 In this video, I'm talking about e-cam live overlays and specifically sharing some tips and guidance on best practices for organizing your overlays so that you can always find where your overlays are, but crucially so that they appear in your productions when and where you want them to as well. So before I do that though, let me just touch on one little point which is what exactly are overlays? Because I see the question come up quite often about what's the difference between a scene and an overlay. And I can actually see where the confusion may have arisen here. And that is because we've got scenes in e-cam live where you can select a scene source which I covered in a recent video. I'll leave a link to that in the description. And the scene source can be either a camera or a screen share, for example, or a movie file. But then we've also got overlays where the overlay can be a camera, a screen share or a movie file, amongst other things as well. And so I can see how there may be some slight confusion caused by that. But I prefer to actually always start with a completely blank scene in any case. And so if you think of it in that terms, the scenes are basically the canvases on which we are going to paint. Or if you think about it in terms of PowerPoint slides, the scene, each new scene is a new blank slide upon which we are going to put our content. So for me, the overlays are the content. The scene is just the particular viewpoint on that content or the particular slide or whatever you want to think about it. It's like that. So let me just come over to my live demo mode. And here you can see I've got a load of different scenes down this side with different views, so things like this, which is a particular screen share scene that I have set up. But all of the elements that you see in here, including the background image, which is gone now, including the main camera, including the screen share, including this little thing, and indeed this little thing. Those are all overlays. So all of that stuff that we've just put in starting from, again, the background image, the main camera, the screen share. And so on, those are all overlays that are overlaid on top of what, for me, was a blank scene. Again, I do understand slightly where the confusion may arise with when you get into scene sources. But I'll just once again reiterate that for me, I always start with a blank scene source. So up in the top, scene source is blank. That way, you're always starting with a blank canvas. But let me just come back to this view. And what we'll do is we'll go through and I'll share with you the way that I think about certainly organizing these overlays and different things to think about so that you don't get caught out in terms of building up your scenes using overlays. So with the understanding that overlays are all the stuff that we're gonna put into our scene, let's have a little look at the three high level organization methods that we've got. So first of all, we've got show in all scenes. Anything that appears in here in the show in all scenes section will be available to be put up on screen in any particular scene. So for example, if I was to put up this one here, this Ecome Live masterclass, of course, I should definitely mention that. Whoops, Daisy. Of course it's locked. It's locked for security, for my security. So like this one up here, I could put this over here. But then if I change to that last scene that I was just in, so I'll come over to this scene, you'll see that that is still on the screen. It is appearing in all scenes and I can move it to anywhere, go back to that other scene and it is staying there. That is because this particular overlay is in the area marked as show in all scenes. Next we have this one, show in current scene. So this is where we put all the things that we only want to appear in this particular scene. Now in this scene, I happen to have my main camera. I've also got a top-down camera which I don't generally use, but occasionally I just want to pop this one over the top. In fact, it is locked. One second, the scene is locked. I sometimes want to put this up on the top corner if I'm showing something that's on my desk or something like that. So there is that as well, but these are basically the things that are showing in the current scene. If I was to go back to that other scene that we just looked at, you can see that we've actually got quite a lot of other things in here. So those are just because they are in that particular current scene and so that changes on a, as you change the scene those elements will change as well. We've then got show in background. Now I think from a naming point of view, this should actually say showing background of all scenes because here we've got show in the front of all scenes and here we've got show in the back of all scenes. So although it says showing background, it does actually mean showing background of all scenes. And this is where we've got in my case, my background image. So if I change to my other scene, you'll notice that I've got the exact same background image in there. So if I just hide that one, whoops, Daisy, hide that one, it's gone. And if I come back to that other scene, then the background image is also gone from there as well. That's because it is show in the background, but this also means show in the background of all scenes as well. This is a great way to just add a little touch of branding to all of your scenes so that they all have the same sort of consistent look and so on. And it's also a good place to use my scene layout template. I did a video about this, which I'll leave a link to in the description. And you can also grab this template for free. I did the video about how to actually use it to create scenes and them all be well proportioned. But having it here in the show in background just means we can toggle it on and off as we need it to create our scene layouts. In any case, so that is the three main areas where you might want to put your overlays. There's a little more that we can do in terms of organization though. The first thing that we can do is we can group things together. So you'll notice that I do actually have a few different groups of overlays. When you add an overlay, by the way, let me just drag a couple of examples in here just to come back to that background image. So where we've got that background image in the background, I could equally just drag another image into that background like that. Whoops, Daisy, put it down here. And then instantly I've got a completely different look to my videos coming out of Ecamm. And if I just toggle that one off, then we can go back to this look. And that is as well because it's in the background. If I was to go back to that other scene, you can see how it's just copied it across to there as well. So it is a really quick way to sort of brand up your productions. Now, at the moment, you'll notice when I drag that in initially, if I just drag this one in, for example, which is a little lower third, there we go. If I drag that one in and just resize it, you'll notice that it appeared by default, it appears in the show in current scene. So that is the behavior of this. When you drag in something new, it will always appear in the show in current scene. However, if your scene is locked, then let me just do that again with the scene locked. So let me just delete that one from there. If I come over to the scene and lock the scene and I'll drag that in again, then nothing can be added to the locked scene. So you'll notice this time it has instead popped it into the show in all scenes. So that's why it's appeared there. So if your scene is locked, the default behavior or the only behavior is it will appear in all scenes. Or if your scene is unlocked, then it will appear in the current scene. What you can also do though, is rather than just drag it into the window, so the way that I did that was just drag that image into there, you can also just drag it in here instead. So you can drag it into the specific spot that you actually wanted in the overlays window instead. So if I drag it into there now, it appears in the middle just as before. But even though the scene is unlocked, you'll notice no little lock there, I did actually drag it directly into the space where I wanted it. So that's just another point to note there. I should also say at this point that this does behave like a set of layers in terms of whatever is at the bottom will be on the bottom of the stack of overlays. And whatever is higher up in the list will be higher up on the stack of overlays. So therefore this background image down here is at the very back. This one here when I toggle it on is now in front of it. So therefore it appears above it in the stack. If I was to just switch those two around then you can see that now we can see the original background image. And if I hide it, you can see the one behind it. So that's how this works, much like layers in Photoshop, in Keynote, in all of these other applications. The one that's at the bottom is at the bottom of the stack therefore looking down from the top you don't see all of those if they're covered up by something else. And that is the same throughout this list. And indeed anything put to set to show in all layers by default it's higher up the list. It will always appear above anything that is set to show in current layer. So that's just another point there. Once we have added a number of different overlays into here as I say we can organize these with folders. So we've got the little folder icon here or group I should say. Clicking on that will create a new group. You can have nested groups so you can have a group within a group if you want. And if I just drag this particular one out of here as you create a group it will start with nothing in it. So you then have to just simply drag in the items that you want. So here let's just say we've got this group and it's just called new group. This one here lower third image is that one that I just dragged in this little sample here. And I can add that to that particular group by just dragging it over here. And you'll notice how this little blue line is appearing underneath the folder and crucially is a little bit indented compared to there. So there it's not in the group and here it is in the group with that little sort of circle at the beginning of the line slightly indented. So now I know that that is now within that particular group. You can add multiple different things to the group. And in fact here, this example that I used for the e-cam masterclass graphic that one here has got two different things in it. One is the little thumbnail and the other is the text underneath it. So that is actually two things in there. But I have grouped them together just so that I can toggle them on and off. So whilst you can turn overlays on and off individually so we've got the little I symbol next to them there. You can see that it's toggled off the text. And then if I come up here and toggle the thumbnail off it's toggled that one off separately. However, what you can also do is just toggle off the actual folder itself. So therefore grouping lots of things together in a folder makes sense if you just want to turn them on and off completely together. I do this actually with my live stream as well. So when I do a live stream I have a number of different layers that are on that I might want to come on at the same time. So I've got a little one up at the top here for example and this sort of lower third at the bottom that I have for my live stream. But basically I can just toggle the whole thing off with the flick of this little button here. Or in fact, I use a stream deck of course. So the stream deck you can toggle on or off either individual layers or you can also toggle on and off groups of overlays I should say as well. I'm in the habit of calling in layers but you know what I mean. And the benefit of doing that as well is if you have stuff that you put up regularly for your live stream but you might be rotating some content out or you've got a presentation where the information that you're showing changes you can create a group within the overlays and then have your stream deck button linked to that particular group. But then just rotate the contents of it. So it doesn't matter if I was to change the contents of this. In fact, let me just show you that for example. So here we've got this live stream overlay that I have. So all I do is I just press the button to toggle that on and off. I could actually just if I had my e-com live masterclass group and I just drag that into the live stream as well. You'll notice it disappeared because the whole group is currently off. But then when I toggle the live stream group on you'll see that that e-com live masterclass just popped in there. So it's a great way to actually show and hide groups of things at once. So I sometimes use this as well where I've got stuff as I say it's going to be different information that is changing but I know that I'm gonna always have to put something up. So I've got a button assigned to a specific grouping and then I can just change out whatever is gonna be shown within there. A couple of other things related to that let me just drag this one out. A couple of things related to that is with groups you can also link all of the contents of them together. So with this one for this e-com live masterclass little thumbnail and link then I've basically created a little link group and the way you do that is this little chain icon here. So if I click that, those are now not connected so those can move freely around. However, if I come up to the little folder as you hover over the folder this little sort of gray chain link icon appears and if I click on that one then now those will be joined together and you'll notice they do just join together wherever they happen to be. So if I was to move this one like this join them together, those are now fixed in that way. At the moment they don't scale together so if I was to scale this image it wouldn't necessarily scale the bottom one. That may be something that's coming a little bit later but certainly at the moment it isn't but you can still get them sort of lined up so use the alignment tools to get things lined up and then just sort of lock them together so that they then move together in unison and like I say, you can show and hide. I should just mention as well the snapping and locking that we've got there. So as you move overlays around you'll notice you get these little lines so we should have one coming up in the center to say that that is now on the center line, the vertical center and the horizontal center. I think I got those the wrong way around but you know what I mean. But also they also align up with each other so I can see that that is now aligned up to the left and right hand side and just drag that one in like that. That is aligned to that side now as well. So I can just get that perfectly lined up and then I'll lock those together. So that's another way to line them up. I should also mention if I can get my words out that this works for widget overlays as well. So if I just show you this one this you're not actually gonna see very much. However, this is for my, I've got one here that you can see the little bounding box for it. This is actually for a widget that I've got which pops up with any new subscribers. So I have this one on when I'm on my live stream but then also I've got one for my Buy Me a Coffee link. So I should suppose I should just put that one up whilst we're talking about it. If you find this content useful at all then the best way to support the channel is to head over to buymeacoffee.com slash take one tech. And that's the best way to support the channel on a one-off or ongoing basis. Now if you happen to have done that and been and bought me a coffee during my live stream then this widget that I've got at the top would actually pop up with a little display there. So this is a widget overlay but you can also group widget overlays just as you can with any other kind of overlay as well. Now there's one more thing that I want to show you which is related to the overlays as they appear on screen and how you can actually sort of work with the overlays when they're on screen and sort of move them about and manipulate them and get them all exactly where you want. So let me just come back into my demo mode a second. And what we'll do for this is I'll put up this particular one here. I'll just move it out from here for a second. I'm going to also show this one. This one here I should say. And what you can do by the way is if you want to duplicate overlays just as you can with screen sharing you can either copy and paste them or you can hold down the option key and drag and that works by the way just in the list as I've just done there. But also if I just hide that one now also it works on screen as well so you can always just duplicate things like that. By the way pressing the little cross button here will hide it from view. It doesn't actually delete it and also pressing the delete key will do that as well if you've got it selected. But from in here if I want to just show you something here I'll put this one at the top and this one is now going to cover the other overlay that is behind it. One thing that might be useful to know is that if you have got an overlay locked then you will be able to access whatever is behind it. So previously because this overlay was on top even if it was locked then you wouldn't be able to sort of get to the one that was behind it to manipulate it. So sometimes we used to have to do this little dance of either rearranging the overlays to get them in place and then put them back where we wanted them or hiding the ones that were on the top so that we could get to the ones behind. But now as long as the overlay is locked so we just click on the little padlock just there. Now you'll see that this one, although it does select it as I move to the one that is beneath it which is also locked. Let me just unlock that. Then you'll see that now the little grab handle sort of shows up and it's got the little border around that overlay. So now I'm able to get to the one that is behind. Now obviously this is a bit of a strange case because we've got the one here is basically totally covering the other one and you can't see the one that's behind it. The reason why this used to be an issue was because it also happened with sort of like invisible overlays and what do I mean by that? That's not as crazy as it sounds, trust me. Things like widgets for example. So where we've got these widgets on screen that is a total widget there and it takes up that much space on the screen. And so previously sometimes we wouldn't have been able to move things that were behind that because that would be sort of like on the top of it even though you can't actually see anything with it. So that is what I wanted to talk about in terms of overlays and just organizing them. As you can see I've tried to be a little bit organized with mine and in fact within all of these I've got quite a lot of different overlays. So some of them are for temporary things like my Econ Live Masterclass. Some of them are for widgets. So I keep my widgets in a separate one there. Screens is where I've organized all of the different overlays that I have for different types of screen and that sounds a bit strange in itself but I use the green screen sharing feature a lot when I'm doing presentations and things like that or I want to bring in Keynote as an overlay over the top of my entire screen. So I have one there for that. I've got my iPad when I'm doing Telestration writing on the screen and then also just the iPad to bring it in if I want to show something on screen for the iPad, for the iPhone, things like that. So I've got this selection here of basically different screens that I may want to bring in. So those for me have just seemed logical to put them all in a little screens folder. Animations, so these are all for my different animations like a little stinger there, which I rarely use actually. It was more for the point of actually trying to learn how to do it. So I did use that for when I'm switching between different sort of screen sharing, things like that. And if I time it properly, it should come back. There we go. That was very poorly timed. Bit of a bad demonstration that was. Let me try that again, just cause I'm committed. So that is just a little silly stinger to go between scenes. As I say, I don't really use it to be honest with that much. Then I've got my little things like my little pop-up for if you are enjoying this content and don't forget to go to takeonetech.io slash discord to join my community over there. And then we've also got my like and subscribe button. If you are enjoying this, then go ahead and hit the like button. But all of those are my little animations. So I've grouped those all together in an animations folder. Anything related to my live stream, I popped down here, this sort of stuff as well. And so that's just a way that I've organized mine. Obviously the way that you do yours will be entirely up to you. You can still access all of these overlays even if they are in folders. You can still access them all from Stream Deck. So even if you have got an individual overlay that you want to activate, like all of my overlays here. So for example, that Buy Me a Coffee link, for example, or the like and subscribe button, it's just in one of those folders but you can still activate it from the Stream Deck or wherever else. I should just mention of course that if you don't use the Stream Deck because I know that not all Ecam folk are Stream Deck or Loop Deck folk. But you can also just assign keyboard shortcuts down here to any of these overlays or indeed the groups of overlays. So you've just got this little icon next to them that looks like the little command symbol off the Apple keyboard. And if you just click on that, then you can just assign a hotkey to it. So if you do want to just trigger these overlays from hotkeys, you can do it that way too. I hope you've found this useful. I'll leave a link to some more great Ecam videos over on the right hand side and I'll see you in there.