PowerPoint resolution looks terrible using Virtual Camera on Zoom

[HereToLearn]

I'm brand new to OBS and have been using it as a virtual camera so I can present over my slides - weatherman style. I'm embarrassed that I didn't realize my slides look terrible and barely legible to viewers on Zoom. I don't know which settings need to be changed or what I need to do to enhance the quality and resolution for the viewers.

MY VIEW:

PARTICIPANT VIEW:

Thanks for any help anyone can provide!
This is my log file URL. Hope I did this right!

 

[AaronD]

Nothing jumps out at me from the log, and the automated Analyzer doesn't say much either. (link in my signature)

Online meetings, like Zoom and pretty much all others too, are not really designed for high-quality computer graphics, with huge areas of *exactly* the same color and sharp edges between them. It's designed for crummy webcams (that take real-world photographs with noise) on crummy connections, without taking a lot of resources (like OBS does) to cram the data through there and really optimize it (like OBS does), and favoring even worse quality instead of a dropped connection if necessary.

So I'd call what you posted, actually pretty good considering the tool (Zoom) and the environment that it's designed to work in. Adjust your graphics accordingly.

Or, if you don't need *video* interaction, consider dropping Zoom, and streaming to YouTube, Facebook, or some other one-way distribution site instead. Use OBS's more resource-intensive optimization ("encoding") to get better quality, at the expense of your audience being about 10 to 60 seconds behind or so, and the interaction being limited to text-only chat with that delay.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

One thing I had to do years ago (as I stream PPTx plus video), was change the the default downscale filter
https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/which-downscale-filter-to-use.125517/

beware heavier CPU utilization potential with lanczos

Better yet, I'm capturing a PPTx Windowed slide show (in Portrait mode due to my scenario), so I got a 1200p monitor, so I could capture the PPTx window (cropping title and status bars) at 1080 and NOT downscale at all
- in the same vein, minimize (or best eliminate) any re-scaling ... So Base and Output resolution be the same, etc

In part Zoom (Teams, Skype, etc) handle spreadsheets and slide shows as well as they do, is by handling the webcam input and screen capture separately (ie, using more appropriate (and patented/optimized) encoding methods for each type of content). By using OBS Studio, you have to do some of that 'optimization' yourself ;^)

 

[HereToLearn]

Nothing jumps out at me from the log, and the automated Analyzer doesn't say much either. (link in my signature)

Online meetings, like Zoom and pretty much all others too, are not really designed for high-quality computer graphics, with huge areas of *exactly* the same color and sharp edges between them. It's designed for crummy webcams (that take real-world photographs with noise) on crummy connections, without taking a lot of resources (like OBS does) to cram the data through there and really optimize it (like OBS does), and favoring even worse quality instead of a dropped connection if necessary.

So I'd call what you posted, actually pretty good considering the tool (Zoom) and the environment that it's designed to work in. Adjust your graphics accordingly.

Or, if you don't need *video* interaction, consider dropping Zoom, and streaming to YouTube, Facebook, or some other one-way distribution site instead. Use OBS's more resource-intensive optimization ("encoding") to get better quality, at the expense of your audience being about 10 to 60 seconds behind or so, and the interaction being limited to text-only chat with that delay.

Thank you for your insights.

 

[HereToLearn]

One thing I had to do years ago (as I stream PPTx plus video), was change the the default downscale filter
https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/which-downscale-filter-to-use.125517/

beware heavier CPU utilization potential with lanczos

Better yet, I'm capturing a PPTx Windowed slide show (in Portrait mode due to my scenario), so I got a 1200p monitor, so I could capture the PPTx window (cropping title and status bars) at 1080 and NOT downscale at all
- in the same vein, minimize (or best eliminate) any re-scaling ... So Base and Output resolution be the same, etc

In part Zoom (Teams, Skype, etc) handle spreadsheets and slide shows as well as they do, is by handling the webcam input and screen capture separately (ie, using more appropriate (and patented/optimized) encoding methods for each type of content). By using OBS Studio, you have to do some of that 'optimization' yourself ;^)

Thank you. I appreciate your help.