New Ecamm Live 4.5 Beta now with DUAL MODE! (Simultaneous Vertical and Horizontal video)

ECM Live version 4.5 beta has just been released and it has an amazing new feature that's going to quite frankly transform the way that I create my content and that is dual mode. We're going to be able to stream and record in both horizontal and vertical format at the same time with intentionally designed layouts for each of those uh two sizes. So, it's going to change the game really for me specifically with my recording. Now, it can also apply to live streaming of course. So it means that if you want to stream to multiple platforms, you could have both a horizontal stream and also a vertical stream again specifically designed for each of those things. So they just look native on that particular format rather than before where we might well be streaming in horizontal and then have it also go out to a vertical platform, but it's either basically cropping out the outsides and the edges rather and just giving us that sort of central part, the vertical part. um or potentially even sort of scaling it down and just making it a sort of like 16 by9 window in the much taller vertical space. Um so now we can create a custom layout for each of those formats and I'll show you exactly how we do that a little bit later in the video. Um but the real game changer for me though is all around repurposing content because it's something that because of the way that I make my videos in one take with no edits again thanks to ecam live. um then uh that means that I've potentially got videos that are not really set up for vertical. Like for example, if I was to do a screen share of uh the ecam live beta page, for example, here I've got obviously a screen share of my uh my web browser on one side and I've got my camera on the other. Well, how would I go about repurposing this into vertical format? Um it's basically going to have to be a bit of a hack job. it's going to have to be I take it into editing software and I'm then basically, you know, recompositing uh this thing with putting one camera in one place and screen share uh in another. And that to be honest to me has always been too much friction. And that's why you don't see much of my content being repurposed. Um but if we could actually just have this thing created um as a vertical format separately with a completely different layout, it would mean that I could just be recording one time and then I would still have everything all laid out. And basically, just to give you a quick sneak peek, that's exactly what we can do in this new beta. Because now you can see that I've got my camera on one side, the screen share on the other in the horizontal format that you've just been looking at. But all the time I'm recording that, I'm also recording this version in the vertical format with a little bit of space for all the stuff that comes onto the bottom of our vertical videos these days. But it means that I can, as I say, just be creating this thing. And whether this is a recorded video or whether it's a live stream, I've got something that is ready for repurposing. Now, yes, there will still be a bit of editing because I'll have to go into that and basically chop out the bits that I want, but it's not anywhere near as much of a task as it is to go and as I say, sort of recomposite things after the past after the fact for me at least. So, that's why I'm so excited about this update and that's what I want to share with you today. So, let's get into uh that and some of the other features and I'll actually start with some of the others. We've got a bit of a list, so I'll just go down that. Uh let's start off though with this window over here, which is the scenes window. Now, this is where you are switching between your different cameras, your different scenes that you've got set up. Uh, so for example, that screen share scene here, we've got that as a different scene down here. And then if I go back to my main scene, that's this one up at the top. Now, we've always had these little preview windows in eCam, which are pretty cool because they just take a little snapshot of the previous state of that particular scene that you want to switch to. Um, and then we've got the the names there. But actually, these little previews are quite cool, but they're also quite tiny. So, it's difficult to be able to see and actually use them to sort of guide. You know, I've got a lot of things with different camera angles where the previews look pretty similar. So, let's tackle two of those things. One of them is just the text size. If like me, you're finding that you're squinting more and more often now when I'm trying to read stuff on the uh on the on the screen, if you go to the ecam live preferences and in the general tab, you'll see that we have this one here that says outline window font size. So, we can now increase the size of the text and that's the text in both the uh scenes and the overlays window as well. So, we can now adjust that. So, if you are uh struggling with your site a little bit, then that makes that a bit easier to uh to read. But the other one though that has been added is just up at the top of the scenes window. You may have noticed uh we've got this icon and this one. So this is the traditional list view, but we also now have this grid view. And actually if I just sort of expand this out, what that is is a grid view of all of those little previews. We do still have the titles in there as well. Um but this is a lot more useful now that we can see all of the previews of the previous state of all of those scenes. um because we can actually see uh you know what they what they all are and maybe even navigate between our scenes um using those. Now another way for me at least where this is kind of cool is because uh one of the videos I made on my channel recently was about a new addition to my studio which is this the Dell 2424HT or P2424HT which is a touchscreen monitor 24 in and it's 1920 x 1080 but this has been my sort of ecam control center. It's great for sort of scrolling on the chat um favoriting chat messages in ecam and things like that and then tapping to add people up onto the screen or comments up onto the screen. But now that we've got this uh view of the scenes as well, it can also become like you know a large stream deck to just basically tap to the scene that you want. So if you do have some form of touchcreen, there was another one out from Elgato or their parent company at least uh recently as well. So that's a touch screen. Uh so that means that you can control these things with that as well. Also, if you are somebody who uses a kind of like run of show approach to eCam, for me, I've just got a collection of scenes and I'm basically pressing Stream Deck buttons that I know instinctively, you know, oh, this is this camera, the button for that camera, there's a button for this one, there's a button for my screen share, and so I just kind of know where those buttons are and I just flick in and out of those as I need them. But actually, I know many people use ecam where they've got a sequence of scenes, maybe even duplicate scenes that just feature again a bit later, and so they want to go through those in sequence. Well, actually, uh, this view that we've got then, uh, with that, um, uh, grid view means that if you are doing that, then you're going to have a really good view of, you know, kind of where you're up to in your presentation, and it gives you a bit of a heads up of what is coming next. So, uh, two nice little usability features there in terms of the uh, the scenes window. Now, there is another thing that has been added, which is to do with quality really. So, let's go back into our Zoom settings, ecam settings, I should say. I've been doing so much Zoom stuff recently, I've got Zoom on the brain. [laughter] Uh if we go into our ecam settings and then go through to the recording menu there is a new option here that says when streaming video recording uh uses separate encoder or same encoder. Now what that means is traditionally in ecam uh when you are live streaming and you want it to record the broadcast as well um there is a potential that the audio quality could drop if your stream quality drops because basically if there is a bandwidth restriction. So if you got insufficient bandwidth it's going to have to drop the quality of the stream somewhat uh in order to make sure that it can still maintain the stream. And in those cases then it could potentially also then drop the quality of the recording itself. So here we've got the option now to basically use a separate encoder. So and the encoder is the thing that's converting your video into the the data basically into the video file or to the to the stream or whatever. So using that means that whatever you set as your recording format um it's going to preserve that for your recording uh while potentially just dropping the resolution or the quality slightly uh for the uh for the stream. So that's what that means. Uh just be aware that when you do this um you are basically adding another encoding process and it is the video encoding that is you know can be potentially the processor heavy tasks on your computer. Um and so just be aware of that. You should be fine uh with the separate encoder though but just note that it will give a bit of a processor hit in order to uh to do that as well as it says uh just down here. Uh that's what it means when it says using same encoder is more efficient uh sort of process efficient that means. So that is uh recording and that's just a nice little thing to give you that increased quality on uh your recordings. So let's come over then and I will come back to this these menus in a moment but let's just come now to this dual mode because this is kind of the main feature. Now there's a few things to note about this. Uh so first of all I will say that you can go and get the latest beta if you're not testing it already or not tried it out. Uh you can go and get the beta from this page which I'll link down in the description and you can just download it from here. Um and when you download the ecam beta for those that have never used it before, it basically runs as a separate application on your computer. So they run side by side. However, they are using the same sort of source files effectively. So all of the scenes you've created, all of the overlays and things like that that you've got in regular ecam are just going to work as soon as you open the beta. you can only have one of them open at the same time. But if you open the beta, uh, then basically all the scenes and all the setup is going to be exactly the same as you have had it. But where we're going to find the dual mode and let's just go over to I'll just go over to another computer now uh to sort of demonstrate this. Um, now I'm in another computer and I'll just show you that we've got a basic scene set up here. I've just got a background and a camera in it. And this is using the sort of regular aspect ratio. Try not to move my my scenes around. uh which this is using the regular aspect ratio that you'll be familiar with. So 16 by9 and the way that you change the aspect ratio in ecam is if you go up to the options menu and then we've got the video shape. Now we've had these various different shapes for a while. So extra wide which is kind of like uh 2x1 uh 16x9 which is regular aspect ratio 4x3 square short which is 4x5 and then we've got the 9 by6 which is the vertical. So, we've had those before, but now we've got this new mode which here you can see says dual horizontal and vertical. So, that's where we physically change it is in the options menu there uh under the dual vid uh horizontal and vertical. The other place though where we can change it other than in that menu is if we go into the settings again. And now what you'll see is the what used to be called the stream menu was always to be honest slightly misnamed because it was where we changed the shape and size of even our recordings not just our streams. Well, they have uh changed the name of that to now shape and size, which makes perfect sense. And so here you can see we've got the shape and then we can change that to dual mode from in here. And we've also got the video size that we had before. Um but what I'll say is before you actually go ahead and change the shape and size in your beta, what you want to do is you want to make sure that you've duplicated your old profile. So don't go and change your existing profile that you've got in ecam with all your scenes all made up because it will kind of screw up the formatting of them because obviously those were designed specifically in 16x9 format. Now technically if you change it back again it should kind of reset everything but it may not because uh you know this is beta after all and uh we we just don't know. [laughter] So it should be fine but I would recommend you go into the profile menu and then you go to duplicate your current profile. uh that will create a copy of it and then you can use that as a starting point to then go ahead and uh and make changes. What you may also want to do is potentially export the current profile first as well just so that you've got an out of ecam backup of it just in case you accidentally go into it or whatever. That never hurts to do that anyway when you've got profiles that you've set up. You can always go to export and it just creates that little backup for you. But assuming you've uh duplicated it and you've got a new profile that profile that you're working with or indeed just go to the profile and create new blank profile, which is what I did here, start with a completely blank canvas to uh to start with. Whatever the case, when you are then in that profile, we're then going to change the uh aspect ratio uh from the video shape rather to the dual mode. Now, when you do this, it is going to give you a warning to say you're about to go into dual mode. Um, so do you want to duplicate the profile? If you uh can trust yourself not to do that again without uh without first duplicating, you can click don't ask me again. Um, but then you can click on dup duplicate profile or if you're already in the profile that you're happy with changing as I am right now. You can just click on continue. Now what you'll see is now we have basically expanded our ecam window out. So it is a lot bigger. Uh there are a couple of things here like I notice my background image for example when I changed from vertical to horizontal the background image just kind of didn't show up even though it's in the background and I found just sort of hiding it and then showing it again and then it came back and you can see now I've still got that background image in the in the background behind the camera. But what was also happened though is whereas the camera was kind of nicely centered in that horizontal scene before um it's now slightly skewed and it's slightly out of place. So if I just unlock the camera, then I can basically reposition that. All of the sizing of everything though should still be the same for that vertical, sorry, for the horizontal format that we started in. So although when I did this with my main profile, yes, all of my scenes were slightly uh, you know, skewed in terms of the content was not in the place where I was expecting for the horizontal, it's easy to just basically unlock the things and drag them into the right place. Nothing's being kind of completely uh resized or anything like that. But what we've got though is as you can see we've got the horizontal area which is sort of clearly defined. You can see because of that background image sort of highlighting it. But you'll notice that the actual box for eCam for the main window is now like slightly larger. It always was or it still is if you're in horizontal uh horizontal format that the eCam main window was exactly the same size as the content. Whereas now just notice that there is this built-in sort of black border um around the whole thing that doesn't come through in the video. your basically the bounding box is, you know, to the outside of this. And it's pretty obvious as well. If I move that camera across, you can see how it's just like black down that strip now. So, it's pretty obvious where the canvas ends and where it starts. And uh you immediately get get used to this. But what we can do though is as well as having our camera here, I could literally just hold down the option key and drag this camera and resize it. And it does just act like one big canvas, but I can basically move that and that now is on the horizontal canvas instead. And so here I could change that camera size. So let's change that to well let's just make it custom basically. And now I'm creating a custom scene layout that has both of those aspect ratios. Now one of the other settings then uh that's how easy it is to just sort of set this up. Uh one of the other settings then to notice is because we have now switched uh in our settings to dual mode where we're in horizontal and vertical. Just notice that whereas before we only had uh one resolution that we could set um and in this case it's set to 1080p um we can also change the vertical one to be separate. So we could have maybe the horizontal at 4K and the vertical at 1080. So you're basically just changing the uh the resolution. Still getting this slight thing with my my background image sometimes dropping out. There we go. Put that put that back. uh these are beta issues and this is why we always say you know just test these things out try and press all the buttons uh it's the purpose of of beta uh software is to to try these things out so that's how easy it is to sort of create those things now what I'll do is I'll just switch back to my uh my main computer instead for a moment and show you the way that I've sort of adapted some of my existing uh scenes there and then we'll look at how you actually uh stream to multiple platforms and choose the uh the resolution that you want for each one or rather the shape I should say for each one. In fact, that's probably a good point to mention. We've just looked there at the resolution of the vertical and the horizontal format. There's another addition that's come into this beta which is not immediately obvious. Um, but it is the uh idea that you can stream to multiple platforms and it will adjust the resolution if there is a cap for example. Let's say you uh stream as I used to stream my podcast to LinkedIn and Amazon live and Amazon live had a limit of 720 whereas LinkedIn had a limit of 1080p. So uh what that meant was if I wanted to you know record in 4K because at that time I was repurposing my interviews that I was doing um record in 4K but then stream to LinkedIn at 1080 and stream to Amazon at 720. That would mean then that in my case, I just basically streamed to a third-party service called Reream and then it did the downsampling to those other platforms that uh that wouldn't basically take the 4K stream. Well, that's now sort of built into here. So as you just want to stream uh you can still set your stream size on your computer your uh you know your aspect ratio your sorry your resolution and then it will just automatically uh you know provide it at the right resolution to those other platforms if it's if it's you know if it can't stream at that the resolution you are sending. Um so coming back then to dual mode let's just take a look at um some of the scenes that I created. So this is obviously my main my uh main scene over here. Um, another one is obviously a screen share. So something like this. Another one that you may want to have is some sort of interview. So maybe you've got sort of two people. Whoops, not that one. This one where you've got two people side by side. And so uh, basically, yeah, it's pretty simple. You saw the process of just we've got a camera here and we can just drag it over there. Well, we can just basically, you know, create whatever we want. So if we want to have me and my guest like this on the screen, if I can just grab the edge of it. It's as simple as that really. And then my Zoom speaker who I'm bringing in or guest one or whatever I assign to that is now going to appear there. And yes, when you finish recording, you do get these two files. One for the vertical and one for the horizontal. So, just actually to show you what that looks like. In fact, let me come out of that and go back to this one. Hopping between uh computers. Uh if I set this to recording uh and then when we click on the record button and then at some point we finish our recording and then it's going to create two files. So, instead of just getting one file in the Finder, it actually puts a folder in there. And when we go to show files, uh you'll see that you've got basically uh two files in there and one has just got the same title but with brackets vertical in there. So, you know which one is the vertical format. Uh as I say, game changer for repurposing content. Uh let's come back over to here though because a couple of the other scenes that I created were for comments. So, I always have this comment scene because I want to be intentional about comments rather than uh just sort of having them flick flick up on the screen. What invariably happens with me is I get sidetracked. I'm switch sidetracked switching between scenes and then uh you know there's still comments that are hanging around on the scene. So, what I've tended to do is just have a dedicated scene setup where I can go over to this address the comment and then go on with whatever else I'm doing. But obviously uh this was also something which was a killer for repurposing because sometimes people would just have you know part of a comment that's been clipped off on either side. Whereas now obviously we can design this thing out to be exactly as we as we want it. And by the way if uh where whatever you're doing with ecam um if you want to sort of get your comments formatted correctly from the beginning uh this is not a new feature but some people don't realize this. If you go into the overlays menu you can always go to add placeholder comment. And in this case, you can add it to either the horizontal, the vertical now or to both. But if I click on that, it just basically puts a placeholder. The reason why that's useful is it means that when you're getting set up with ecam, you can basically go in and edit your text, edit the fonts and all of those kind of things and basically make all of those adjustments without having to be actually be live and have real live comments there. Um, but as you can see, I've basically already done the formatting on this. We got this comment over here and this one down here for the vertical version. Actually, probably that's not a good place for it because we do have all of that other stuff on the on the stream, don't we? But nevertheless, you can see how it's basically a different layout that's been designed. And then when we are in the uh the chat, and this is either we could have the Zoom chat if we're in a a workshop or whatever, or it could be the uh the live stream chat. As we click on messages, you can see that it is coming back up into both of those places, and we can just go through the uh the chat messages as we want. Now, I say that it's coming up onto both of those screens, but just note that there is a specific uh choice there that we have. So, here we've got the option to add comments to and then we can choose either both sides, just the horizontal or just the vertical. I'm personally, as I say, because I'm going to want to repurpose this, I'm just going to have those go to to both sides. But if you do want them to just go to one or the other, uh then you can uh you can do that as well. So, that is bringing uh bringing comments up. And yeah, all of the other uh scenes that I've got, it's just a case of I've set up basically a different view of those uh those scenes uh for the vertical and the horizontal. And hopefully you can see if you've been using eCam for a while, uh this is just totally intuitive. We're just setting up uh two different versions. And the thing to note is, you know, in the overlays, we've still got the show in all scenes. We've still got the show in background. Um and basically what we've just got is show in the current scene is going to show you everything that's in both the vertical and the horizontal. I actually would like to see a little indicator here to tell me whether it is in the vertical or the horizontal. In this one, for example, uh the way that it went in originally was I'd basically just got like camera A and camera A. So there's no indication in this at the moment as to whether that is in your vertical uh format or your horizontal. So you might want to just sort of actually add that in uh so that you know what it is. You can always rename your overlay. So, but just to understand, you know, make sure that you know which camera is which in there or which overlay is in which. Same with the screen share. If I go to my screen share scene, you know, it's not immediately obvious which one of these is for which. Actually, the one that says copy of is the one that I kind of copied to create that. So, I kind of know from that, but you can always always rename them. Um, so yeah, pretty uh gamechanging really for creating content and that's why I'm really excited about this because I might finally get to repurpose my content. Now there is one for final thing to mention in here which you'll see if you go through the sort of release notes and you may wonder what it is. So I'll just explain it. It's in the ecom live menu. You'll see that they've added a new option which is stop without ending live stream. Now what that means is um to stop the broadcast. So let's say you're streaming to YouTube and you want to stop the broadcast without actually lend uh ending the kind of like open stream that's going to uh to YouTube. Now, it's kind of niche this one and it may not be something that most people would even need. Um, but what that means is, let's say you've got some issue on your side in your studio, in your production, or maybe you're remote producing for somebody. Um, and you basically need to kill the the thing on your side uh to potentially rejoin it again because YouTube has this thing where, you know, if you press the big end button uh in ecam, then it is going to uh it's going to kill the stream completely and you may not just be able to rejoin it. Whereas if you just have it basically interrupt the stream, you can potentially rejoin it again. Um, so that is related to uh to streaming. I almost there forgot and here we can tell it's completely live one take because I almost forgot the streaming [laughter] aspect, but that brings us on to it because we're talking about it. So uh let me now just go into my other computer. We talked about that for uh you know streaming. So let's look at how we actually uh set this up from the perspective of um actually streaming to multiple platforms. And it is a really simple thing once you've got all of your destinations added. Let me go and toggle on stream. So we've now got the uh the stream activated here. And now if I go to new um then this is where we've got this menu where we can add all the platforms that we want to stream to. But what you'll notice though now is if you are in dual streaming mode, it's going to give you the option of where you want to stream or how you want to stream. So let's say I want to go to YouTube and I want to do that in both horizontal and vertical. But then I also want to go to uh LinkedIn and I want that to be in horizontal format. And then I also want to go to uh Amazon for example, not Amazon, sorry. Uh I'm stream to Amazon in a while. If I want to go to uh uh Instagram and do that in vertical. So now we've basically got three different destinations. Uh LinkedIn in horizontal, Instagram in vertical, and uh YouTube in both horizontal and vertical. And then from here we could just go through the same process as before uh as usual rather where we just add in our title and add in our description and then add in all the other settings related to the platform potentially add a thumbnail and schedule it out. But now when we go uh live to those platforms it's going to obviously send the correct stream to the correct platform. So that is the new update and as I say you'll find the link to it down in the description if you want to go and get it and try it out. Let me know how you've been getting on with it in the uh the comments as well. What I'll also leave a link down to in there is my ECAM live master class. If you have been looking to really master eCam, it's a completely free course with over 150 videos to help you get from zero to hero. It's an encyclopedic course all around eCam. And I will be updating that as soon as the beta features go into the main version. They will be added into that course as well. So, it will just become a complete whole ecam live masterass as you might gather from the name. So, with that said, then we will leave it there and I'll leave a link to some other ecam videos over on this side. Let me know how you've been getting on with the beta in the chat and I'll see you in another video very soon.