Full Walkthrough Of All the Amazing New Features - Ecamm 4.6 Beta

The eCam 4.6 beta has just been released and it is a huge update. It feels more like a major release than an incremental beta release. But in any case, let's get into it because there really is so much to go through and lots of great new features that uh I'm certainly loving and I'm sure you will too. So, let's start off with the user interface. And probably one thing that's going to be really welcome for a lot of uh non-English speakers is that we've now got increased language support. So, they've added in support for French, Spanish, German, Brazilian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese as well. Now, in order to have that show up, if you are uh, you know, a native speaker of one of those languages, you've likely got your Mac set to that as the default language, in which case it should just work uh for you in that case. You will just see ecam now in that language. But if you're not quite sure where to uh do to do that, if you go into your Mac preferences, uh go into general, and then go to uh language and region. And this is where you can add in different languages. So, I only have English and Thai in here at the moment, but if you were to click on the little plus symbol, add in whatever language you want it to be in, and then ecam is just going to use whichever one is topmost in that list. So, I could, you know, drag Thai to be the top language. Uh, no Thai in there at the moment, by the way, but there you go. Um, but the, uh, if you've got one of those other language that is supported, if that is the topmost language in your list, uh, then that is just the language that ecam is going to be displayed in. So, I'm sure that is going to be really welcome for for lots of folks around the world. Now the next thing then on the user interface is actually something which I think has been uh needed for a while because I feel like it often caught people out. So if I look over in the ecam main window uh we used to have these three buttons up at the top which is for the scene source. Now what that means is um if I just create a new blank scene here uh and let me just get rid of these things in the background. A scene source was either going to be your camera. Uh you could have it be a screen share. You could have it be a movie file. uh and you just pick out a movie file from that and that was basically the entire scene was made up of that element either the camera, the screen share or the uh video file. Uh now there is another mode which always used to be slightly hidden which is if you go into the source menu you've got blank up there. Now that's actually the one that I use all the time because I want to basically start with a blank canvas and then add in all of my overlays one by one to kind of build up the scene. Uh so I'm really happy. It might seem like a small thing, but I'm really happy that that is there because also what I used to do sometimes is inadvertently in the middle of a recording, I would just, you know, click on the button and if I was in my main scene like this one for example, and then I uh click this button here for to make the scene source be camera, suddenly I've got another camera going on behind me somehow. Uh so just having the button up there is a really nice little usability feature uh to actually get it back to the way that I personally always use eCam. So only a small thing but really useful to have it in there. Now another thing that is a common uh issue that we have with eCam is um that there are all of these different windows and you may have lots of different use cases for it. Now I use a window management tool called Moom uh which is for you know saving different locations of different windows and so on. Well, what they've done is basically just built this function into eCam for all of your eCam windows. So, you see how I've got everything nicely arranged on this uh particular screen here. Uh so, if I'm just sharing this screen here, where has it gone? There we go. Um if I uh you can see all of my window layouts here. If I go over to the window screen, uh sorry, window menu, I should say here. Uh you can see here now we've got this option of window layout and I can click new layout and I could call this uh I'm in my studio downstairs at the moment, my main studio or sorry, mainstage studio I should say. Uh so this is the layout that I want to have when I'm in this particular studio. And so now when I go to window uh you can see here window layout and we've got the uh that particular one there. And what that means is if I kind of move my things around here and go to my window menu now uh and then go to the uh window layout if I click on mainstage studio uh then it's going to move all of those things back into place. And so you can save a number of those so that uh they they're going to be for you know different layouts that you may have. Maybe when you are recording uh you have your chat window in one place whereas if you're live streaming you want your chat window on a different display uh you know moving things around however you want for different use cases. So that is in the window menu and that is this one here which is window layout. Now there is also another option here to just move all of your windows to another display. Maybe you have that issue sometimes where you start up your computer uh and maybe your computer's kind of decided to switch around which monitor is which on you. That happens uh from time to time depending on the the setup you've got. So here you can see where it says move all windows. Uh you can just pick any one of the other windows that you have connected and it will just move everything exactly as it is in that layout over to the other monitor. Now, there may be a slight issue if you have got, you know, a different aspect ratio or different resolution on that other monitor, but basically it's going to try to just move everything over to the uh to the other monitor. And of course, when you do switch them from one to the other, uh you can always use the window layout to snap things back uh to the way that uh the way that they they should be. Uh now another usability feature that's been added in is you'll notice now on the top of these windows for scenes for overlays uh for sound effects as well you've got a search function. So if you are somebody that has got a lot of scenes like I've got here and if I want to find a scene which is I have a number that say basically two up it's basically uh ones with me and a guest and some other element on the screen. Uh and so here I can just search and I can find them. So that applies to scenes, it applies to overlays, and it applies to uh sound effects as well. So lots of great usability features there on the user interface side of things. Uh so next up then, we've also got some changes to uh cameras. Uh and this is another uh again just lots of really nice uh usability features that have been added in. Uh so when we go over to our camera switcher here, uh you can see we've got uh sources and we've got the AB. So, these are the placeholder cameras that we've got where you assign a placeholder um to or sorry, assign a camera to a specific placeholder and then you can basically add those into different scenes. So, for example, I've got my camera A here is in this scene. But if I go to my screen share, then it's also in that one as well. And the point of the camera placeholder cameras is that I can change it once in here in the camera switcher in under placeholder camera A and then it will just appear in those positions. However, we are kind of stuck uh previously with camera A, camera B, camera C. Well, now we can simply go in and rename that. So, I could call that my main camera or just main. Uh maybe this would be my uh right side. Uh and then maybe we'd have another one down here, which would be my uh Whoops. Uh left. Whoops. I don't want to change the thing. I want to change the placeholder. So, let's call this left. And then let's call this one over shoulder. So if I double click in there now over shoulder. So I've basically now just named those cameras. So it just means that when I look at them I can see which one's supposed to be which. And if I was to maybe move to a different computer, have different cameras connected, I would just know which one to assign to those places uh uh to those placeholders rather so they would show up in the uh in the right place. Now, the other thing that's great here in the camera features in the camera switcher is if we click on these three little dots here, um we did have the ability before to send a particular camera feed to a specific monitor. So, if we wanted to just monitor one camera on one screen, uh we could uh do that previously with this show video uh uh source video monitor and we could send it to a monitor. Uh we also had the ability to show it in a separate window. Well, now we've got the ability to actually send out that particular camera feed as an NDI feed. Now, this is actually huge because uh I often do things where I've got two um uh computers connected and for example, the digital stage summit where I have uh ecam running on two computers and I want to be able to have my camera on one of them, but I also want it to be available on the other. Um, and I used to do a thing where I'd split the uh the HDMI out of my main camera and then have two cam links going into uh into each computer so it'd basically show up in each one. Well, now it can just connect to one and then we can send that camera out as an NDI source and have it be picked up by uh you know any of the other uh devices that I've got or any of the instances of ecam or whatever that are running on my local network or to whatever other devices you want to to stream that across to. So, the idea of being able to send um uh cameras out like that is uh is actually huge for from a production standpoint. Uh now, uh just to go back into live demo, don't know why I switched out there. Uh the other thing then is just another little ease of use uh feature. Um which is if we go to the camera effects window here, uh you can see that we've got the digital pan and zoom. This is really useful uh if you want to just sort of frame your shot if you haven't necessarily done a great job of it from the beginning. And you can see that the way that that works is we have a kind of like little uh box around the outside there and I can move that round and zoom in and out. So that's nothing new. Uh and you'll see how uh the way that this always used to work is that as you were changing it, it would change in here. Well, maybe you actually don't want that uh sort of adjustment to be going out live. Um and you want to just change it first and then apply those settings. Well, that's exactly what they have added in here with this option in the digital zoom. So rather than immediate, you can click on apply. And what that's going to do is it's going to leave the actual image as you can see in my main output here completely unaffected, I can then move this around to get it to where I want it. And then once it is where I want it, uh we can click on apply. And then that's suddenly going to apply that. Obviously, I don't want to apply that. That is a little bit too huge on the screen. But anyway, you get the idea. It allows us to uh to adjust the camera setting. And then it's a bit like preview mode, which we'll speak about later as well. you get the thing set up and then you publish uh that uh that change. So uh that is uh some nice little usability features added into cameras. Uh so the next thing then is some features that have been added to the overlays function and uh to the overlays window and actually a new type of overlay which I'll come to as well. Uh but if we go over to our overlays window uh so one thing is that we can now actually rightclick on an overlay and it's going to show us some options for those for those overlays. Um, and one of them actually which is a really uh useful thing which is not necessarily listed as a feature. Um, but because we have got this popup, it makes it a lot easier to do things like uh copy the uh the overlay and paste that somewhere else or paste the settings. Now you can just press command C uh but sometimes uh you know I'd be never entirely sure if I'd click the right thing or it was being copied or whatever. So uh just a minor thing that it therefore you know makes it more obvious exactly what you are applying those settings to or copying those settings from. But anyway a rightclick contextual menu then uh popping up. Now a couple of things then that you will see in here uh this is a really useful one. Exclude from current scene. Now what that means is in the overlays window uh we have these three different sections to the overlays. Uh and by the way an overlay is just something which displays in the scene. So, uh, where we talked about earlier about setting the scene source as blank, um, and then layering in all of our overlays, uh, you can see that in this scene, basically, I've got my, uh, cameras on the left and right canvas, and I've got this background going on. So, these are um, uh, show in background. So, that means that this background here is something that just appears in all of my scenes. Uh, show in current scene is the are the two cameras uh, or the same camera in two formats coming in there. And then these things here that show in all scenes are things that appear over the top. So for example, something like this, you might want to have your little logo in the corner and then when you go to a screen share, for example, or another scene, uh your logo is still there. Now, that's great because it gives us those three different levels of applying things in multiple scenes. But what if um you actually want this logo in every scene except this one? because maybe uh if I just made it a little bit bigger, maybe the problem is that it's kind of like covering my face here and so we don't actually don't want it in there. Or it might be that you're doing like a countdown scene, for example, and you've got a specific thumbnail that you've got for your countdown uh uh scene, and you just don't want these, you know, logos or elements like that appearing in all scenes. Well, one of the things that is now in that contextual menu that we've just looked at, if you rightclick here, uh you've got the option to exclude from current scene. And what that means is obviously as it says if we go exclude from current scene you'll see that that little icon there is no longer appearing in this scene but if I go back to my main scene it is appearing there. If I go back to a different screen share it is appearing in that one. But if I go back to that one we've just excluded it from then it is no longer there. That might seem like such a small thing but uh yeah certainly for things as I say like countdown screens or things like where you want a full screen video that plays partway through a production or something like that. um uh to be able to exclude those elements from uh just those individual scenes uh is uh is really useful. Um so then uh another option that we've got in that contextual menu is one that is uh to fit things to canvas. Um now what that means is I'm sure you've been in this situation where you've added in an overlay and maybe it's come in in the middle. This is probably not a good example. Let me just pull up another one here. uh you've got some sort of item like that and you want to uh fill the screen with it and you you might have sort of lined things up uh and dragged and dropped it like that or dragged it to the edge and then maybe it's uh not quite the right size or maybe you've got something that isn't even actually uh a full um sort of 16 by9. So, let me just crop in the edge of this. Imagine that I've cropped in that uh and then we've got something now where we want to try to fill the screen but uh we can't quite get it exactly as we want it. Uh there is a little trick to this. If I just reset the crop on that. In any case, um there is one little trick which is actually just the scroll wheel. If you use the scroll wheel, it will just naturally sort of fill the uh to go to the right size of the the the canvas and then you can just drag it into the right place. However, uh that is still a little bit of work, isn't it? So, uh what we can do now is if we go to the uh the contextual menu that we have there, let me just zoom in. Uh so, if I just right click on this, uh we've got uh two options. uh resize to fill canvas or resize to fit canvas. So resize to fill uh is going to just fill the entire canvas. Uh and if you'd got something that was maybe uh I don't know like a sort of narrow shape like this. Let's do something like that. Uh if we go to that one again and do uh resize to fit canvas, it's just going to stretch it so that it fits um and exactly, you know, fits the entire image in there as best as it can. And now obviously that one now because it's the different aspect ratio where we've got those things at the top and the bottom but it's fitting it all into canvas. And if with that crop version uh just to show you that again if I go to resize to fill canvas uh then now it's going to basically just make sure that it completely fills the uh the canvas uh entirely. So uh so that is uh the uh one of the new features that is in that contextual menu there. Now we have actually got an entirely new um overlay type as well. Uh if we go down to the overlays window down here, uh you'll see that in amongst all of these others, we've now got this one that looks like a QR code. And so I'll leave you to guess what that is. If we click on it, it's going to allow us to add a QR code. So if I just type in uh a little shortcut here. Whoops, it was actually already in there and I deleted to type it in again. There you go. So now we can uh add in that QR code. We can give it a styling. So maybe I want to actually just give it the ecam orange. This is a link to a uh uh a link to get 15% off eCam. So, if you're only on the free trial, uh you can try this link out. Let's give this a different color for the bottom. And now, click on add QR code. Uh if you actually scan that, uh you'll find that it will take you through to a link to get 15% off off ecam on either the monthly or the annual plan on your first payment. But the point about this is it's so easy, you know, during a live stream if you've got a particular download or a call to action or something like that and you want people to be able to scan on the uh on the code to uh you know take whatever action that is. Um we can now do this and it means that you don't need any sort of third party services. I know sometimes uh folks pay for services which uh you know you have to continue paying for in order for all of your links to to work. I've got a few links QR codes that are like that that I've uh just resigned myself to the fact they're just dead now and they no longer work because I don't pay for the subscription. But this is nothing to do with that. It's just sort of hardwired into the QR code. So it will or always work once you have set it up. So yeah, a really uh a really great a great function there. Uh now what we've also then got is if we go on to any particular overlay, let me just uh hide that one for a second. H if we go on to any overlay, we can also now assign a sound effect to it. So you might have some sort of call to action or pop-up that's going to appear on screen. Uh and then you want it to actually play a sound when it does uh does appear. Now previously we would have had to have done that with either uh you know creating an animation with a sound embedded in it and add that in or if we want just an overlay to appear and the sound we would have had to use a multi- action in Stream Deck. Well, let's just take that QR code for example. Uh and we'll go to the settings. Uh what you can see now is we've got this box here uh in the sort of the pop-up menu for that particular uh uh overlay and it says sound effect and it says drag or sorry drop a sound effect here. Well, I could go to uh this one. Let's say uh we'll use the DJ air horn and I'll just drag and drop that from my uh sound effects and we'll drop it into there. And now what's going to happen is when I actually show that QR code, you can hear the sound effect come through. So it's so much easier now. And sometimes, you know, we get these animated files. I have lots of uh animated files that are calls to action that appear during the uh the course of a live stream or a live event or whatever. Uh the ability to just basically get the graphic that you want or the animation that you want and get the uh the sound effect and add them separately like that is uh is just huge in in my view. Uh now there's another nice little uh use case here as well which is let's go to a call to action which is actually a video overlay. So uh for example something like this where I've got these uh different popouts and I created these animations in Keynotes. So uh that's just the way that I created the animation but there's lots of different places we can get uh animated movie files from for for animations like this. or maybe it's actually just a movie file that you're embedding in there, like a little uh uh bit of B-roll or whatever that's embedded into your scene. We've always had this feature, well, not always actually. In a recent update, we had this feature, which is if you want to replace a particular element in the screen, uh you can always go to the uh the details of that particular overlay and click on replace asset and then you just go and find the new file that you want to replace it with and that will then replace it. And by the way, that applies to not just video overlays, but also images as well. Well, the update that they've made now though is if you just take any new video file and you just drag and drop it over the top of that as an overlay, that will do the replacement for you. So, it's just so much easier now to uh to replace those things uh just by basically dragging and and dropping it. The other thing then related to movies is if you have got a scene which has a a movie file in it. Um then uh the you'll be familiar with this idea that at the end of the movie uh you can have it go to another scene. So let me just find an example of this. Uh this is one here we've got with uh let's see uh let me find an example. Uh this one here. Uh whoops. Can't find the file. Let me try another one. Uh let's do this one. Okay. So, here we've got um uh an embedded video file. Actually, this one's not going to work either. Okay. Uh let me just go and actually find a video file. The point I I'm going to get to when I actually just find this and this is just to prove all of my videos are made in one take with no edits. If I just take any other video that I've got, and I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll just take a video from uh from a recent event I did. That's probably the easiest one uh for me to uh to find. Um, but the uh the function that's been added in is uh rather than at the end of the video having the option to loop or do nothing or end, uh you could have it go to the next scene. Now, uh this does only work if you've got the um uh if you've got the uh uh the video as the source uh and then it can go to the next scene. Now, I had scenes set up like this which are for B-roll basically, and I wanted it to sort of play the B-roll and then just skip straight to the next scene. But what that meant is I had to duplicate my main my my main scene over and over again in order for it to uh uh to actually work properly. So, let me just go to this. In fact, I tell you what, why don't I use ECAM's pause feature and I'll be right back. And there you go. Just like that. Press the pause button and we can pick up the recording straight where we left off. I don't know why I didn't think of using that sooner. It's a great feature of ecam for one take recordings. You can just pause, find the file you want, and come back. So, I should have done that from the beginning, but anyway, uh getting back to the demo part that I was going to do there is if we've got a scene which is a uh um a video scene where we've got video as the scene source. And if I drop a file in here and click on open, uh you can see now that we've got um in the background here, if I just uh hide my video uh like this, where's it gone? There we go. We've got this video file that is playing in the background. Now um what we can do is um here we can have like what happens when we start that scene but we've also got this thing that what happens when uh the video ends. Now previously we had the options of do nothing uh loop or go to next scene or end broadcast. So you could use this for like an outro scene for example and have it end broadcast. Uh the one I want to draw your attention to though here is this one go to scene and that means that we can go to a specific scene. Now, uh, the point I was making is when I've had these scenes set up specifically like this for B-roll, you know, when I did a video about the Roadcaster Pro 2, for example, and this was, uh, the video B-roll for it, um, I want that to play, but then I want it to come back to my main scene afterwards. Well, now what we can do is just click that option there to say what happens when it ends, and we can just select the scene that we want it to go to uh, when that particular video ends. So, now this is also a function which also applies. If I just uh come back to this scene and we'll go back to a blank scene source and I'll put my camera back. Uh this is also something that applies to a countdown. So you may have uh used a countdown before for a live stream beginning or whatever or the start of an event and you want it to be that when the countdown finishes, it just automatically goes to the next scene which is where you start talking or whatever. Well, that's great. But what you always have to remember to do was actually make sure that if you have got a countdown, the scene that you want it to go to is the very next scene in the uh the list. Uh well, now we don't have to do that because as well as the function I've just shown you with videos, uh we also have the option with a countdown to go to a specific scene. So here we can go countdown for a particular amount of time and then we can say duration there. Um, and then where we had before, uh, when the countdown finishes, do we want it to do nothing or go to the next scene? Well, now we can also just specify, uh, the exact scene that we want it to go to. So maybe in our countdown, uh, we want it to countdown for 10 minutes. Uh, wherever that has appeared. I'm not quite sure where that overlay's just appeared. There it is. It's really tiny and it's uh, it's in dark text. Uh, so uh, we can actually just rightclick on that and go to edit countdown. There is another use case actually of that contextual menu that you get when you right click because instead of having to click the little icon here, go to edit countdown. Uh now we can actually just get that right from in there. Click on edit countdown and then we could change the uh the the font color there and make that uh make that white so that we can actually see it. Um but anyway, the point of the that particular demo is that once this has counted down uh rather than just going to the next scene or doing nothing, it's now going to go to that specified scene. So you could have a whole range of different countdowns for different things that are all set up, but they're all pointing basically to the uh the same uh starting scene that you want it to go to. Uh next is uh speaking of countdowns, and it's not technically related. It's not actually an overlay, but since we're talking about countdowns, uh if you go to the recording menu, uh we did have this option to save a photo uh or save a photo as an overlay. Now, what that's going to do is it's basically going to capture a picture of your output. So, if I click save photo as overlay, uh, what that's done is it's now created a snapshot of my entire ecam production as an overlay. And obviously, I'm in demo mode there, so you saw all of the interface. But ordinarily, what you would see is if I go to options and save uh picture, sorry, recording and save photo, uh, then you'll see a little thing that appears at the bottom and it says photo saved down there. And now we've got that as a uh as a picture in our ecam recordings folder. Well, the new one that's been added is if we go to recording because that involved basically before either you had to uh press the uh keyboard shortcut shift command G uh and try and make sure that you were looking at the camera and ready when you pressed it and not looking down at what you were pressing. Uh also we had a stream deck we could uh do a keyboard shortcut to do that. Uh they've added a button into this into the stream deck which we'll look at later. Uh but importantly though they've added this option here which is save photo with countdown. So now when you click that you'll see that there is a countdown gives you time to do your YouTube pose and then it will take that take that picture for you. This is interestingly a way that some folks are now creating their thumbnails where they can basically just get the thing set up in eCam. Maybe put some text maybe a product image or something like that and you can literally just take the photo uh right there and then from within uh from within eCam. So, uh, with that said, still sticking with overlays a little bit and, uh, we've also got some updates to, uh, to comments. Um, so, first of all, the thing about comments is, um, previously when you added a comment overlay into the screen. Um, there were a number of potential issues with this. Now, I had actually created a dedicated scene in ecam, uh, which is my comment screen, which looks like this. Uh, and it basically has the comment appearing there and there. And so I would switch to this scene uh and then switch back when I was uh you know not not taking comments anymore. Uh and that was partly to overcome a couple of issues which is first of all if I just add a placeholder com comment to here. By the way if you are wanting to style your comments before you've started. We've had this function for a while now but go up into overlays and then you can say add placeholder comment overlay uh to either the horizontal canvas to the vertical or to both. So let's just add it to the horizontal canvas. It's going to put this uh placeholder comment here and you could style this, but then when you went into another um uh scene potentially um then you add the comment on it's going to potentially be in the same place. So if I just copy that there and let's just say I'd gone into uh I don't know one of these screen shares uh and now we just paste that comment in. Obviously that's not really the best place for that. There could be a better position for it in that particular scene. Well, the new feature that's been added is basically wherever you style the uh the comment overlay or however you style it in that particular scene. Uh and how is that? Uh oh, it's because it's locked. However you style that comment in that particular scene, let's say you put this one down here for example. Uh then when you go back to your other scene and a new comment comes in. So once again, I'll just go to uh uh overlays. I just assume that I'm live streaming now. I'm using the add placeholder comment to uh to show you here. If I add a placeholder comment, you see it's coming in in the same place as it was before in this scene. But when I go back to the other scene, it will be in the in the same place. So, um that idea that you can just set the styling and that doesn't just go to position. That's also the actual style of the overlay. Maybe you want it, you know, with a black uh a background in here and a border. Whereas when we go into that other scene, you want something different. So, the styling is persistent from one scene to the next is the important thing. Uh, the other function though that's been added with overlays is that you'll notice that the overlay is there. Um, and if I go to a different scene, um, what often used to catch me out on live streams is that I would have the comment up on screen. Uh, I would go back to my other scene and then the comment would still be persistent on the screen and we had moved on from that topic. You'll notice now that it is cunningly actually disappeared from this scene entirely. And that's because there is a function if we go into our ecam settings here and we'll go into general. Uh there is this option here to um and by the way there was this function for quite a while which was automatically hide comment overlays after a certain number of seconds. I personally don't like that one because I want to be in control of you know when the thing comes down from the from the screen. However, this one is really useful uh which is automatically hide comment overlays when the scene changes. So that means that that thing of you know you want it on the uh on the screen for all the time that you're talking about it but then when you switch away from the uh that particular scene and come back then it has disappeared. So the new default behavior is that it's going to uh it's going to hide it automatically when uh when you are switching away. Um uh coming on to comments as well. I can't actually demonstrate this um but if you are running a YouTube live stream uh and you've got members uh and members chat uh there is a separate um uh space in here for the members chat now. So just as when you see here you've got tabs along the top normally when you are streaming live you've got the messages you've got favorites uh and so on. Um then there is also now a members uh tab in there as well. So that just gives you that sort of separation between uh the main content and your uh the main main chat and then the one that is dedicated to uh to members. Uh just making sure that I haven't missed anything off uh off the uh the comments uh in that respect. Uh oh, there is another aspect actually which is when you add an overlay in uh this is kind of related. When you add an overlay into a locked scene, um the default behavior before was that it would automatically be put into the show in all scene section. And so I can show you what I mean by that. If we've got my uh main scene is now locked. Let me just delete some of these uh overlays that I've got in here. I've got a few too many that have just been added in as part of this demo. So let's just delete those. uh if I lock the uh the scene uh normally what would happen is if I add in an overlay and add in a placeholder comment for example to the uh vertical canvas or the horizontal canvas like that um then it used to be that if the scene was locked it would appear in the show in all scenes section. Um, and that meant then that when you did go to another scene, uh, suddenly that thing would still be there because you'd added it in, you thought to that main scene, but because the scene was locked, it was appearing in the show in all scenes. Well, that has now been fixed. Uh, so that, and I say fixed because I think that was not the right behavior. Uh, so that when you do add a new overlay in, even if the scene is locked, it's going to default to going into that current scene. Uh and their other um actual advantage of that specifically for the way that I uh do handle my comments is that I had a scene set up specifically for comments. Um but the problem was I always had to leave that unlocked because otherwise anytime I added a new person's comment in uh then uh if I wanted it to stay in that scene only uh then I had to have it uh had to leave that scene unlocked. Whereas now I can comfortably lock that because the comment will still appear uh just in that uh in that main scene. So uh those are the uh the updates to the uh to the comments functionality. Uh next we move on to uh to outputs. Um there is a menu in ecam called the outputs menu. And we've kind of touched on it a little bit actually already because uh we've already talked about how with individual cameras you can click these three different buttons here or sorry the three dots I should say. Um, and we can use the camera source as an output um to NDI rather than just to a specific monitor. Well, they've also taken this to uh another level as well with the outputs. Um, so um we have the ability in the outputs menu um to send a video monitor output. So if I go to here and we've got audio monitor, by the way, audio monitor, if ever you get slapback, uh just make sure audio monitor is off. There's a distinct delay between it. And I've had so many calls with people who are saying they're getting this echo effect coming back and it's because they've got audio monitor on. It's not zero latency and it's actually quite a big gap. So you will hear it back. But anyway, that's not for today. The one we're talking about is video monitor. We had had the ability to send out our ecam production to a specific monitor. And this is useful if you're using, let's say, a teleprompter or something like that. Or maybe you just want to have the production up onto a screen so that you can sort of see it like that. Well, we can now add it to multiple monitors. So, it's not just fixed to one, but also they've changed what we can actually send out to those monitors. So, if I go to uh this monitor here, uh I can choose now whether I want to send out the main window. Uh which is going to be basically be, you know, if you're in dual mode like I am right now, uh then that would put both the vertical and the horizontal on that screen. Uh but you may want to have just the horizontal or just the vertical canvas going out. Uh the new one that they've added in though is this thing called multiv- view. And if you've used a hardware switcher um previously such as the Roadcaster Video or the um ATM Mini for example or those kind of things or any other sort of professional broadcast suite uh you'll be familiar with this this program output uh which uh sorry that's not the right word program output is the uh the output my my mistake there uh the uh the multiv- view output I should say uh which is going to show you you know a number of your different cameras and it's going to show you the program output and maybe even the preview which is kind of the next thing that's coming up. And so that has now been added into this. And if I just show you, I'm I'm not in my usual uh desk studio at the moment. I'm in my uh my what I call my main stage. Whoops, that's a bit too close up in my head. But what I've got here is uh this is normally I'm standing up. I'm not normally sitting down at this desk. This is a a standing space. I've got a tracking camera there that allows me to uh sort of move around. So I've got content that I can show on that screen behind me. Uh from the other side, I've got this screen over there. So, I use this as a uh kind of like a virtual stage really all powered by eCam. The even the content on those two screens is uh powered by eCam as well. So, as I say, normally I'm I'm kind of standing up in here. But what I've got in front of me though is this bank of uh of monitors. Uh so, I can see the output on there. Um I do have a couple of teleprompterss around for when I'm looking in those different directions. But up in that screen there, I want to be able to see uh the program output. And so if I just move my head out of the way, what you can see up there then is this view that has got the actual program output, but then it's got the different cameras that are connected and also there is some audio there. Now, it's going to be easier rather than me try to show you a screen from a camera and going to get this weird uh sort of infinity effect. It's going to be easier if I just show you what this output looks like because uh we do have the option to display this in a window. So let me just show you where to display it in an individual window. Um, if we go to the window menu, uh, you'll see we've now got this option here, which is multiv- view. And that's going to give you that exact same view that we've just talked about, but in a kind of free floating window. Now, it's actually frozen right now because that's a that's a very unfortunate picture that it's frozen on. Let me try and just undo that. And then there we go. That's a bit more of a cheesy grin, isn't it? There we go. So, the point about it is when you're in live demo mode, it's not going to uh it's not going to have the live feed in it. So, that's why it's not working right now. But ordinarily it it does do. But the program window just sort of freezes when I'm doing the live demo. But what I want to show you though is what you're seeing in here is the program output. And then you've also got four cameras that are connected just down here. Uh and then you've also got this audio levels here. Now ordinarily this would be kind of bouncing up and down. You can also adjust the size of this if you are in this particular program window pop out. Uh sorry, this multiv- view window pop out. Uh, and note that that would if you were broadcasting this up onto the uh onto the the monitor, uh, this would adjust it in there as well. Um, so you can adjust the size of this. Um, you'll see also if I do add in more cameras. So if I go to all sources, let me just add in a couple more cameras such as this one here. Uh, and I'll add another one in here as well. Uh, the virtual camera. Uh, now once again, I need to just pop out of demo mode and then I'll pop back into demo mode. Uh, and you can see that uh those uh cameras have now been added. As I say, it's only frozen because I'm in demo mode. I'm sure they'll they'll sort that out. Um, but it's really cool because uh now I can have like at a glance my program window uh sorry, my multiv- view window and see all of the cameras a bit like having the camera switcher and the program window combined, but also the audio levels as well. Now, if you are bringing in guests over Zoom, you would also get an individual level here for all of your guests, too. So, uh really cool. Uh the other thing that you might want to do is uh there is this uh view called preview mode in eCam and uh it's always to me seemed like a little bit of a dangerous thing because uh I never whenever I use it personally and this is on me not on the software. Um I always end up uh screw screwing myself over. But basically here we've got the preview mode open. Uh and then when you do that you get a separate window which is the program window. And the program window is essentially you know what's going out live. Um, and the preview window is where you you can kind of basically queue up the next scene, for example. So, for example, if I wanted to do a screen share, and this is how, you know, professional broadcasts work and professional broadcast suites work, uh, where you have the preview of what's coming up next, and then you have the the output, and then you kind of transition from one to the other. So, let's say that I want to queue up a scene, which is a screen share, for example. So, I'll queue up this one. Uh, now this is the one that is queued up, but this is the actual output here. And then when you're ready to actually publish that, you click publish. Uh and then that then is the output. So now those two things are matched up. Maybe we then want to go back to my main view like this. Uh and then when we're ready, we just click publish. Now when you are a sort of one on one person show as it were, um then personally I never use this because I just have the button set up on my stream deck and I just know intrinsically like I'm going to press this button, it's going to go to that scene and the other scene and and whatever. But as I say, professional broadcast studios would have these two things side by side. And also if you are in preview mode, then let's just close this one down. And I'll just do that thing of popping out of demo mode temporarily. Uh but what you'll see is if you are using preview mode, then actually just like when you are using a hardware camera switcher with the multiv- view, uh you do get those two views side by side. And you can see green is the preview and red is the live program view. So, uh, once again, you can get that either in this free floating window, um, or you can get it on the, uh, onto any one of those monitors. So, I'm just going to exit this now, uh, and go back to live mode because otherwise I'll forget and I'll be happily changing scenes and you won't see any of it. So, let's go to the output menu then. So, just to recap where that is, if you go to video monitor, uh, you can choose any one of your, uh, monitors here. Um, and then you can just say, you know, what you want to be on that particular one. So, at the moment, I've got my multiv- view going up to one of these TVs that's in front of me, but maybe on the other TV I want to actually have, you know, the uh the horizontal canvas displayed on there. Um, and so if I come out of my demo mode and I just go back to that other camera view, you can see now I've got the multiv- view up there. So, I can see all of my different cameras. Uh, but then on this one is just a big version of the main program window. I could have a vertical one that shows me uh the uh the vertical frame as well. So, that is how the uh the multiv- view uh works. And just again if you want it to run in its own window uh you can always go to the window menu there and then you can say uh go down to the uh the multiv- view from down here. Another instance where you might want to use that is actually just bear in mind that when you uh use the output menu here it basically takes over that monitor. You can't drag anything else onto that monitor. It's is just taking it over completely uh like as a as a source for that particular monitor. Uh now if you want to use teleprompting software or maybe you want to have I don't know some notes or something up on the screen as well uh then what you would do for that is you would actually use that window view here. Um go to the multiv- view and then you could just position that onto the monitor that you want it on to or onto your uh teleprompter or whatever. Um, so, oh, and one other final thing, sorry about that, is if you are just going to have uh the um uh the output on your um of a the main program, if I can get my words out, on one of those monitors. So, for example, we saw how I put my uh on this video monitor here. On this one, I had the horizontal canvas. Uh you can also flip the uh the display. So, I know some people like to, you know, see things in reverse so that it acts more like a mirror. When they put their right hand up, it appears that way on the screen. So, if you want to flip that, you can do that. But you can also show the uh audio levels on that monitor. And that's just going to put them down into the uh the bottom corner. So, uh just as we've got it in the multiv- view itself. Uh so, you see in the multiv- view, we have the uh the audio bouncing up and down there. Uh well, it's also been added just to the bottom corner of that one as well. So that's really useful actually to have that sort of thing in view so that you can see uh crucially that your audio is is coming through. Now, that actually brings me on to another thing because this has really caught me out uh a number of times and I think that anybody who's used ecam uh has had that experience of they feel like they've gone through they've done all their checklists they've checked that their audio is coming through and uh everything seems fine and then at some point during the live stream during the Zoom presentation or maybe worse so in a recording that you don't notice till afterwards you've gone into a scene and because the mute function in ecam is persistent across scenes if I go into uh let's say uh you know another one of my scenes like this over here. So I'll go into this screen share one. I can actually mute myself in this scene. And so if I mute myself now and when I go back to my main scene I'm no longer muted. Now that's fine uh if you are in this scene but then if you have forgotten somehow or you've accidentally hit it when you go back to that other scene you don't realize that you're on mute. And so then as I say if you're lucky and it's live people will tell you. But if you're unlucky and you've been recording, uh, you realize you've just got your audio missing, uh, for part of it. Well, they've added, um, a big red banner that appears over the top of the screen. When you are in a scene where you are muted, but it detects that there is audio coming from your mic, it'll basically warn you. So, let's take a look at what that looks like. If I go back to that scene that I'm So, when I'm muted and I'm talking, you can see that there is this banner that appears up at the top here. So just uh doing that once again. If I hit mute uh there I go out of that scene. Obviously I'm trying to explain to you there as it is muted but hopefully you saw that big banner that came up there and showed you that uh that the uh the the audio was muted in that particular scene. So again, just a nice little um uh use case there for making sure that uh you know you you notice that you are not muted. Another thing, by the way, just going back quickly to preview mode. Um just notice as well, they've made that green. So the green and red uh is matching. They did have that yellow, I think, in the in the previous version. So that is just another another minor difference. Um oh, the other thing by the way is when you are in preview mode, uh this is another useful function. Um, if I go to uh publish, sorry to just go back. I realized I just skipped over a couple of things. Uh, if I go to uh let's say we're in this scene, but now I'm going to this one in preview. Uh, what you'll see is in your scenes window, uh, the one that is the, uh, the the the live one is going to be in red, and the one that is the preview scene is going to be in green. And if you are using the uh the the this function here to show you all the previews of all your different scenes, the grid view, that's going to be even uh even more obvious. So that's just another quick point there about the preview mode. But as I say, I'm going to go back to the live mode in this in this instance. Uh so as you can see, number of useful functions added in there to do with uh to do with outputs. Uh so next up then let's come to the uh sound effects. And here there have been some uh some new features added in as well. Obviously otherwise I wouldn't be uh I wouldn't be mentioning it. I've talked about the uh the mute function. So that's to do with audio, isn't it? That's when you are muted in a particular scene. Um, but what you can also do is if uh just as if I go back to my demo mode, just as you can rightclick in the overlays window, uh you can also rightclick in the uh sound effects window as well uh to get more information about a uh a particular uh item in there. So, let's just go to some of these uh and I'll try this one. In fact, that just says reveal in finder. So, there's not actually a huge amount into into that one. Uh but the uh the other option though is um that they've created this other view. So just as we have that view of um our uh scenes where we can have it in a sort of grid view, we've also got that now in sound effects. So that makes them more like large uh sound pad. So if I go into ecam sound effects and I've just clicked on one there. Uh now you can see that we can actually see these images of the uh of the effects. By the way, one of the things that I added into my uh studio was this huge uh touchscreen monitor, the Dell P2424HT. I'll add a link to the video I did about it. But that means now that if you've got, you know, all of your sound effects here, I can basically just tap on a sound effect and it's a lot easier than tapping on it from that list. But uh just coming back though to the uh to the actual thing itself. Uh when you are in this view though, uh you can add some different styling to these things. So for example here if we click the three little dots uh we can assign a color to it. So maybe we want to make that green. If we assign color to this one and we make that one purple you can just basically color code them. But what else you can do is actually assign an image. So if we click on uh sound image for example I can just drag and drop any image on there and that is going to then appear as the image on that particular sound pad. Uh the other cool thing about this then is if you have assigned a color to it or you've assigned an image to it, uh then that is also going to come through into stream deck. So if you're adding these sound effects onto your stream deck, uh you basically have the exact same image or color appearing on the little button of the uh of the stream deck. Uh we already talked about the idea of having a sound effect come through with an overlay and as I mentioned that is done from actually in the uh in the overlays window itself. So, uh, that's that thing where we just choose a particular overlay and when we show or hide it, we show or hide it, we can drag the sound effect on there. So, we covered that one off a little bit, uh, a little bit earlier. So, with that said, let's talk about uh, streaming because there have been some uh, some updates to to streaming. Uh, in particular, uh, YouTube has got this uh, new uh, codec. Well, I suppose it's not actually just YouTube, but H.265 265 um which is supposed to give a uh a higher quality or maybe a more efficient use of of bandwidth. Um and just note that this is when you are streaming to YouTube then it is going to default to uh to using this. So if we go into our settings here go into uh into encoding here. Um we've got uh this one here. Now because I'm recording I can't change it but it's on by default use H.265 uh for YouTube. Um so it's a function that YouTube allows. is going to give you a better uh sorry am I not sharing my screen? I beg your pardon. There we go. I've gone into settings then. So that was from here. And then we go into encoding. And as I say, it's grayed out because I'm recording. But if I wasn't recording, uh then we'd be able to uh to change that one there to actually show the um uh uh to toggle that one off. But it's on by default. And that's going to give you a better um better experience or better higher quality or more efficient use of your your bandwidth. Uh now there is also something else for streaming. Um if we go back into those settings again and we'll go into stream shape and size. Um so here is where we can choose the um the resolution that we're recording at in both horizontal and vertical. Um but it may well be that you want to have a different resolution as a limit set for uh streaming. So maybe you've got, you know, low bandwidth for example and you want to record in uh 4K, but you want to stream in something lower. Well, you can actually set that in here as a as an upper limit. Just note that in the previous version of ecam that was released, they already do handle um the different streaming capabilities of different platforms. So, for example, if you are streaming to YouTube uh to uh LinkedIn and to Amazon live for example, I think Amazon live is still 720. LinkedIn is maximum 1080 whereas YouTube obviously can be 4K. So, what that means is you could have your resolution set to 4K. it would be recording at 4K uh but it would be streaming to YouTube at 4K, LinkedIn at 1080 and Amazon if at 720 if that was still the uh the limit. So that already happens uh but this is specifically if you want to say well actually I do still want the maximum only to be 1080 and in that case if you were set to 4K here you'd be recording at 4K but you would only be streaming to uh to YouTube at at 1080. Um there is also some other things related to the bit rate here. So the bit rate is uh required for uh a horizontal and vertical canvas in dual mode requires 5.9 megabits per second. Actually that's not true. Sorry I'm misreading that. That is for one single stream at uh you know 1080 here um at 30 frames per second. And this is just telling us what the megabits per second. So that's the the sort of uh the the estimated bit rate that it is going to uh to require. Um but they have actually added a new tab in here. So encoding um and this is where we've got some other things related to bit rate. So first of all use reduced bit rate. This is going to reduce the bit rate which is you know the the the the information that it's passing bit the bit rate is com a combination of basically the frame uh and then how many frames per second. So the resolution and the frames per second is actually not quite as simple as that but in essence that's the things that make up you know how much data is required. Um but it can go with this reduced bit rate. You would use that if you have an issue with bandwidth um and that you want to uh to to maybe conserve bandwidth. Uh the other one here is use constant bit rate. Now I mentioned that it is made up by you know the size of the image in pixels uh and then you know how many of those are being sent per second. But actually it's not quite that straightforward because uh they're quite clever about it that you know if the picture isn't moving from one frame to the next it doesn't need to send the entire frame again. So ordinarily there is this variable bit rate which is going on. Uh so that yes sometimes you are sending the full bit rate um as in you know everything's moving it needs to send a new frame every every time whereas uh from sometimes if you're uh you know completely static on screen and not particularly moving uh then the bit rate would be lower because there's not as much change from one frame to the next. Now the reason why this is not uh always ideal is because some platforms have an issue where if they notice that uh you know there is no new frame being sent through they perceive that as being maybe the streams dropped or something like that and it can cause problems. So some particular platforms not YouTube I should say but others uh do require that it is a continuous bit rate uh so they're not sort of having to uh think that the stream has dropped or something like that. So if you are using one of those platforms or you have issues where it keeps thinking that your stream has dropped uh then you can toggle on that use constant uh bit rate there. Um this one has been moved. This was previously in the recording section. Um uh this is when streaming video recording uses either a same encoder or a separate encoder. Now what that means is uh it used to be that when you were streaming to YouTube uh it would be doing all of the variable bit rate stuff. it would be handling any uh bandwidth issues that you had and potentially slightly dropping the quality of the uh the video in order to to handle those. And it used to be that whatever was being streamed out was also what was being captured by the uh by the recording. And that meant that you weren't necessarily getting the absolute best quality recording because you had to accommodate, you know, whatever could be uh streamed out. Um so in the last version of eCam, this was introduced. This is not a new beta feature. It's just newly located here. um uh which is this one which is you can use a separate encoder. So basically it does one encoding for the recording and one encoding for the stream. Just notice that you know the um encoding processes are the thing which are processor heavy. You know the whole point about uh or the whole issue with with video is um it's it's processor heavy to actually you know do the encoding and if you are doing two separate encoding processes it's more processor load. So if you're using uh you know an underpowered Mac for example uh this may be something that uh causes issues potentially. So just bear that in in mind. Um so just coming back to the uh the list of uh functions. I've got a huge list here of things. I just want to make sure I don't skip over any of them or or miss any of them off or possibly remember all of these. So we talked about the constant bit rate. Um uh the other thing then is in when you are creating a broadcast and I can't show you this because I'm recording but uh when you go to schedule a broadcast from within ecam uh which is nothing new uh and you select the platform like YouTube and we've got those different settings so you can select whether it's a public broadcast if it's unlisted or private or whatever. Uh well they've just added in a new dropdown which is where you can actually se select the category of video. So within YouTube you can select the different category uh that you want it to to fall into. Usually channels have got a channel default for that. But if you are changing the category, then you can actually now change that within that option. Uh you've also got an option to see uh items that were scheduled previously. So normally when you are set to live streaming mode and you open up the window, you can see all of the current broadcasts uh where you will now be able to see the previous ones as well. Um and another minor thing here is when you go to add a new destination. So what that means is if you go to your uh destinations here uh and we click add new destination uh and then you can pick one of uh these so Facebook, YouTube uh X or LinkedIn or whatever. Uh another minor thing is it's now going to open up the Mac's default uh web browser for login. Previously it used to be like a little popup window with a kind of browser sort of built into it. But uh again just a minor little thing that you might notice if you are going through and uh and doing that. Um, so that is streaming. Now, with that said, let's actually just go through that uh those settings because I've mentioned a few of them, but it's worth just going through and making sure we've uh covered those off and the new additions to the uh settings window. So, I'm just going to go straight back into that actually. And uh we'll start with general. So, the one that was added there was this one, automatically hide uh comment overlays when uh uh when scene changes. Uh that is going to be on by default, but if you don't like that behavior, you can certainly change it off. Um then if we go into shape and size again that's got the streaming limit. Uh the encoding is the one that we've just talked through. That is the completely new uh section that has been uh has been added in. Uh if we go to audio uh we've got this one here speaker while muted warning message. So that was the thing that is now on by default. That's that thing where when you go into a scene uh if you are speaking and it detects that you're speaking but you uh you know you're on mute in that scene uh then it will uh it will pop up that warning message. So why might you want to turn that off? Well, you might want to turn it off if uh you have got lots of scenes where you are on mute because you are doing the production and maybe you're just you know you come on to host on one particular scene um and then all of the rest are you know you on mute and you just don't want it popping up all the time. So that would be a use case for potentially uh turning that off. Now, another thing that has been added in here, uh, is this one, which is manage profiles. And this is where you're going to be able to see all of your different profiles. Now, previously, profiles were all managed from within here. Um, but it's one of those things where, you know, you didn't necessarily notice the friction involved in managing profiles from here. Um, but basically, this had a list of different profiles. Uh, you could change profile from here, delete the current profile, rename the current profile. But obviously if you wanted to rename something and you weren't in it, you would have to first switch to that profile and then rename it. Um, and so yeah, just managing profiles was not as necessarily so easy from that thing. With hindsight, I never thought of this as a an issue until I've seen this implementation. I think, oh yeah, this is so much better. So we do now have a manage profiles option uh from or or menu I should say uh in the preferences. And now you can just see all of your different profiles. Uh you can highlight them, you can rename them from in here as well. So you can just re go in and rename whichever you want. Uh you can delete selected profiles. So if there are some of these that I'm no longer using, I can just highlight them and click on delete selected profiles and sort of manage them that way. Uh the other thing is we always had from the profile menu that export current profile option. Again, if you wanted to export a different one, you'd have to change to it first and then export it. Well, now we can just simply select any profile from here and click export selected. But actually, if we want to just export all of them, we can hold down the command key and highlight multiple and click export selected and it's going to export all of those uh those different things like that. Um so that is the um that is the new manage profiles thing. Now I'll just come on to then another option here which is shortcuts. Now this is nothing new actually um but it's something that I've never really used um however it gives you the option to trigger certain Apple shortcuts. So, Apple have got this automation feature uh called shortcuts. And I should probably have had it open. Let me just open up the app and I'll open it up somewhere else hopefully. There we go. Let me just move that out of the way. We'll come back to that in a minute. Uh but we've had this option here in eCam to basically uh trigger a shortcut when something happens in eCam. And the options that we've got are when ecam opens. So maybe you want it to be that when ecam opens it turns on do not disturb uh uh on your computer. maybe illuminates an on air sign outside your house using uh you know the home uh home automation features or whatever built into shortcuts. So there's lots of uh ways that you could do this and basically you've got the option for when ecam opens, when broadcast starts, uh when broadcast finishes, when ecam quits or when a super chat arrives and you just basically click in here and then just add in the uh the shortcut that you want to uh want it to be. Now what they've added in in this version though is basically working the other way. So we can now control ecam with the shortcuts app but also with Apple script as well. Now the way that that works is if I click into uh shortcuts and I'll just go to create a new shortcut. Uh this is the shortcuts app to create an automation. Now what you'll see is in the apps uh here we can go down and hopefully find eCam. And if I click on eCam beta because that's what I've got open. Uh now all of the functions that we've got within eCam. So for example, find an overlay, uh hide last comment, uh next scene, play sound. All of the things that you might want to do within eCam are all now functions within here. Uh we've got some for ecam for Zoom as well. Admit all from waiting room, leave meeting, uh mute all Zoom participants, and so on. So all of these different functions are now available for us to build into our automations. So, we could have an automation that's going to uh I don't know create a specific overlay um and uh do do any number of other things. I'm I'm struggling because basically anything that you could do with ecam uh you could do with this. You could have it so that when a super chat arrives for example, it's going to uh then uh rather than here do nothing uh you could create a an action that's going to maybe change to a scene uh that is, you know, a big scene with some uh lights, some fanfare or whatever. And so it could actually be changing scenes for you when that arrives. So the the steps to involved in doing that are and this is if you want to use these two functions together. Uh you could basically program whatever automation you want in here to do whatever you want within eCam. Uh and then from within here you just basically trigger that particular thing. Uh I think that the most useful though are going to be uh not you don't not going to necessarily want to trigger things in eCam just when it opens or when it quits but uh certainly you might want to have you know stream deck actions that are going to trigger these shortcuts that could potentially do a whole sequence of things uh within eCam and within other elements that you want to control within that as well. Um so that is the integration and and the automation with uh uh with the shortcuts app but as I say also with Apple script as well. So if you're doing anything where you're creating apps or if you're using clawed code or any of these kind of things, you can have it do the scripting to do these things. There is also an API uh for for ecam that's been around for for a while as well uh that you can use for for that too. Um so uh let's go to then uh some other things related to zoom. I kind of mentioned zoom there. Um the thing that we've got in uh Zoom in particular is if we go into our Zoom window here. So this is specifically for the ecam for Zoom integration where uh you can start a meeting from within here and uh your ecam live is just going to your sorry your ecam feed is going to go straight into uh into zoom but also you can incorporate people from Zoom into your ecam productions. It's a game changer. It's not new. It came out beginning of last year I think. Um, what we can now do though is this is where we either go to a scheduled event uh or we can start a new meeting or we've got this one here which is join by uh link or ID. So if you're using ecom for zoom regularly, I use it almost every day. Um then you may well have joined lots of meetings in the past. And so if you click on this one here, we've had this thing to be able to see uh different meetings uh or the the last meeting. But we we've now got this drop down here which will show you a list of recent meetings. And I've just created a couple of dummy meetings here. So I cleared my my my otherwise full list. This will hold up to 10 recent meetings. Um but if you go to manage recent meetings, what that allows you to do is assign a name for it. So if I call this one freedom formula, which is a an event I've been running recently, uh and if I can spell properly, the freedom formula. Uh let's just call it freedom. There we go. And this one might be, I don't know, office hours or something like that. Um so now, and I can't spell hours either. So now we've got those things named. Uh when we want to select one of those, you can see that rather than just having some arbitrary Zoom link that we can't see what it is, it does actually show us that that meeting. So if you are having regular weekly meetings, for example, um yes, there may be other ad hoc meetings that you're joining. Uh but the most recent one will always be at the top. So it means that if you do need to just rename some of those ones that you're attending often, then they should always, you know, if you if you're not having more than you know, 10 meetings a week, for example, then they'll just be floating to the top. Obviously, if you've got a scheduled meeting, uh then there's no change here. Uh you just click on scheduled meetings and you'll see all of the the scheduled meetings that you've got uh coming up and you can just join them from uh from there directly. So, this is specifically for those ones that you are joining uh by uh by um uh by a link effectively. Now, a couple of other things related to uh to Zoom as well. Um which is um when you have somebody uh join a meeting and then they uh they drop out and then they rejoin, they'll automatically their camera will automatically pop in. Um and the other thing that was in there was when you are uh in your Zoom settings here, we've got these options to include a Zoom active speaker camera uh which is great for when you do Q&As's uh and you want to just have a scene set up. I've got one set up like this, which is basically me and the active speaker. So, it means that whoever comes off mute and talks when I do a Q&A, they just automatically pop into this uh this place here. Uh so that's the active speaker camera, but obviously um I'm also in the Zoom meeting. And so in this instance, normally with Zoom, I'm then the active speaker and so I would appear in both places. Um and so uh this include active speaker is on but I don't have show me as an active speaker because I don't want myself to appear in that place as well when I happen to be the one talking uh even if there's somebody else that you know I have just literally been talking to. Uh and then there is another similar thing which is imagine you've got you in the screen but then you've got a guest out of Zoom. So maybe it's a guest presenter and you also want to run a Q&A. Uh then this is a similar function then which is exclude visible inputs from active speaker camera. So, if you've got your camera there and you've also got another guest, uh let's say guest A, um from uh or guest one from uh from Zoom, uh then neither you nor they would appear in the active speaker camera. None of that is new. It was all added in with ecam for Zoom. However, there was an issue when they introduced dual mode that sometimes uh that behavior might not necessarily get handled quite right. So, uh that's just a minor fix. So if you have um encountered that uh using dual mode with active speaker mode and so on it's getting a little bit niche a little bit uh you know uh fewer number of people going to be using this but nevertheless that thing has now has now been resolved. So um the other thing then is if you've seen Zoom production studio um then that has now been integrated as well. So there's now support for uh for that. Um I won't go into that. That's a whole separate Zoom product but basically now there is support for that. Now, still sticking with Zoom, then I want to just go through um some uh things related to Stream Deck and in particular to Zoom. And I've got to say these are really welcome for me because I'd spend my entire uh you know days in Zoom it seems sometimes and certainly running lots of events and programs. Uh there are lots of times when I'm running these sessions and so there are some new Zoom functions that have been added into the Stream Deck plugin. In fact, uh there are two stream deck plugins for ecam. There is the regular ecam plugin and then there is the ecam for zoom plugin. So uh just coming over to here you'll see that there is ecam and ecam for zoom. When you install the beta then both of these will uh it will pop up and say do you want to update these? So the answer is yes go ahead and update them. Uh just quickly if we go into the ecam plugin that option to take a photo uh it wasn't actually a button before. So now we can actually add it as a button on stream deck. Um it's uh you know anything with ecam where there is a keyboard shortcut it's only a matter of time before people say just give us a button for it and so that's what they've done. Uh and by the way if you've got any requests for things that you want to see changed in this or uh uh you know new functions that you want added in always go into the ecam beta uh group. I'll drop a link into the description. That's how this gets evolved. You know it gets evolved by people asking for things and uh Ken and Glenn the developers are just amazing at uh uh listening and responding and putting things in. So if you've got a feature request, drop it in there. That's how these things have made it in there. But take a photo. Then we can drop that in. And you remember how I said the new feature that's been added in in this version is that we have a 3se secondond countdown option. Well, here you can choose whether you want to enable that in here. So if we leave that unchecked, basically when I press that button, it will just take an image. Um or if we click on 3 second, then it's going to give that 3se second countdown when uh when we press the button. So that is the uh only new button that's been added into the ecam plugin. But the one that I'm really excited about um uh actually uh let me just uh correct that because I did mention this that um although it's not a new button as such. If we add in the play sound option here and then we check choose an item from the uh from the dropdown there uh and if I click on Windows XP shutdown sound um you remember that when I demoed that in the uh sound levels window I changed the color of it to green. Well, now you can see that it's basically pulled that across. So, technically not a new uh function, but if I just copy that and paste it, and then the other one, which was the next one down, I changed the color of that to purple. So, that's just to show that whatever you add as a either a background color to those sound effects or if you've added an image, it's just going to all come straight into uh into here. Uh but as I say, the one that I'm most excited about, I am easily amused, is the ecom for Zoom plugin. There have been a couple of things that have been added into here. Uh the one that I'm using all the time, I have a waiting room and then I want to let the people in from the waiting room. So now we just have an option which is waiting room on and off and it is a toggle. So uh if you're in Zoom, it's sort of got a line through it now because I'm not in a Zoom session. But if I click on that, it would basically open the waiting room to everyone or if I want to suddenly turn the waiting room on, then I can toggle that one on that way as well. Uh so that is uh is waiting room. So that's going to allow people to uh to turn the function on or off. Uh but we've also then uh if we turn the function off then presumably we want to actually let the people in as well. So the button there to admit all is going to uh once we've turned off the waiting room uh so that you know any new people just come straight in uh we might want to admit uh admit all. And you might think well aren't those two things one in the same. Well uh not necessarily. You might have, let's say, uh, speakers that arrive 15 minutes early and you just want to admit all of those people in, but leave the waiting room on so that any other people come through, uh, go into the, uh, to the waiting room. Or you may want to, uh, you know, toggle the waiting room on, uh, so that people aren't coming in, you know, after a certain point and then at some point just admit them all, but leave the waiting room on. So, lots of reasons why why you may want to do those in slightly different orders. Uh, now there is another option in here, which is uh, mute all participants. Now there was a bit of an issue with this before because uh you have an option in Zoom which is uh do you want to allow participants to unmute themsel and it is a specific setting that you choose uh yes allow them to unmute themsel or no and if you selected no then it means that you can people can either request to unmute or you can ask them to unmute themsel. Um but the slight little uh bug I guess in this functionality with with Zoom in particular um was that previously when you click the mute all button it defaulted to allowing everybody to unmute again. So let's say uh you had got everybody set to you know nobody can unmute themsel you then requested three people come off mute so they could come up and speak or whatever and then you just hit the mute all button so they'd be all three of those people would be muted again. Suddenly uh everybody then would be able to come off mute. So it was a an issue because people would get caught out thinking that everyone couldn't come off mute and then suddenly without them realizing it suddenly people were doing. So the point about it is this now mirrors the behavior you get in the popup in Zoom which is when you say mute all Zoom pops up with a window that says you know do you want people to be able to come off mute or not. And so this is where that now lives. We've got this just this little check box. It's only a minor thing, but trust me, you'll be glad that it's there if you use this function. So, mute all. Now, we have the option to allow participants to uh to unmute themsel or not. Um, and so for me, uh it's not. If I'm muting everybody, usually it's because I don't want them to come off mute again. Um, so that is the uh the function that's been added into added into that. Um, so with that said, that wraps up the uh the stream deck things. I think I've covered off all of the the stream deck things. So, we've got waiting room admit all and and that one uh the play sound and the uh the thing. So, yes, that wraps up the stream deck and that also uh wraps up all of those updates. I think you'll agree a pretty massive update for a beta release. Uh go and try those out. I know that Ken and Glenn have said that certainly with the multiv- view uh there this is the sort of first iteration of that and so they're looking for feedback as to you know new functions or features that people want want in there and I know that people have already been submitting those. So, uh, find the link for the beta down in the in the chat, in the description, I should say. Uh, go and try all of these things out. Uh, and then what will happen now is YouTube will leave another recommended video for you over there. And I guess you go and check that out. Let me know how you get on with the new beta.