The video menu in macOS Sonoma also lets you quickly access Portrait and Studio Light effects. Enable portrait effects and better lighting We were not able to get them to work in Discord, however. This puts the focus more on you than on your presentation, and it won’t work well for slides with small text or detailed images.īoth of these modes worked well when we tested them in Zoom and Google Meet. Your shared screen now appears above and slightly behind you, and you can toggle whether it shows on the left or right. Selecting Large gives you more of a TV-presenter vantage point. You may have to reposition your hands or body to get the gestures to work. In our testing, our MacBook Air recognized our hand gestures accurately every time, but the effects sometimes had a noticeable delay-perhaps a function of our hands not being fully visible to the webcam. The new video-feed menu also has buttons that allow you to enable the effects, but the gestures are far more delightful. Making peace signs with two fingers on each hand cues a cavalcade of confetti, and a double thumbs-up triggers a fireworks display. What’s more impressive is that the hand-gesture triggers are so effective. The effects are extremely fun-who wouldn’t love making heart hands to send hearts cascading around them?-and they also create a portrait-like effect, where virtual balloons and confetti appear in front of and behind you, or a brief laser light show outlines your silhouette. IOS 17 includes eight effects that let you trigger reactions such as virtual hearts or balloons by making specific hand gestures on a video call, and those are in Sonoma, as well. You cannot, for instance, use it to swap between built-in webcams, peripheral cams, or an iPhone using Apple’s Continuity Camera handoff feature. It’s so useful that we wish it went a little further. With just a click, you can make adjustments on the fly and trigger reactions without having to find those controls in the particular app you’re using. This powerful little menu puts several disparate controls in one place, and we’ve found that it greatly simplifies the overall video-conferencing experience. Underneath the preview are controls for various video effects, presentation effects (more on all of this below), and a toggle to apply noise reduction to your microphone. When you click it, you get a preview window of your video feed. It’s a useful indicator that you’re on camera, but it also gives you quick access to many of your Mac’s new video-conferencing features. When you use your built-in or attached webcam in Sonoma, you’ll notice a new video menu bar with a green button in the upper right of your screen, regardless of what video-conferencing app you’re using. Doing so gets you not only all the latest features but important security improvements as well. Whether to upgrade to Sonoma is up to you, although we recommend always keeping your OS and apps up to date. Your computer has probably already prompted you to upgrade, but you can also find the option by opening the Apple menu and selecting General > Software Update. If you own an iMac (from 2019 on), iMac Pro, MacBook Air (from 2018 on), MacBook Pro (from 2018 on), Mac mini (from 2018 on), Mac Pro (from 2019 on), or Mac Studio, you can install macOS Sonoma. Here’s how to use these new features to liven up your next video call. For anyone who works from home sometimes or regularly meets with co-workers who live in other cities, the new tools level up even the most routine video check-ins. They look great, they’re easy to use, and they work with third-party cameras and video-conferencing software. But one reason you might want to embrace the latest change is a set of new video-conferencing tools and effects. If you’re like some Wirecutter staffers, you might hold off on upgrading your Mac’s software every year due to sheer laziness. The latest version of Apple’s desktop operating system, macOS Sonoma, has officially rolled out, bringing with it a bunch of new features.
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