Restart built-in FaceTime camera on iMac during a Zoom meeting

The Facetime camera on my 2013 iMac has a habit of turning off abruptly during Zoom meetings. Not only does the video go black, but Zoom and all other video-using apps no longer see the camera in their list of video sources.

Restarting the Mac does fix the problem, but that takes a lot of time. The following command-line fix usually brings it back temporarily, but it doesn’t always last, and may need to be repeated to get you through the meeting until you can restart the computer.

Open Terminal and type:

sudo killall VDCAssistant

Hit return and enter the administrator password.

The problem seems to happen most frequently when I’m using MS Remote Desktop. I’ve seen many posts indicating that it also happens when using VMWare Fusion or Parallels, which is a strange coincidence.