QUESTION · ARCHIVE

I use the Rodecaster Video for Zoom teaching. Depending on what I send in from an iPad, it can be blurry. Notability handwriting is crisp and sometimes graphics are blurry from the same app. What is going on?

ASKED BY · Francis Frey · CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS · 26 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:42:40

THE PANEL'S ANSWER
Bill

Zoom's resolution bandwidth allocation varies with participant count and activity; graphics may appear fuzzy during transmission but render crisply on export. Allow processing time and avoid extremely low-resolution source material scaled up to higher resolutions.

Courtney

The Rodecaster Video rescales all media to 1080p, which can degrade low-resolution graphics. Pre-process and upscale graphics to 1080p using AI sharpening tools or Photoshop before importing to preserve sharpness. Text rendering depends on original file type (PNG vs overlays).

Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

From the transcript.

Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.

42:23What was shown in the AI water cooler? I don't know. Didn't watch it. If anyone else has any comments, they can raise their hands. But I don't know. So let's go to the next question, I guess. Francis Frey in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I use the RODECaster video for Zoom teaching. Depending on what I send in from an iPad, it can be blurry. Notability, handwriting is crisp and sometimes graphics are blurry from the same app.

42:55What is going on? Hmm. I don't use a Rodecaster video, but Courtney does. What do you think is happening with the negotiation? I'm not sure. It depends on her setup and how she's bringing. Notably, handwriting is crisp and sometimes graphics are blurry. Maybe it's resizing it because it does, when you bring in a still graphic into the media player, it will resize it and rescale it to match 1080p.

43:28So if that, if what you're bringing in is really a low resolution 480 or a video grab or a screen grab from old, you know, standard composite video, it may be scaling it up and not doing the best job of preserving sharpness. You may want to run it through some type of AI sharpening tool first and resize it outside of the RODECaster Video app that you load.

43:55Because when you bring stuff into the media pool, it will rescale everything to match your resolution, which is usually 1080p. So try and rescale it to 1080p outside of the app before you bring it into RODECaster Video and sharpen it up there. You could bring it into Photoshop or bring it into any of the AI-enabled graphics programs that can take lower resolution stuff and sharpen it up.

44:23And text, depending upon what type of graphic it was, whether it was a PNG or whether it was something with overlays or something on it, the fonts may be rendered separately. So it depends on the resolution you're at when you turn that into a still that you're going to bring in. Bill? Yeah, that was, I think Courtney might be on to the right thing.

44:48We've noticed a lot in Zoom, depending on how many people are in the call, if this is a Zoom call, say you're using it for teaching, we don't know whether you have a 35-student classroom or you're just doing this privately and individually. But we've noticed for years on office hours, it's a lot better than it used to be. But if you had a number of people who were logged into a Zoom call and they went to a second screen or they pulled something up or they spoke, at first they would be pretty fuzzy because Zoom was trying to maximize the division of resolution from everybody.

45:20And they would often get crisper as they spoke because all of a sudden the full bandwidth of the connection would fall into play. I can't tell you the number of times that I thought in a video that I was watching on my screen when I was editing. That's really pretty blurry image. But when I went to export it, it would do all the rendering.

45:42And that same frame, instead of looking fuzzy, would look crystal clear. And it was just where it was in the processing pipeline. so what i'm saying essentially is investigate through exports or moving it out giving it time to process doing what courtney suggested which i think is really good if you get a low resolution contribution into the stream and it's you know 320 by 240 that's going to require a lot of

46:16processing to fill a 640x480 or a 1920x1080 screen, it is better to let the computer do that task separately and then bring the higher resolution up-resed photo in from that point on. So there are a whole bunch of little catches and gotchas that can happen that can make things look like they're not working right, but behind the scenes, if you give your computer enough time,

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from Office Hours | Saturday | September 26, 2026 | Vertical.

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