have a choice of do you want it to go widescreen or original ratio. I tend to use widescreen just because that's most of the time everything that I'm doing. You can also choose depending on what your bandwidth is whether you want to enable HD or not. If you are— happen to be in an area where you don't have strong internet speed, you can turn that off. Mirror my video, you'll notice that as I'm raising my hand, it's mirroring what's happening on here. If I flip this one, it's going to be the actual view that it's being seen, but that can throw people, or it might throw you when you're raising your right hand and it looks like you're raising your left hand. And who doesn't want to touch up their appearance? It's up to you whether you want to show multiple people in gallery view. I tend to be doing a lot of different video types, so I do have that turned on. Now when we go to the audio section here, You've got different choices for your output. Now normally, if we're running a session with a lot of different people and a lot of different audio, I'll have some headphones in. But you'll see that I can also go out of a USB interface. So if I am going into a— into the USB interface, it's a way for me to then monitor my headphones directly out of it to hear what I'm hearing in the system. You can set your output level just as you can set your input level. So a tip I'm going to give you right away is if you are mixing your audio, turn off this automatically adjust the audio. Set it to an area that feels natural for what you're doing. Another couple settings down here that we want to take a look at are the enable stereo. If you are broadcasting out stereo, or sometimes you might want to be using one feed to set certain bits of the audio and sometimes you want to send another feed down a different channel, you might want to choose that. I always have this checked, press and hold space to temporarily unmute myself. It's a quick way to stay muted and to tap it just as if I'm in a control booth and I'm talking back to somebody. I can still go and unmute my meeting at any time I want to. I don't always have to be tapping the spacebar. For those of you that have worked in the recording industry, you know you don't want people to hear what you're saying sometimes, so it's a nice feature that allows you to do that. To do that. Now, super key is this tab right here, the Advanced tab. First up, you'll see this critical checkbox right here, Show in Meeting Option to Enable Original Sound. We're going to come to that here in a moment. But you also have these choices as to what Zoom will do for you. Zoom is always trying to create the best audio for you. Therefore, it can look at different background noise cancellation. And you will notice that this persistent one is looking for a frequency that's going to say "remove fans" or "remove the hum of a refrigerator." This one is going to look for, as you can see, keyboard sounds or other dogs barking or birds chirping, whatever it might be. And you have a choice to say how much do you want it to do this for you, or do you not want it to do it at all. You have a choice right here just for either auto or aggressive. There is no turning off the echo cancellation because it's a way Zoom stops different feedback and other aspects from cratering the whole meeting. But when it comes to the noise canceling, you can also choose that. Another thing that Zoom always tries to do is optimize the audio the best that it can. I'm going to jump to the statistics for a moment because When you go to the statistics, you can look both for your audio and video to see what your latency settings are. Now that is something, as you're starting to work with meetings, will give you some understanding of how it's working on the other end. Because we don't have another person on the meeting right now, I have no latency because we're just doing a loopback feature. When you are recording video, you have two choices as to where you can record your video to. You can record to the cloud. Depending on the subscription you have will tell you how much you can record for how long. And the nice thing about recording to the cloud is you can then send a link to somebody when it's over. It's all done for you. I tend to record to directly to my computer, and when I do that, I also optimize for third-party video Editing. That gives me a file that's less compressed and allows me to work with it a little bit more. You can choose whether to record the video during the screen sharing or not. I leave that one checked. Let's say you have something that's absolutely critical and you want to make sure that you have a backup. This checkbox will keep all those temporary files that are being stored because at the end of a meeting Zoom will convert it automatically to the format that you have chosen. Based on whether you have this checkbox checked or not. This will keep them. That way, if something blows up during the conversion, it's an extra layer of safety. Once we have all of our preferences set up, we're now going to look specifically at a few different aspects in meeting that we can do. So back in my meeting, I now have this checkbox right here, which is Turn on original sound. Now when I do that, you pick the microphone that you want to turn it on for, and this will then take away a number of the background things that Zoom tries to do for you. So it gives you a very clean sound. Where this becomes very useful is you're playing guitar and you don't want the guitar to compete with the voice. Well, sometimes Zoom will try to match the two for you if you're playing piano. This one will turn that off and it gives you a very clean sound when you are running a recording. And you have the option to turn it on for any one of the individual mics, and you can set that as a default if you want to. By clicking on the share screen, I can share a number of different things. If I have other windows open, I can share an individual app like a PowerPoint file. But for you musicians, you may be wanting to share out something that's an audio-based file. So you have a couple of choices here. First of all, you can take the audio file and choose it and say Share. But notice that I didn't say Share yet. That's because I almost missed this Share Computer Sound. Because if I share it as is and then I go ahead and play it, what's happening is it's trying to It's picking up the sound that's directly on the MP3 itself through the speakers through a microphone. Now you compare that sound. I'll stop sharing. Reset this. And now say share screen. Pick this again and choose share computer sound. And now all of a sudden it's going to sound much better. Now on this microphone you're not noticing making a difference at all. You actually have to listen to what Zoom is broadcasting and therefore you're going to be able to see that. Another aspect that we have control of when we went share screen right here and you said share this MP3 player, what's going to happen at the other end of the person that you're sharing it to is just a big window is going to show up that says Take a step. And when I look at that, it can be jarring. So for example, when we're doing a reading of a new musical, popping up a big screen can kind of take away from the fact that you have other people in the room. Up top here on the Advanced tab, you have a choice of saying just share a portion of the screen only if you want to, where you can drag it out, which sometimes is useful. If you want to highlight something that's got a couple windows in it. But specifically for this is Music or Computer Sound Only. And what this will do is when you're playing the song and you are sharing it, you're still seeing my video. For example, if I am a singer-songwriter and I'm singing to a track When I sing to that track, I will still be seen and the track will just support me underneath. And if I've turned off the original sound on my mic when I'm singing to it, that usually gives me the optimal sound overall. I don't have things competing for it. This is definitely something that you want to play with. You want to go in and look at what permutations work best for you. The best way to do it is have somebody else on the other end and they are communicating back to you. They are through the chat window right here. They can let you know, "Yes, that sounds good," or "No, that doesn't sound very good," and play with it. The other thing, if you're singing to a track, you may want to look at adjusting the different volumes to make sure that you have a consistent level of volume for both whatever instrument you're playing and whatever track you're playing. I promised you in the beginning that we were going to look at this View More Settings. I'm going to click View More Settings. It's actually going to open up a web browser. You're going to see that there are a number of different settings that you have options to make changes to within Zoom based on what account type you have. Now under the In Meeting Advanced, you're going to see this Allow Users to Select Original Sound in Their Clients. Let's say you're working on a project that has people that are singing from their individual computers. You'll want to turn this on. That gives them the ability during the meeting to adjust their sound. The reason I don't always have this by default, depending on the meeting type that I'm using on, is sometimes I don't want people to be doing that. If I happen to be doing something that's more of a corporate type meeting, I don't want a bunch of techies clicking it just to see what happens. This one is just pure fun. Whether or not you want people to allow their virtual backgrounds or not. It's something that I've come to enjoy and you can make different changes on your background. Where this can also be kind of fun is if you're working on something theatrical and you want to have a backdrop for a particular setting. You first have to enable it so it shows up as one of the choices in your application. And you'll see there's my virtual backgrounds. These are the built-in ones, and I can go find myself on a nice sunny beach or maybe the winter lights. Both of those have video backgrounds, or I can have a, a still background on here. You can bring in your own. And now with my virtual background, you can see that I'm branded. Let's now turn off that virtual background. It's been fascinating to watch Zoom adoption and see how people are using it to solve so many problems across the globe. Well, thank you very much. Please subscribe if you want to hear some more information, and in the comments section, leave me some questions if you have any. We'll get to them in the next video.