Make Your Own Video Conferencing Virtual Background

Make Your Animation

The following Processing script creates a graphic animation, and saves the first 120 frames.

I changed the image size to 1280x720 based on Zoom’s recommendations for a widescreen camera.

float angle = 0.1;

void setup() {
  size(1280, 720);
  smooth();
  noStroke();
  background(0);

  frameRate(12);
}

void draw() {

  float size = map(sin(angle),-1,1,0,height);
  rectMode(CENTER);
  translate(width/2, height/2);
  rotate(angle);
  noStroke();
  fill(255,255);
  rect(0,0, size, size);
  angle += 0.0523 ;

  noStroke();
  fill( 0, 15);
  rect(0, 0, width, height);

  if(frameCount <= 120){
    TImage frame = new TImage(width,height,RGB,sketchPath("frame_"+nf(frameCount,3)+".png"));
    frame.set(0,0,get());
    frame.saveThreaded();
  }
}
class TImage extends PImage implements Runnable{//separate thread for saving images
  String filename;

  TImage(int w,int h,int format,String filename){
    this.filename = filename;
    init(w,h,format);
  }

  public void saveThreaded(){
    new Thread(this).start();
  }

  public void run(){
    this.save(filename);
  }

}

¹

Other programs that can help make the animation files are:

• Cinder
• Ruby 2D

Where Did Files Go?

In order to find where the sketch files were saved, try this command. In my case, they went to a folder in \tmp.

println(sketchPath(""));

²

Creating .mp4 File

Now we use ffmpeg to convert these .png files directly to an .mp4 which can be used by the Zoom client.

$ ffmpeg -framerate 30 \
    -i frame_%03d.png \
    -c:v libx264 \
    -r 30 \
    -pix_fmt yuv420p \
    mybackground.mp4

³

Using with Zoom Client

• Start or join your meeting
• Click the up arrow to the right of the Start Video icon
• Choose Virtual Background
• Click the plus sign (+) to add a video
• Add Video
• Navigate to the .mp4 file created above
• Click Open

Play around with the settings, and have fun.

This technique should work with other web conferencing clients like GoToMeeting, WebEx, and Skype with some modifications.