How to Turn Your iPhone into a Webcam for Zoom Calls

Hey, this is Tom here from Potatoes and feed your brand and I want to share with you all something very new and exciting in the world of recording with your Zoom account. Recording in Zoom. A lot of podcasters, including me, record all their episodes with Zoom. And there's been a new development this year, or at least I became aware of it this year, where Zoom will use your iPhone camera. If you're an iPhone user like me, that you need to have a updated Zoom client app, meaning the app that is on your computer, you need to have that updated to the latest version. And I think there is also a limitation of the minimum requirements for the iPhone model and more importantly the iOS version that you're using. So you want to make sure that's up to date. And if you have any questions about that, if you go to the Zoom Us website, then you just look it up, you search on, you know, use iPhone as my camera in Zoom and they'll give you the minimum requirements. But what I'm going to do is show you right now and I'm recording this. So I have my computer currently and most of the time, like for everyday stuff, I am using a USB webcam. I'm not using the built in one to my MacBook because it's pretty lousy. Quality color and resolution always shocks me how bad those things are really when you're doing nice quality video to put on YouTube. So I have a USB webcam that I use for most of that. However, that has limitations also. And some people tell me my skin is too orange with that camera, all sorts of things. Well, what I'm going to do right now is show you and I'm going to actually use my camera because I conduct webinars. You know, actually most weeks I conduct a webinar to new prospective, you know, podcast customers and I do a whole big video presentation and I want my video quality to be the best. And I use my iPhone camera with Zoom. So this is the development is that.

When you have an iPhone and you use Zoom and your computer capable of Bluetooth. Now I'm using a MacBook, I believe it also works with Windows operating system. When I go into Zoom and I go down and you know, you next to where it says stop video, there's an up arrow. And the up arrow gives you all your cameras that are available. So you have to have your phone on Bluetooth and and have the Zoom app installed on your phone. I think that's also a part of it. The mobile app. I'm right now using my USB camera But I'm about to switch to the. I'm about to switch to the iPhone camera. So when I look at select a camera, when I click that up, arrow th iPhone, that's me is one of the selections. Now, I'm going to a few things here. And this may look a little funny, but there you can see there's my other webcam. Whoa, that's a little psychedelic. Okay, so there's the webcam I was using. Now I'm using the phone, and now I'm going to turn it around and I'm going to put the phone right there. Now, it still works with my green screen, and this is a green screen. Anybody you all know me know that I use a green screen a lot.

And I have my camera in the vertical orientation right now. But notice zoom's filling the whole thing with the rectangle, which is what it wants to do. But if I turn it now, obviously I'm a little too far away from my green screen right now. But I have a way I do this. I actually take my phone and I'll move it higher and I'll. You know, I have a mount that I'll put it on right now. I'm just sitting it in front of the computer so you can see this. But notice my color has changed the quality of the cameras. But you can tell I need a shave that I, you know, the other camera, I don't think that was as easy to see. I'm gonna turn it back here because I think it's a little better. I mean, you're really getting up close and see me.

And this is what I use with these big webinar presentations I do, which. Which have a lot of other graphics and things I put up on the screen. But because of that, I want the best quality camera, and I use it in my iPhone and it's really smart. It also won't let a phone call come in and interrupt it, which is great because when I'm in the middle of a webinar, I can't afford to have that happen. But I love using the iPhone camera. It's once you have it all set up one time, the operating systems are updated, it's seamless, and every time you use zoom, the option is there to use it as your camera. You can just use is a wonderful thing. I love it. So I've recorded this, and I'm doing a screen capture video. So hopefully you can see right here th iPhone camera. That's the one. I'll go back to the USB live camera here. And you're going to see. Oh my goodness. It really shows me that USB camera using is not the best. Lighting wise, color wise more than anything, but also resolution. Quite honestly, they are shooting serious feature films and music videos and all sorts of things on iPhone cameras because they're just that good. Why shouldn't we use them as the camera for our podcast, video recordings or webinar recordings or anything else? I've actually been training a few customers on this, really like it, can't recommend it enough.

I'm sure some point they'll start doing it for Samsung cameras. Right now I only know it works with iOS with the iPhones, but maybe soon they'll be doing that with other phones. So check it out. Enjoy it. You have any questions, reach out to us via email. Happy to try to help, but pretty cool stuff.