NEW Ecamm 4.5, now with DUAL MODE! 🤯 Creating content was never so easy!

Ecom Live 4.5 has been released and it's got a really great headline feature which is dual mode. That means that we can now both stream and record in vertical and horizontal format at the same time. So, you could be streaming to YouTube as a horizontal video while you're also streaming to your Facebook group at Facebook group or page in vertical format. And the point there is that you've got something that is specifically formatted for both of those different types. So, it's going to look great on both of those platforms. Uh the way that I'm going to be using this more though is actually in just simply recording because uh you can also record in both vertical and horizontal format at the same time. And that means that for every single piece of content I create, which is predominantly horizontal format, whether that is YouTube videos, uh live streams on YouTube, whether it is events, uh webinars, or whatever it happens to be, uh workshops, I've now basically uh got a vertical version of every single recording I create. And that's a game-changer for me at least because uh my whole thing is zero edits. That's why the channel's called Take One Tech because I don't do any editing, thanks to the power of Ecom Live. Um but that's meant that I've not been great at repurposing content cuz that always felt like an editing task to go and take my vertical video and then sort of re-composite it in a vertical format. Well, now basically, just with spending a little bit of time, as we'll see in in a moment, uh to get things set up right from the beginning, it just means that everything is now essentially vertical ready. That means that I'm not thinking about doing an editing task, I'm thinking about just taking a clip out of the already prepared vertical video. And I'm just going to stay in dual mode for every single thing I do because it means I'm always going to have that vertical version of my horizontal contact content. Absolute game-changer for me. I know that phrase is overused, but for me it is literally going to change my game. Um there are some other updates though to talk about, so let's get on to those. And the first of which is that we have now got a rebrand of Ecam. Uh Ecam Live is now simply called Ecam. I think lots of people just call it Ecam anyway, so that makes total sense. And we've got a nice shiny new app icon there as well. Uh if you're using the beta, you'll see that the beta icon will also be updated. And now it's very clear which one is which because we've got those two separate colors to them. Uh apart from that though, let's take a look at the other updates that we've got. So, obviously, we've got the new branding which we've just mentioned. We've also got an update to the preferences window. It now looks slightly different, and there are some new preferences in there. We've also got a better way uh for some people at least to control scenes, or at least an alternative way to control your scenes. Then we've got a big improvement to video overlays. I know this is going to be music to a lot of ears, no pun intended, but uh you now can have your audio just play through on your video overlay, something that it didn't do before. And I know that's going to solve a lot of issues for a lot of people, so a really welcome addition there. We've also got some new encoding options, and I'll talk about what those are, but it's basically just going to ultimately mean that you're going to have improved quality across your streams and your recordings as well. And then finally, we've got dual mode. Of course, I'm going to save the best till last. Uh so, let's get into it then in terms of these updates. And the first one I want to talk about then is the preferences. So, uh let's start with the the boring one. But clicking into your preferences, none of this is boring to me, as you can tell. Uh but if you go into your Ecam Live preferences, it's going to look slightly different than you may be familiar with because before we had a series of tabs along the top. Uh now basically, those tabs have just moved to down the side here. Now essentially, they're all exactly the same in terms of what's in them. There is a few extra things in the in there. Um but the one that has changed in the naming uh is this one, which was previously called something to do with live settings, uh but now this is the uh shape and size. So, it was a little bit confusing before because shape and size was where you would set the uh the video um resolution even for the recording. So, now that's simply called shape and size. We'll come back to this one a little bit later. I'm going to go into the general tab though because there is a new setting that's been added in, and it's just down here at the bottom where it says outline window font size. And and you'll see as I increase that what's happening, it's basically increasing the font size of the text within the uh the overlays window, the scenes window, and a few of the others. So, that's the point of that is if your eyes are a little bit straining at the size of the text, uh now we can adjust that within within that. Um so, apart from that though, the preferences are staying much the same. As I say, there are a few additional ones that have been added in, but we'll come back to those a little bit later. Um so, the next thing then is if we go over to the uh the grid view for scenes, this is this new way that we've got to interact with our scenes window. So, let me just go back to the demo mode once again. And over on the side here, you'll see we've got the familiar list of all of our different scenes in here. Um and we've got those little preview windows, but it's not exactly easy to see what those are. Um and maybe you are a more visually orientated person, and so you can now click on this grid view up at the top. And that is going to give you, as you can see here, a nice grid view of all of your scenes where you can just simply see which one is which. And then you can just click on them as you could could before, but now we can just click between our different scenes just like that. Now that is actually really interesting if you are getting a touchscreen uh monitor. Now, I've got this Dell uh P2424HT. It's a 24-in touchscreen monitor. Uh but this now means that I can basically scroll through here, and I can just tap to switch to a different scene. So, if you have got a touchscreen monitor, there are a few of these around these days, and I'll leave a link to the video I did about that particular Dell monitor down in the description. Uh but now you could have a touchscreen control for all of your scenes. I know that lots of people use scenes in a different way to I do. I normally just have a collection of scenes, and I've got buttons on my Stream Deck that I'm basically just flicking backwards and forwards between the different scenes I want to change to. Whereas I know other people have this concept more like a run of show, or imagine like a slide deck, and they're basically going through step by step this whole built-out sequence of scenes. So, I can see that that particular view there is going to be really beneficial for for that particular approach because you can just literally see, you know, which one's next, just like you would see in your slide deck in your presentation software. So, that's a great new way to control your scenes. Next one then video overlays with audio. This is actually much bigger than it might appear. Um this could be anything. It could be some little animated graphic, so if you want to have something like this, like and subscribe button, that actually plays a little sound and pops as it comes out. I just talked over that one, but you get the idea. That is something before that we would have had to convert that from a movie file or an MP4, we would have had to convert it to a WebM and imported it because only WebMs would play audio. Whereas now you can just drag and drop any particular file you want on there, and it's just going to play. The other use case for this though is let's say you want to introduce as part of your presentation like a full-on video as, you know, part of the production. Well, previously, we would have had to have done that where you're adding the video in as a scene source. Whereas now, you can just drag it straight into Ecam, drop it on your scene, and then you can set your scene up with the the video playing and use all of the familiar video controls that you've got for overlays and video and whatever. Uh but the point is the audio is then embedded in it. It's not it's not taking up the whole screen like the old scene source as video used to do. So, I know that that is going to be a really welcome addition. The next thing then is encoding options. And so, there are a couple of things to note here. Uh first of all, let's just go into the the settings once again. So, I'll go into my demo mode. We'll open up our preferences rather. And if we go into recording, uh you'll see that there is an option here now that says when streaming video, recording uses, and then the options are either a separate encoder or the same encoder. Now, previously, it always used to just use the same encoder, which means that if there was some issue with bandwidth or anything like that that required the the encoder to sort of drop the the quality in order to cope with that, um basically, that would then carry over into the recording. If you want the best quality recording that isn't going to be affected by anything going on with the streaming, you can use a streaming a separate encoder for for that. Uh just note that as it says quite clearly here, using the same encoder is more efficient, but recording quality will be reduced if the stream's data rate is reduced due to insufficient bandwidth. So, that's what I'm talking about there. Now, if you are going to use a separate encoder though, the point about this is that it is going to be a separate encoding process, which means it's going to be increased processor load. Um and so, that's just something to bear in mind depending on the power of your Mac. Uh that may potentially be an issue. Uh the other thing then about this is that if you are multi-streaming to multiple different platforms, uh the problem that we had before was um that let's say you were multi-streaming to uh to LinkedIn, to YouTube, and to Amazon, for example, and you think, "Well, I want to have a nice 4K stream." Um well, actually, it's impossible to stream to Amazon Live with a 4K stream. You have to be at 720. And what that means is that LinkedIn is 1080. YouTube, you can stream at 4K, but we were always having to revert to the lowest common denominator uh because because that's what we had to set the stream to. Whereas now, with this update, actually, you can still set the recording to whatever you want, but it is going to automatically handle that downsampling to whatever the stream that is being accepted by the particular platform. So, that means that you can now still do multi-streaming, uh stream to YouTube in 4K, but it's going to downsize that to 1080p for LinkedIn, and downsize it to 720 to for Amazon. So, that is a really nice feature because as I say, it solves this problem that we had before where I used to have to use a restream, uh stream out to restream, and then let it do the downscaling. Whereas now, we can just do all of that directly within within Ecam. So, uh so that is a great little feature that's been added in. I just want to let you know that my free course, the Ecam Live Masterclass, is still obviously available. It always is, and it's over 150 lessons all about how to use Ecamm. There is a quick start guide in there which will get you up to speed as well. 13 lessons you'll be up and running before you know it if you are new to Ecamm and it will be continuously updated as well. There's going to be a big update obviously with all of these new features coming up in the next few weeks and that will be fully up to date with all of these new features. So you can get that at ecamlivemasterclass.com. You'll find a link down in the description. It is completely free. It is the most comprehensive Ecamm Live course out there covering every single button, every single preference, every single action that you could imagine doing with it and it's yours for absolutely nothing. So go and take advantage of that. The next thing then is dual mode and this is as I say it's going to be a game changer for me. So let me just show you what we're looking at here. You've probably seen this when I've been sharing my screen but just to first of all to find this if you go into the output menu up at the top, sorry the options menu, you're going to find this under video shape. Now I can't change at the moment cuz I'm obviously in this mode but you'll see here that we've got all the familiar ones that we had previously but now we've got this option of dual mode. Now when you click into that for the first time or rather anytime actually that you're in another profile, it's going to prompt you to duplicate your the profile that you're in and this is very important because what you don't want to do is have a whole profile set up in vertical or sorry vertical or horizontal mode and then you go and change into this dual mode and it is going to make some changes to that profile. So my recommendation would be that if you've got a profile or profiles that you've already created that have got all of your styling and everything's all perfectly set up then when you're prompted then definitely go ahead and duplicate that profile first. You'll still then get a full copy of it which will have kind of the horizontal version already created for you and you'll just then be adding in the vertical aspect to it. So just make sure that you do that first but then what you're going to see is as you're seeing on my screen here. We've basically instead of got the instead of having the Ecamm window that you'll be familiar with where basically the main window in Ecamm was right up to the edge of the kind of viewable area. So if you think that that's the the sort of horizontal edge but you can see that there is now this black border and there's basically a bit of a gap and then we've got the vertical one next to it. And so we've essentially got two separate canvases that we can work with and what that means is if I just create a new blank scene, I'm just going to click on the little plus here to create a new blank scene. Apart from the fact that I've got this this background image in here, we're now free to basically create different scenes exactly as we want. So maybe we want a horizontal one, we want to have our camera in it like this but then maybe we want to have the camera on that vertical scene as well. So what we do is just click right click and then say copy to vertical canvas canvas or rather duplicate to vertical canvas like this and now it's going to create a copy of that. You still might need to do some resizing so this is in sort of a horizontal format video but I can just go and change that and let's say that I want to make that tall 16 by 9 and then we can just put it up at the top there and drag it like that. So obviously for cameras then it's really great but that for me was never the issue with repurposing. The issue for me was where I wanted to repurpose something that maybe had like a screen share. Well, the point about this is that you can do that too. So if I just add a new screen in like this, let's say that I want to share I want to have my camera in the screen like this and I want to share a particular portion of another desktop. So I'm now going to add in a screen share overlay. It's going to go into the full desktop but let me just crop in on let's say my Stream Deck app just there and I'm creating a scene because I'm going to do some sort of demo of Stream Deck and so I want to just have that visible and we can crop in there so we can make this look nice for our vertical version, our vertical format screen like this. If I go up to here like that, we've now got a scene created. Obviously I would spend a little bit more time getting this all nice and tidy but we've essentially got a screen created that is looking right in the vertical in the horizontal format. But now if I want to add this into the vertical format, well, we can still just duplicate those things across so duplicate that to the vertical canvas and I can reduce it. So now I've still got the space to have like my screen share on the screen and then I can duplicate my camera to that. You can also by the way rather than actually physically selecting duplicate, you can just hold the option and just drag things around just as we always have been able to do and then maybe with this one I want to change the format rather than tall just make it custom and then that means I can just basically drag it to be whatever size I want and then we'll drag this up here but the point about this is though now I've essentially got two different scenes. This one works well for when I'm in the horizontal format and this one here works well for when I've got the vertical format. I can still see exactly the same things. If I'm moving my cursor around on the other screen share over here, it's going to come through into the vertical and horizontal. Now that's basically what I've done for all of my scenes. So I've got different camera angles here. I've got those all set up in those different things like that as well. So they're both showing in vertical and horizontal. I've got my screen shares as well where they're set up so that the screen share is looking good in both the vertical and horizontal format. I've got my ones where I want to bring in my guests for example. So if I've got two guests side by side if I was bringing someone in from Zoom, it would be two people one above the other here and side by side there. You just have to go through and set these things up once and then you never have to think about restructuring things in your repurpose content ever again. Now you've also got things like comments. I've got a scene here with comments. Now actually the event I've been doing just just recently, I've not wanted the comments to come on the vertical but you can choose whether or not they do. So if you look down here where we've got the comments here, you've got the option here to add comments to the horizontal canvas, the vertical canvas or to both. So you can choose that and if you put it to both sides, then when I click this then this comment as you can see is going to come up there and then it will just be a case of I could adjust this. I could put different styling on the vertical one versus the horizontal one. So you can absolutely choose you know how these things come on but as I say just for a bit of training that I've been doing just recently, I just only wanted them to come onto the horizontal but you can now can decide how you want that to happen. Now the other thing then related to this is going to be in the settings. So if I go into the the Ecamm preferences and then we go to this shape and size. Just note here that you can change the shape and size of both the horizontal and the vertical canvas independently. So you can choose those ones separately and once again if you are then using the the recording option here to run streaming using separate encoder, then that would be not only recording a vertical and horizontal stream but it would be also encoding a vertical and horizontal stream if you were multi-streaming. So just be aware that this is adding sort of additional processor usage and in actual fact for that reason some of these features you may find if you are on an older Intel Mac. I'm not entirely sure which ones are and aren't there at the moment but some of these may not work on an Intel Mac just because they don't have the same power as the latest generation M series M series Macs. So that's how easy it is to set up and work with these two things, these two canvases I should say. The other thing then you maybe wondering about is the virtual camera because obviously we've got this concept of a virtual camera that means you can take it into any platform you want whether that's Microsoft Teams or Zoom or whatever. If you're using the Ecamm for Zoom integration, although there are two formats here, it's just going to default to sending the vertical sorry the horizontal version of that. So you can still use Ecamm for Zoom. It's going to just send through the horizontal version. If you go into the output menu and go to the virtual cam, here you can choose which one you want to use. So by default it's going to be on the horizontal but you may want to use the vertical canvas. For example, if you are streaming to Amazon Live, not Amazon Live, Instagram Live or to TikTok Live, then for those you need to go in through the browser and it's sorry for TikTok you need to go through not the browser but their their interface. Getting my terminology mixed up here. You need to go through their interface and basically you have to use your Ecamm Live virtual camera into their desktop app essentially. Well, this means that if you are using this with TikTok, you would select the vertical canvas. Of course, you can natively stream to Instagram. I'm incorrect about that but for TikTok, you would use the vertical canvas or anything else where you want to send your vertical virtual camera in, you can change that change that in there. So a couple of other things then about the the vertical format is specifically about streaming to these these platforms and streaming from within Ecamm for in in dual mode. Let me just go over to another computer because I can actually show you the process of setting up a dual live stream. So here I've got another computer set up. I haven't bothered as you can see duplicating this to my vertical canvas. I've literally just got one scene set up. Let's just go through that process again so you can see how that works. Change the thing here the settings make this tall let's say and then I could just make that like that. So now I've got my dual aspect ratio settings already here and now we're ready to start streaming. So what we can do is click on the new down here and then we go to add because we want to add the destinations. So let's say I want to stream to YouTube and you can choose between horizontal, vertical or both because you can stream twice to to YouTube on both of those formats. I want to just make something clear though that YouTube has its own dual streaming capability. So when you set up a live stream in YouTube itself in YouTube Studio, it will say do you want to stream in vertical and horizontal format simultaneously and if you select that option, it basically takes the horizontal stream and it just crops it down the middle. So you're going to be losing some of the the content. When you do it from Ecamm, it is essentially setting up two separate streams. Ecamm does denote which one is which because it'll have the little mobile phone symbol uh emoji there to to show you which one is the vertical versus the horizontal. It will just tag it onto the end of the name. But note that you will then have two separate streams on YouTube. And that's just something to be aware of. So it means the comments on each won't cross across to the others. But it does mean that you're making your stream accessible for people who happen to be viewing on mobile and prefer the vertical viewing experience. And but you may well just choose to go horizontal on YouTube. But then perhaps you want to go and add a different format for let's say a Facebook group or for to Facebook let's say. So now you can see how I'm basically just adding in those those different formats. And you can see the it shows you what format it is. And if you click on that if you want to change this and let's say the YouTube one actually I want to change that to be both. Then you'll see now it's just updated the symbol. Apart from that though that is as simple as it gets. If you've tried multi-streaming from from eCam before there's no other difference. We are just literally saying which of these streams we want to send to to which platform. One thing though is when you do schedule your streams if you've got two computers that you use eCam on maybe one at home and one in an office or something like that. You do have to set this up on the computer that you intend to stream from. So it will be kind of remembered from from that. So if you set it up on a different one it's not necessarily going to pick up all the individual streams from from YouTube or wherever and then pull them all together and figure out which one is which at least not in my experience. So just note that. I know I did I found out that the the hard way. I scheduled something at home came into the studio and it wasn't all there in the studio computer. So just make sure that you're scheduling on the computer that you intend to do the the multi-streaming from with those those different formats. Apart from that though you would then just go in and add in your stream title your description and everything like that. And that would be that would be that. You'd be all ready to go. Click on schedule and then at the time you go live it's just exactly like using eCam has always been just as easy as ever. But now people are getting it in that dual format. When you hit record though at the end of the recording you're basically just going to get two separate files out. One of them will say vertical in brackets at the end and the other will be horizontal. And that will be that. You will have your two files ready for all of your repurposing at the end of the at the end of the day at the end of the session. Apart from that though there is one final thing that I want to to mention. I can't stress how excited I am by this dual streaming mode and dual recording. It's it's the solution I've been looking for for since I started recording to solve my repurposing issue. But anyway let me go over to just mention one more thing which and let me just see exactly where this is cuz I've got to find it. This you may see it in the the list of the the updates to the software. I just want to explain what it is so that you understand it. It's likely the case that you probably will never need to use it. But it is when you are broadcasting in eCam you'll see that there is this option in the menu here that says stop without ending live session. So when you are actually on a live stream stop without ending live session. That's not the same as when you're streaming and you can individually end specific streams to different platforms. So you could start streaming to YouTube Facebook and Instagram and then you know you get to a certain point you say right everyone over to YouTube and you end the streams on the others. It's not that. It's technically what it is is to be able to stop streaming from eCam without actually ending the stream on the platform. If you're having some issue during a live production scenario and you need to reboot your computer but you want to be able to reboot and come back and rejoin the live stream then technically that is what you would use that for. It's very niche but there it is and you will see it in the list of updates. So just so that you know what that is that's what it is. It's not something that I envisage myself using necessarily but it is it is there nonetheless. So that's what that looks like in the description. So with that said um I hope you will find this as useful as I do and I look forward to hearing all of your comments and how everyone else is using this. I'll leave a link to some other eCam comments and sorry eCam content over on the right hand side there. And yeah look forward to hearing all of your feedback. Enjoy eCam. It's changed the game for me in terms of how I create content and I'm sure it can do the same for you too.