#Zoom virtual background living room tv#

I experimented with using photos of other rooms in my house as my Zoom background in the attempt to maintain some sense of visual authenticity that’s true to my real environment. I think you should have an image behind you that doesn’t make you look like you’re in a video game. Yes, it’s a neat trick… once or twice, but eventually you need to come back to earth. Some of us even flaunt it when they place nature shots or outer space behind them. By now, I think we’ve all gotten used to that fake Zoom look. You’re not really fooling anyone when using a digital background. And there’s that sudden, momentary disappearance of a hand. You can see that eerie black glow around someone’s head. And though it’s pretty amazing that Zoom can pull a key at all without using a green screen, the trick just doesn’t work as well.Īs a result, you can almost always tell when someone is using a virtual background on Zoom.

The only reasonable choice was to use the standard Zoom keying option that doesn’t take advantage of a green-screen background. I eventually succumbed to the reality that using a big enough green screen to pull off a full-shot chroma key during my iMac’s Zooms rendered my home office unusable.

#Zoom virtual background living room tv#

So, I bought white and green pop-up screens and tried squeezing them into the space behind my desk.īut most of us don’t live in an empty 30’x30’ TV studio where this type of staging is easier to pull off. That would be so much better than revealing the cluttered background of my home office. Or even better… attempt to mimic that clean, all-white background that Apple is famous for. I once believed the goal for Zoom backgrounds was to try to mimic a uniform environment, like walking into an average conference room. Fabricating the illusion of a faux background for your Zoom calls may seem like a good idea, until you realize what you’re giving up.