Can I zoom the MacBook Pro camera in a Zoom meeting?

Sometimes when I’m in a Zoom meeting I am a little far from my camera and wish that I could zoom in closer to my face without having to move the computer. I haven’t found a way to zoom or pan the built-in MacBook camera when you are using it as a camera in the Zoom meeting app. There are no settings in Zoom itself to control the level of zoom on your MacBook built-in camera. The good news is that there is a way to do it. You can zoom your camera by using a ‘virtual camera’. Here’s how.

The trick is to send your camera output to a different app that can zoom and pan. This app then needs to become a ‘virtual camera’ that you can select as an input in Zoom.

One piece of software that does this is ‘Ecamm Live.’ A cheaper and simpler solution is iGlasses. A free equivalent is OBS.

  1. Open the app that allows a ‘virtual cam’ and select your computer camera as the source camera.
  2. Enable ‘virtual cam’ so that this video signal is made available to Zoom.
  3. In Zoom select the virtual cam as the camera input.

You can see this in the video below.

I compared iGlasses to Ecamm live and while iGlasses was easier to setup, Ecamm has a better quality picture.

The ‘FaceTime HS Camera’ is the built in camera while the ‘iGlasses’ and ‘Ecamm Live Virtual Cam’ are virtual cameras. The image in them can be zoomed and panned and then sent into the Zoom meeting.

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