 Hello, everyone. How are you doing? I hope you're having a wonderful day today. In this livestream, we're talking about Zoom setups, and specifically the tech and desk setups that can really help to amplify your impact in Zoom meetings. I am going to go through and do a full desk tour of what I'm using, specifically for the Zoom calls, meetings, webinars, workshops, and things like that. Then what I'm going to do is talk about practical steps in terms of, if you're just starting out or you're thinking of upgrading your setup, what is the logical order to go through? This has been prompted by a couple of things, really. First of all, a call that I was on just yesterday where somebody was talking about the gear that they've got and thinking about things that they need to add into their setup. I was talking about some practical advice there for them. But then also in the Take One Tech Academy, we've had some discussions around this. There's this constant discussion around what we call gas, the gear acquisition syndrome, and this thing that there is always seemingly one more bit of tech that you need, and I use that word in a pretty comments, that you absolutely need in order to improve your setup. And this thought that the gas can be never-ending. There is always one more thing that you need to buy and add in. And there's a couple of things to that, really. First of all, I found that whilst in the early days of setting up my studio and getting everything set up, then it did indeed seem like there's this other one thing that I need, and if I have this one thing, then it will make it this little bit better. But that does actually seem to plateau. Certainly I feel that where I am at the moment with my setup, there's nothing more that I really need to add in. I mean, I've got this perpetual excuse of having a YouTube channel, so I need to get things for testing, don't I? But in actual fact, what I've actually got now is for me pretty much the perfect setup. There's nothing really that needs to be added in to improve it, aside from maybe a faster computer. But there we go. So I'm gonna talk about the potential upgrade path that you might want to consider, and where I think are what are the essentials, what are the nice to have in terms of just improving the overall Zoom experience or meeting experience for you and for your participants as well, and then move on to all of these other little gadgets and things that you may want to consider as well as part of a broader upgrade path. So that's basically the idea. And this is also being prompted as well because I am launching a book. So you can find that in the description and I'll leave a link in the chat for that as well. So this is launching in three months. It'll actually be available, but it will be available for pre-order before then, probably within the next two weeks. But if you want to get notified as soon as that goes live, then go and check out imperfectpresence.com. And that's all about not just the gear, but also just the general approach to maximizing your impact in online meetings, presentations, webinars, and also, of course, in your online content as well. And there's a big section in this book about all about gear and going through this sort of process of building out a studio. So it's very much two-sided, really, the book. It's a book of four parts, actually, but it's two-sided. So one of them is the whole sort of on-screen aspect of getting over potential perfectionism to just get your content out there, to not be afraid of the tech and all of this kind of stuff and understanding what it can do. But then there is a whole sort of practical guide in there in terms of similar to what we're gonna be going through today, what to get and when and how to sort of build out an upgrade plan. Because I do believe it is important to start with what you've got. Everyone says that, don't they? You don't need to go and have all of this gear. Certainly don't let the lack of gear hold you back from doing things. But it is always good also to have a plan of a potential upgrade plan if there are improvements that can be made. So with that said, let's just jump straight in. And what I'll do is I'll talk about my setup first so that I can show you the things that I've got in here. And then we'll go on to just sort of looking at some more sort of first steps that we can take. So if I come over to this shot over here, this is what my desk looks like. My Zoom setup is essentially my live streaming setup and my video production setup as well. So I'm using all of the same stuff and they work pretty much hand in hand. The same sort of things that you're gonna be doing for live streaming or I do for live streaming is exactly the same as going into a Zoom meeting. So you are effectively live streaming when you're zooming on and you're just streaming some sort of video content into your Zoom meetings. So I'll just go through a bit of a run through of my setup. My main monitor over here is a 43 inch monitor. This is my main monitor. So when I'm generally working, I'm sort of sitting over here looking at this, but my camera and my Zoom component, all the Zoom controls are over here, which is kind of like at 45 degrees. So normally sitting working over here, but then on a Zoom call, I just switch over to here. And this has got then all of my Zoom controls that are kind of separate to my main window, my main monitor as he throws his Apple pencil across the room. I find that having a large workspace is really useful. And sometimes, you know, you see these, you know, all these multi monitor setups, you know, such as this. So I've got this one over here, the 43 inch. I've got a secondary computer over here. So this is for taking presentations into Zoom and things like that. So that's running on a secondary computer. I'll talk about that a bit more later. Then I've got my teleprompter up here and this screen down here. I'll just go through this in more detail in a moment, but just to explain like all of these screens, and then I've got this vertical screen, which is sort of over on this side, just down here. So when you see these setups and you think, oh, do I really need all of these screens? This would be something that I'll come on to later. You absolutely don't need all of this. Obviously you can run Zoom or Teams or, you know, a meeting or webinar on just a single screen. But one thing I find of having, you know, multiple screens that is really useful is it allows you to basically see all of the content that you're going to be talking about. And it can make things a lot, have a lot less friction, shall we say. So that's what we're trying to do here when we're looking to level up our setups is to basically reduce the friction that there is in us delivering content into our meetings, whether it's a sales pitch, whether it's an educational thing, you're teaching somebody. You don't want your message to be disrupted by the tech. So any pause is where you're just saying, hang on a minute, let me find the window for that, or let me find the screen share or whatever it happens to be. All of those breaks in your messaging is just a distraction basically. And it'd be akin to somebody standing on a stage giving a presentation and then they say, just hold that thought one minute while I go and get my notes or any sort of disruption like that is basically interrupting the flow. And so that's what we're trying to eliminate or at least that's my view of it with all of this stuff is just reducing that friction. So if I just come back though and I'll just explain the setup a little bit further. So essentially what we've got here is my teleprompter is this thing up here. Now a teleprompter is traditionally something that you would use for reading text. So it's what the news readers read when they're on camera, they're looking into the camera and they're reading the news headlines or whatever it is. But that's not actually how we're using it here. It's actually so that it's more of a way to maintain that eye contact with people on Zoom. So the way the teleprompter works is if I come over to this shot I've actually got a second teleprompter. This is my original first teleprompter just over here. And you can actually see here that we've basically got the camera here. We've then got the camera lens on the front and then we've got this thing. And this is the teleprompter and it consists of a screen that is kind of like that in that sort of horizontal plane. Maybe that's not clear. Let me try and do that in a different color. There we go. We've got that screen just there. And then in front of the screen we've got this 45 degree angled glass window if you like. And then as he writes all over the screen we've got this sort of housing that covers it completely. So that effectively the lens is looking through this transparent screen here. But because the teleprompter is dark inside what I'm actually looking at is when I look into the teleprompter I'm actually looking at a reflection of the image that is in this monitor down here. So that enables me to put something on this little screen here and be able to see it even when I'm looking directly into the camera. So right now when I look into the camera I'm actually seeing myself. I'm seeing the Ecam Live output. However, in a Zoom meeting then I would be looking at my participant and that's how you get this thing of maintaining eye contact. And we'll talk a little bit later about sort of the order of adding potentially adding these things into your studio. But certainly the teleprompter has been one of the biggest game changers for me in Zoom because it just allows you to basically see the facial expressions have a proper conversation with people but then also be able to feel like you're looking at them as well. And it's the thing that I get the most comments about in Zoom meetings is this thing of maintaining eye contact. Rather than often in Zoom meetings people are looking down because they're looking at you and the cameras up here or maybe the camera's over to the side. There's one guy that seems to be in meetings with a lot of while ago and he was always looking like this because his camera was mounted off to the side of his camera and then just at the very end of the meeting you'd turn and say bye then. So there was no eye contact and you really have this sort of disconnect. So a teleprompter is great for that. But I'll talk about that a bit more later. So that is my main teleprompter though is over here. So this is a 12 inch screen and these are field monitors. And by the way, all of the stuff that's in my studio you can find linked down in the description as well. So if you want to go and check out any of the things that I'm talking about. So this is a 12 inch field monitor. It's called a field monitor because it's traditionally used in the field for monitoring your camera, your video camera. And so you can plug your HDMI cable from your camera your HDMI out into the field monitor and then it gives you a much bigger view rather than just having the small little window that you've got on the back of your camera. However, in this instance we're not plugging into the camera directly. What's happening is this is just being plugged directly into the computer's HDMI out so that it just shows up as a separate monitor. So in terms of running this on the Mac then this monitor down here is basically just showing up as another monitor and I can put whatever I want on it. So at the moment, as I mentioned I've got my eCom Live output on there but what I can do is I can drag it across. So you can see here on my big main monitor that's my eCom Live output but I can just literally drag that and drop it and put it up on that other monitor. So now that's what I do when I'm live streaming and basically I'm watching the stream too to make sure that what I'm showing on screen is what I want to go out. And so this is just, it's a bit dark back there but this is the same setup as we've just seen on the other one. So although this is the monitor down here then we've got the reflective plate like that, the little hood at the back and then the camera is somewhere back here looking through the front of the screen. So typically in a Zoom meeting then I will have the speaker view up there. If it's a one-to-one coaching call then I'll be looking directly at the person down there. I use a dual window setup in Zoom and so then what I'll do is on this monitor down here which is a smaller monitor that one there is then gonna have the gallery view or if I'm doing a coaching call then it would be when they share their screen that would appear down there. So that is just the way that I sort of set these things up for a Zoom call. As you can see now, obviously not on a call I have the chat down here and then I have the actual YouTube chat window there as well sometimes things show up a bit different in there and then I've just got a few sort of bullet points down here and some ECAM controls. So for live streaming that's the way that I have that set up. I mentioned that I have this secondary computer over here so this would be if I'm doing a webinar or a workshop where I've got a presentation that is being brought in and I don't mean just sort of a set of slides and I'm standing over to one side talking to the slides we'll talk about that a bit later but actually bringing it directly into ECAM to create a more of an immersive presentation sort of feel to it. Then there is an HDMI out from this computer that's feeding into the primary computer. So I don't use that for live streaming. It's usually not even on for this purpose but I've switched on just to show you this sort of setup but that would just have the HDMI out going into the first computer. So that's them bringing in additional stuff and that's just to reduce the load on the primary computer but also it means that I can have things like the speaker view. If I'm running slides or something like that I can have the speaker view up there to refer to and then the actual main output of the presentation is then feeding directly into the main computer. So I already mentioned this monitor over here. So this is the 43 inch Phillips and the way that I have this setup is I think of it as it is being broken up into sort of six zones. So like this in a sort of grid fashion, so three by three and then I've got scenes set up in ECAM Live that are sharing different portions of that screen. So at the moment I've got not got very much on it actually I've just got the website up here and then I've got Discord voice channel down here but if I was doing a live demo of lots of different apps or maybe I was doing a presentation into Zoom where I wanted different things that I was gonna be demonstrating then I could put those in any one of these sort of little zones here and these are then mapped to scenes in ECAM. So this one here that is the website then if I press this scene it's taking me to this. So this is just sharing that top left corner of the screen now. That's how this scene is working and you can see it's just sharing that particular website but what that means is that and this is the reason why I like the expansive screen is that I can have all of these things queued up and I can kind of see what is where and it means that I can certainly be prepared and know that I'm going to the right place as I've got the website up. Definitely go and check out some of these resources. So this is takeonetech.io slash resources. This is where you'll find all the free stuff on my website and as I move the window down, didn't wanna do that so let me try that again. And so here we've got a few things. So like AI powered course creation but these are the couple that I want to draw your attention to here, Zoom, audio and video settings. So we are talking about Zoom. This one seems quite relevant. So you can go and grab that. That tells you about how to optimize your audio settings and video settings in Zoom to give a better experience and better audio quality especially if you have sort of level up your studio then you wanna make sure that Zoom is then taking advantage of that as well. So go and check out that guide. You'll find that as I say on the resources section. I've just dropped a link and you'll find a link to that down below as well. There's some other things in here in terms of checklists and so on and then some other recommended products and services which we'll also talk about today as well specifically Camo and Speedify and Ecam as well. So you can check those all out on the website. So that is how I've got the desk set up so that I'm sharing that portion of the screen. I mentioned earlier about what's the point of having all of these screens and having so much screen real estate. Do you really actually need it all? Well, one of the advantages of being able to see everything is it means that let's say I wanna come over to my website and I wanna queue up something different. Whilst it's not on screen, I mean it is on screen now because I'm sharing everything with you but technically it's not on my Ecam scene if you like but it means I can come over here and I could be queuing up something different on here while I'm talking. So it means that even though I'm sharing that one part of the screen, if I was to just come back to this one for example, so I'll go back to this scene, it means I could be talking about this, flick back to the main view and then just glance across, switch to a different tab up there and then switch back again and now we're on a different tab but in that same window. So that's why I think there's a lot of power in and this is by the way the link that I left to the book you can go and sign up for an early announcement when it is available for pre-order but that is the point there though of having all of this space is it means that I can clearly see what is queued up and make sure that what I'm about to put on screen is the right thing basically. So that's why I quite like this setup. I also like it from a work point of view if I just get rid of some of this rather than this is not necessarily a zoom thing but just a point on the screen aspect ratio because it is just a regular 16 by nine as opposed to I'm not a fan of the real ultra-wides I mean there's the LG dual up which is basically like half the size of this so it's that sort of shape so you can have a window above and below. What I like about this particular size of monitor and the aspect ratio is that sometimes I'll do things where I want to have like a big document down the middle and then I'll have lots of other apps around the outside like that. Sometimes I work with massive spreadsheets in some other business stuff that I do not so much intake one tech but there I'll have like a massive spreadsheet that's going all the way across the top, the bottom so I can see all the columns and then have some like supporting data up the top. So having that sort of aspect ratio screen for me works really well because I can just sort of lay out the screen exactly as I want. So if I want it to be a wide screen it can be or if I want some stuff on a vertical column or whatever, I quite like that. I find the ultra-wides are just sort of limiting for me in terms of what I want to be able to do with it. I then also have another monitor which is arguably unnecessary. I mean I do use it but for this one in particular this is more for when I'm working this is where I'll have things like discord my calendar and mail and everything. So it's not just sort of open on the main screen but that is definitely a sort of nice to have as opposed to essential whereas I wouldn't want to get rid of, you know this set up here because it means I can separate the zoom stuff that's going on here versus the actual content that I'm talking about. So then also on the desk obviously there is a microphone. Step one by the way in zoom setup is get some good quality audio. So that is always the first step but then I've got down here a collection of Stream Deck. So a Stream Deck XL, a Stream Deck Plus and then another Stream Deck XL and I'll talk about the reason for that and by the way I've got two pedals down on the floor as well. I'll talk about the reason for those and the multiple Stream Decks and you know obviously with Stream Deck you can have multiple pages, multiple profiles and you know, do you really need multiple Stream Decks? So the reason for that for me is that when I'm doing something on a presentation or a live stream, I want to know where the buttons are that I'm going to be pressing and what I don't want to be doing is having to switch between pages to then sort of go to a different page and then press a different button and then switch back because what I found out the hard way was that when you're doing that sometimes I will forget which page I'm on and then I'll go to press the button that I think is going to do one thing and it does something else. So for me that kind of like upgrade process with the Stream Deck was that I added these in as and when I ran out of buttons on the first Stream Deck that I needed to be using in a live environment as it were. So fine for using it for multiple different use cases but for a single use case where I need to have more than 32 actions in a given meeting presentation or webinar or whatever then that's when the second one got added in. The Stream Deck Plus was a kind of separate thing really that is used now as a switcher for the main Stream Decks. So when I press a button on here this is where I've got all of my different profiles and I can swipe between different pages of them but basically when I press a button on here it's going to update what is on the other two. So I use this to switch between different actions on here like if I press the Zoom one for example you'll see that it updates my Zoom controls and has my basic ECAM controls over on this side. Go back to this one which is for live streaming it's updating that but it's also updating what is happening on the pedals as well. And then the other thing that you have with the Stream Deck Plus is the dials to be able to then control audio for ECAM and things like that. But certainly the one that I would always recommend in terms of Stream Decks would be the Stream Deck Excel with those 32 keys and even if you think you only need six or seven or eight or nine or 10 actions trust me you'll find that there are all these other use cases for Stream Deck that maybe you haven't thought about. So definitely obviously there are budgetary considerations but if you're making a decision based purely on what you think is your use case then there'll be a whole load of other use cases you haven't thought about. But I'll get back to the desk and then we'll go through some specifics in terms of this upgrade plan that you might want to consider a little bit later. Next up on the desk here is the Roadcaster Duo. The Roadcaster Pro 2 actually is now a lighting feature for the moment. So it's just behind me. I really love the Duo. I think that if the Duo and the Roadcaster Pro 2 were out at the same time then I would definitely have bought the Duo rather than the Roadcaster Pro 2. Although actually I have to say the Roadcaster Pro 2 was a gift from Ecamp so thank you very much for that. But it's one of these things I totally would have bought it when it was first come out. But the Roadcaster Duo for me for what I use it for or what I was using the Roadcaster Pro 2 for for Zoom and audio routing then the Roadcaster Duo does that all. It's just got basically two mic inputs as opposed to four but we'll talk about that a little bit later as well. So the Roadcaster Duo I really love it. I love the smaller form factor so rather than kind of coming out here and being much bigger on the desk it's a much neater smaller form factor. The other thing then that is on the desk which is over here is a Road Streamer X. Now I would guess that people are going to choose one or the other if they're going to be buying one of these devices. However the Streamer X is a great device with it having a built in capture card so actually my video now for my main camera is actually going through the Streamer X but I'll talk about that a little bit more later. There is also here not technically for Zoom calls specifically but there is a top down camera here that is pointing down and then I guess I should also mention this thing here is my key light and there is also a hair light, not a hair light, sorry, a fill light over there and the hair light is illuminating my luscious locks and that is from just behind me. So let me just clear this for a second and come back to this for you. That gives you a better view of the lights. So this is a 90 centimeter softbox and that's a non-light. The fours are 60 is the light that I'm using behind that. This is actually the same light. It's just a much smaller softbox, so it's a 60 and then I've got another one just up here behind me that's kind of putting the light behind me. So that is the sort of rundown of the desk setup and all the stuff that's relevant to this. So I thought it'd be useful then to go through and just talk about what is a potential upgrade path that you might want to consider and what do I consider these sort of essentials. Before I do, I just want to say hello to a few people because I've just been rubberting on. Hey, Richard, great to see you here. Thanks for stopping by. Bicky, you've always, you know, you've got one of my favorite setups with the way that you've got all your stream decks mounted. Hey, Jess, great to see you here and where are we now? The gear acquisition syndrome because more kit is always the answer. That is true, there is a little joke but there is always something that we can do to improve our setup with a little bit more gear. Hey, Gretchen, how are you doing? Great to see you and Annie. So it was Annie that we were talking with about that was where the comment came from about when does the gas end? When does the gear acquisition syndrome end? And there isn't always an end in sight once you've got these few things as Annie found out. Let me see where we're up to. Hey, Parker, great to see you here as well. You tried it for the, oh, the teleprompter, I guess that is. Yeah, it is one of these things that having a teleprompter in Zoom, just to be able to have that eye contact is just really is just this massive game changer in terms of being able to actually look at somebody, see their facial expressions just as you would in a normal conversation, yet also, you know, then be able to see you as well. It really does make a massive difference. So I often wondered why you have the second teleprompter off to the side. Would you mind explaining the benefit of that, please? The only reason I have it is because I have it. So that was my original teleprompter, which was a, this is the Desvu T3 teleprompter and it basically hangs off the front of the lens here and then this is the teleprompter and then we've got this little seven inch screen there. That is the first teleprompter I had and incidentally, this camera is a Canon EOS 60D, which now is like 11 years old or something like that, coming up for, I guess, 12 years old and that is the camera that I was using on my channel and on all my Zoom calls for the first sort of eight months or whatever and nobody really complained about video quality. So this idea that you've got to have the latest and greatest camera is just, you know, it's nonsense really and you might well find that you've got a camera lying around as I had. So this was a camera that I bought when my first daughter was born and then technology moved on and we started using our phones and things like that, not so much carrying this big, heavy DSLR around and so I kind of repurposed that for my channel. So all of the first eight to 12 months on my channel was, in fact, it was even longer than that before I actually upgraded the camera, maybe 18 months, was basically 720p. So although I was technically recording in 1080, it was coming in at 720 into Ecam and then being upscaled. And that was my first teleprompter because what I thought that I wanted it for was just for this thing of having eye contact and for live streaming to be able to see the output just to that little sanity check to make sure that what was going out was what I thought it was because I was always sharing a screen and then I would be looking back at the camera and realized I hadn't switched out from the screen chair. So it's good from that point of view. So I digress slightly, but that was why I had this one. It was my original camera and my original teleprompter. Then at some point, quite rapidly, I realized that there is a benefit to having a much larger teleprompter that then when you're on a Zoom call, like with one person, a little seven inch field monitor is fine. You can see those people just fine. But when you start having a larger gallery view with maybe 15 people or 20 or whatever it is in there, I mean, the gallery view can get a lot of people in actually up to 37, I think it is. So then it ended up that the people were still really small on the screen again. The other thing about it is the actual on-screen controls become quite small as well when you've got a really small monitor. Technically, that small monitor, that seven inches 4K. So if you take a 4K display and then 4K resolution and scale it right down to seven inches and then put it at arm's length away, it's kind of like trying to control something on a phone, on an iPhone with tiny little controls. So that's why I wanted to upgrade and get a larger monitor. And then it's actually been much better because it now just does feel like almost an actual monitor. So rather than before, if I come back to this one, this is not much smaller sort of visibly to me than this monitor down here. So it actually does become kind of usable. I do throw things on it during the day as well. It's not just purely for a teleprompter, it's become an actual monitor. So that is the 12 inch monitor. So then when I upgraded the monitor and the field monitor, the teleprompter and the camera, then I just basically moved this other one, which was always, I used to use like a webcam for this particular shot, this over the, you know, side on desk shots. So I've basically just left that there. But what it means is that is basically duplicating the output from this one. So I've got a splitter. So if I, there's something that looks like this. So this is an HDMI splitter where you can see you've got one HDMI in and then you've got two HDMI out. And it's basically sending the exact same thing then to two separate monitors. So the way I have it set up is that I have my monitor here. What's shown on here is exactly the same as is being shown on this monitor up there. So it's really more for an e-cam thing. You know, if I'm looking up at this screen, I can still see my output if I happen to be looking at that camera. So definitely I wouldn't necessarily add a second teleprompter in as such, but it's just the fact that I had one that I had upgraded. So that's why that is Jesse, it's just because I've got one. But certainly I wouldn't be recommending that as a potential upgrade. Do you have a recommendation for a smaller monitor which is in front of you below the teleprompter? There is one of those actually down in the description. The one that I'm using is a, I always get the name of this always escapes me. It's called a Uperfect. No, Uperfect, no Uperfect. And it is a really, it's like a travel monitor actually. And it actually comes with a case, a bit like an iPad Folio case. So it sort of folds over the top and that can be a stand. So it's actually great and specifically for you, Jesse, you might find it useful for travel as well because it's about the size of a MacBook Pro, as you can see, the two side by side. So it would stick in your case or your bag with that. And then it would mean that when you're on the road, you've got these two monitors. It's also got a Vita mount. So I got it mounted on an arm. So it just sort of move out of the way if I get things out of the way here. Somehow, there you go. It's just on a little Vita mount arm. But yeah, it's great for, you know, as a potential travel companion as well. So like I say, yeah, it would be great for you. If it's, I think it's in the description. Let me just see if I can quickly get the link to it. Probably not. I'm sure I've got a keyboard maestro. I'm sure I've got a, I'm sure I've got a text expander snippet for this. But I haven't actually, I don't actually remember it. This is the one that I've got. Here you go. I'll just drop this into the chat. And I'll put it up like that. So it's actually a 2K monitor. Whoops, thought I'd changed scene. Wrong one, there we go. It's actually a 2K monitor, but the teleprompter itself, by the way, although that is 4K, I've reduced the resolution of that. So it's not using 4K. And what that does is it doesn't change the, you know, the people that you're seeing on screen, although technically they're slightly lower resolution, but you don't notice it because it's in the teleprompter far away. But what it does do by reducing the resolution is it makes the interface bigger. So by reducing the resolution in your teleprompter, it will, can't talk and type, putting this in the chat. There we go. By reducing the resolution, probably made some screw-ups in spelling there. No, I got it right, there we go. So yeah, by reducing the resolution though in your teleprompter, what that will mean is like all the buttons in Zoom will be bigger and all of the interface, if you're looking at the menu bar along the top, then that will be bigger too. So yeah, definitely it's worth doing that. Reduce the resolution in your display settings in the Mac. And then that will then make everything look better. So let me just come back to where I was there. I just saw that, yes. Thank goodness my Apple Pencil didn't go in the coffee mug. Oh, I should say by the way, that is the other thing that I sort of neglected to mention there, was that the other thing that is on my desk is the iPad with the Apple Pencil and I've left a link to this in the description, but this video pencil is the name of the app that I'm using to do the drawing on the screen. So when I'm drawing on the screen, that is me just drawing on the iPad. And I've done a whole video specifically about Apple Pencil, but the thing that is great about Apple Pencil is that you actually see the output from in this case, Ecum Live on your iPad. So it means that you can be, whoops, wrong one. It means that you can know exactly where you're drawing. So if I want to draw, you know, give myself some hair, then I can see exactly where I'm putting that. There are obviously better ways to use that in a meeting like notes and stuff, but yeah, that's kind of an essential part for me of the setup is using Apple Pencil, is using video pencil on the iPad to then be able to go and draw, you know, annotate on screen. It can be as well useful when you're doing things like screen sharing, maybe you want to highlight something, you know, in here, like this is a 12,000 to one ultra-wide, you know, whatever it is, but it can be great for highlighting certain things in presentations as well. And you can, as I say, you're just seeing exactly the output on screen, so you can be sure that things are going where you want them to be. So yeah, Apple Pencil and video pencil, I should say, is a sort of essential part of the setup as well. Let me just come back to these questions and then we'll be getting back to going through a sort of step-by-step and my view on a path to building all of this sort of stuff out. Indeed, yes, Jeff is my timekeeper as always. You know that, Jesse, keeping me on track. Hey, Tatiana, great to see you as well. Just gonna get in the hang of one stream deck. Well, that's the thing, once you get in the hang of one stream deck, it's so easy to add more. But yes. Yeah, hair light, you notice that hair in the hair light is singular, so I have just got one. It illuminates my hair. This one particular one just there. Hey, great, thanks for stopping by. I'm glad you're liking the channel. I'm Michael, great to see you too. The Streamer X, I'll talk about this in a moment, actually, but the Streamer X for this particular purpose that we're talking about, like leveling up your Zoom calls and online meetings and just your content. It's really, really a compelling product that can do, it can be your capture device, your audio device, and have all of roads sort of onboard processing. The same stuff you've got on the ROCASTER Pro 2 and the ROCASTER Duo. And if you've just got like one or two mics going in, it's really perfect. I absolutely love it. I'll talk about that and the other road devices a little bit later as well. Hello from Israel. Hello, welcome. Great to see you here. I mean, I missed what is the small screen in the middle? So that was the one that I just dropped in the chat, by the way, I think we've circled back to that. But yeah, this one here is Uperfect Portable Monitor. And as you can see, it is really great as a portable monitor as well. So it comes with this sort of folding folio, like it's not leather, but whatever they are these days, that sort of folds over the front of it. And then you can power it either by USB-C or it's got an HDMI thing in there as well. So yeah, it's a really nice little monitor. And just to reiterate, the thing I use that for is on Zoom meetings, I use dual windows. So I want to have the speaker view in the top and the gallery view down below. If it's a presentation like that, if it's a group call, then I'll just have the gallery view in the top. Or if it's a coaching call, then I'll have the speaker view at the top, the person I'm talking to. And then when they're sharing their screen, if we're troubleshooting something, that'll be just down below then. So that's how I specifically use that. And where are we? So Annie, feeling so much closer to that place where I'm comfortable with my, yeah, you've got an absolutely awesome setup now. And there is, that's the other thing. Yeah, we're talking about this in the Academy Q&A just yesterday about, yeah, there's two things actually, there's gear acquisition syndrome, but there's also kind of software acquisition syndrome, isn't there? Because there were always these new tools coming out. And yeah, there's some of these things that I'm constantly trying new things, but then there's other ones that I just, I leave them alone and I don't try and tweak too much. But yeah, it is a never-ending quest, isn't it? Oh, thank you very much, Michael. I'll receive that in the spirit with which it intended and send it straight back to you too. I'm not sure what that's responding to, very true. HDMI, not sure that was. Maybe that's talking about the monitor, is it? The HDMI mini input. I'm not sure where we're, what we're talking about there. This is the problem with live streaming. I love live streaming, but there's always this disjoint between the comments and me catching up with them. So yeah, I think it might be about the monitor though, isn't it? So yeah, the input is actually a regular HDMI. So if the HDMI question there was about that Uperfect monitor, it is actually a full-size HDMI. And so are the field monitors that I'm using for the teleprompters as well. So they are HDMI too. But you can, that Uperfect monitor you can use with USB-C too. So yeah, the Streamer X versus the Mackey DLZ. So that, I guess that's the new Mackey, is it? The big one that's kind of like the Rocaster equivalent, if you like, with multiple tracks. I've looked at that. For me, that one looks like it's massive on my desk. And I love the fact that the Rocaster Duo has basically replaced what I was, everything I was doing with the Rocaster Pro 2, which is in a smaller form factor. But yeah, the Mackey does look good. It's got lots of other features to it. But I think I'll be sticking with the road for me. Yeah, the Uperfect would be ideal for, as someone who travels a lot. Actually, we were just talking about this yesterday in the Q&A as well for the Academy. And we're talking about this idea of doing things on Zoom and how Zoom meetings now can arguably be even more effective than face-to-face meetings. Of course, you can never replace meeting someone, shaking their hand, having a coffee and all of that kind of stuff. But there's certain things you can do in online meetings that are pretty tricky to do in a in-person meeting, like bringing up presentations and having this sort of interactive nature with them that you can actually have a much more control over the messaging when it's on Zoom or something like that. And yeah, Jesse was talking about still going into face-to-face meetings, but maybe using a small monitor that he's got to then have a laptop up and have another side facing the client to be able to still be controlling stuff on the computer, but then showing it off to the client on the other side, if you like, if it was that kind of like literally face-to-face over a desk or whatever. But yeah, actually this Uperfect monitor would be perfect for that because it's a larger, but potentially a larger size as well. So how do I get so many monitors connected to the MacBook? Actually, they're connected to the Mac mini. So the MacBook is standalone, but then I've got the Mac mini, but the same question applies because the Mac mini has a limit of two monitors. There is a thing that you can get as, let me step back outside before I mince my words. There is a technology called display link. So this is not to be confused with display port, which is just like an HDMI, an alternative to HDMI, but there is display link. And this is something which basically runs as an application on your Mac, but allows you to connect more monitors. So on my actual Mac mini, which is under the desk, I've got, this is my primary monitor. Then this is my secondary monitor. Those are the two that I can have plugged into the mini. But actually this one and this one are plugged into an external dock, which is a wavelength dock. So that is in the description as well, I think. But let me just see if I can get to that up. And you can use, there's other ones as well, but I just use this particular one. It gives me an extra two screens. You can get some that I've got three in as well. So if I just find the exact one, here you go. This is the one I've got. And the prices of docks vary. I wasn't too bothered about the sort of power. That's usually one thing that you want to look at. So when you're looking at a dock like this, this tells you the power somewhere. Where is it now? It's something like 60 watts, I think. I can't just see it, but yeah, it's about 60 watts, that hurts, not that. But the sort of pass-through power that you've got is always a factor with these. So if you look at like the KEL digit, which is another common one, then, or popular one that people use, then that I think is like 100 watts or 90 or something. But this one that I use, the wavelength, what that gives me is a few extra USB ports just down here, but crucially it's this. It's got the HDMI and display port for two separate 5K screens. That's the other connector I was talking about, so display port. But what you're looking for is this, this little logo here that says display link. So just next to where that big 5K is, you can see it says display link on there as well. So any dock that's got that display link technology means that you can add those additional monitors on top of the sort of limits that you get on, whether it's on the MacBooks or the Mac Minis, which do have a limit in terms of how many monitors you can connect. So that's how I've connected more monitors to my computer. In fact, this was the very thing that was, we were talking about with Annie, where she was saying, oh, does the gas never end? And it was because of this thing of just got the teleprompter, plugged the teleprompter in, and then it wouldn't show up because of this limit on the number of monitors. So it's like, oh, well, there is this one thing you can get that will solve that. And that was where the question came, when does the gas ever end? But anyway, so, yeah, Gretchen, the Apple Pencil is obviously the device, but the video pencil, the reason why I keep getting confused, video pencil is the app. And that is the app that I've got that allows me to draw on the screen. And it's by a fellow ECAM member as well, so another ECAM user. And he developed this specifically for drawing on the screen. So I'm using an app for the iPad called Video Pencil, and there's a link to that in the description. But then I'm using the Apple Pencil to physically write on the screen. So that's why I keep getting those two mixed up. So sorry if that was confusing. Yeah, video pencil is definitely a game changer for sure, just to be able to draw on screen like that and annotate things. Oh, sorry, yes, the HDMI splitter I see what you were talking about. Yeah, so this is two HDMI inputs, sorry, one HDMI input and two out. That was the splitter that I was talking about. And the point of that is to make sure that, as you say, it is actually splitting one to two monitors because there is another one which is a switch as well, by the way. So you will see some of them where it's got one in and two out, but then there's a button to decide which one you want the thing to go to. So that is actually a more common kind of device or bit of tech, whereas this one is the splitter that is going to split the HDMI down to two places. And yeah, you can have them for multiple monitors as well. You're quite right there. Oh, this must be about the Mac Eats. So, oh yeah, I know it's got a lot of features that the Rocaster potentially, it's got some additional features in there. So yeah, I do get that. It's more just for my needs, really. Let me see where we're going. So I see, right, that's more about the Mac Eats. So Streamer X for the audio routing and the video for my two PCs. What I'll do is I'll start going through my sort of order of preference for building all this out, and then I'll come on to the Streamer X, because I've got a lot to say about that and why I think it's great. And so the other reason for this live stream today was because, as I mentioned at the beginning, having a call with somebody yesterday and they were talking about their setup and things that they were planning on adding in and having this similar conversation about the cost of all of this stuff and the idea of setting all of this stuff up from the start, certainly if I was to go out and just buy everything that I've got in my studio, there would be a big bill. But the fact is it has just sort of built up over time as I've noticed a need for it and added certain things in. And like I say, there's nothing really that's on my desk that is, at the moment, kind of redundant. It's all there for a specific purpose and doing something. But like I say, I didn't go out and just get all of this stuff in one go. So when it comes to thinking about an upgrade path, obviously, when you're on a Zoom call or a meeting or whatever, then you want to have good video quality, good audio quality. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the first thing you should do is go out and buy a camera. I already mentioned that the camera that I was using for the first sort of 18 months on YouTube and in my calls and that was a 12 year or 11 year old or whatever it is, Canon EOS 60D coming in at 720 and Ecam was doing the upscaling. And nobody really noticed. They probably just saw that on my channel, the video was a 1080p resolution. It'll tell you that, but they didn't notice that it being upscaled from 720. So people don't really notice that thing. What makes the most difference, I think, to your video is actually your lighting. And whilst I mentioned that I've got these Nanlite, which are real video lights, I say real, they are video lights. They're intended for this purpose. This, again, was not what I was using in the beginning. I was just using some generic soft boxes that, I mean, I'm in Thailand, so I bought them in Thai Bart for like, I don't know, 2,000 baht. Was it 1,500 for the pair of them? So that would be around about $50. And they're just sort of rectangular soft boxes about two foot square-ish, something like that. And the light that was actually in them was, they just had regular light bulbs. So they had four, like a head with four different screw fittings in for four regular light bulbs. So that meant that you could adjust the color temperature by changing from warm white to daylight bulbs, make it brighter by sticking in an extra bulb and that sort of stuff. And so it was a really low-cost solution, really, but it added a lot of light. And as I say, can you tell the difference if you go back and look at my early videos versus the later ones? Has that, is there this massive, huge, exponential change in quality because I upgraded my lights? Probably not. I know there will be people all saying, oh yeah, I can definitely tell, but probably not a huge difference. Whereas the difference between not having lights and having those low-cost lights was just, that was a massive shift. And it suddenly made even a lower quality camera look amazing. The other thing is, the cameras that we've got in our pockets these days, with the latest iPhones, they've got tremendous cameras. And yet they don't have the large lenses. Obviously, we're talking about, when you're getting into talking about cameras that have got full frame sensors and it's all about the size of the frame and the quality of the glass, the lens and everything. But actually, the way that Apple compensates for that is by all of its onboard processing. So it is doing a huge amount by having, it's three or four smaller lenses and then doing all of the processing on the image side, on the software side, in the actual phone itself to give you a really good quality image. So I would say that this whole cliche of, oh well, you can start with your phone, by the way, my little guilty secret is that although I'm a tech expert, I still use an iPhone 6s. So I'm not really a phone person. But generally, for normal people, the phone that they've got in their pocket is usually got a really, really good camera on it. So that is adding a good camera, but then just upgrading the lighting. That is definitely a step one. The next thing obviously is then, once you've got your video quality sorted and as I say, just lighting with a, even a regular webcam or your built-in camera, and then think about positioning, making sure your eye level, not doing the whole sort of looking up the nose thing as people with their laptops on there, let's do so. But that, again, can be combated just by getting a riser to lift your laptop up, so it is at eye level. And then have the lighting and the built-in camera, you'll still look great. But for the audio then, it's a case of thinking about that. Now, I'll get onto the audio mixes in a while, but the first step is though, to just get some sort of microphone that is gonna give you a better audio quality. And when I started, I bought the MV7, which is actually just over there. And the reason I bought that microphone was because it was a USB microphone, but it also had XLR. So the USB is, this is the Rode PodMic, which also has the XLR and USB. This wasn't out at the time. But the reason why I did that was because I did have this idea that at some point I was gonna be upgrading my studio. And so I wanted a microphone that would kind of grow with me as I built out things. So that meant that having something that was dual USB and XLR meant that I could then just keep that same microphone because whilst all the other tech, there's always new models of this and that coming out, microphones are something that will technically last, potentially last a lifetime. So that was the reason for that particular purchase. Now we've got the Rode PodMic that's come out. And I think it's a really, a good solid competitor now to the short MV7. The short MV7 is $250 versus the PodMic, which is 200, well, that's 149 versus 199 or whatever. But yeah, it's essentially $50 cheaper, so 80% of the price. But it actually does something which the MV7 doesn't when you're using it in the USB mode. So the short MV7 does have the short motive app, which allows you to adjust things like the, the kind of adjusting like the compression and things like that, some audio aspects of it. However, the PodMic has a lot of the onboard processing that we've also got with the Rocaster. And the most notable of which, or the most relevant to this conversation is actually the noise gate. Because I find that that's something that is really important, is having a way that you can basically eliminate your noise going through your microphone when you're not speaking. So if you listen whilst I'm speaking, there is actually the background noise of an air con going, but because my voice is like the more dominant of the two, you probably don't notice. But as soon as I stop speaking, everything goes completely quiet. And that is useful on a Zoom call because as I say, people don't generally notice the background noise that's going on while you're talking, but it's when you stop that if there's some loud humming or the clicks on your keyboard or things like that going on whilst you're not talking, that is gonna be really disruptive. So for Zoom, having the noise gate and some of the other onboard processing that it's got I think is really compelling. So basically for $200, you've got a really high quality audio device that as I say, can actually grow with you as you start adding in more stuff. So then when we mentioned the Streamer X, if you do wanna just start with an audio device, so using any other XLR microphone or you want to have the audio device, using the Streamer X actually as the thing that you're gonna use, if you just wanted to start off with something quality, the Streamer X is great for a number of reasons for this very purpose. So first of all, it does have HDMI in and it's got your mic, so it becomes your capture card. So if you are gonna start off with, I mean, I'm talking about using an iPhone camera and everything like that, but if you are using some other kind of mirrorless or DSLR camera to come in higher quality camera, then you can take your HDMI in from here and you can also take your audio from your microphone in here as well. And the good thing about this specifically for Zoom is it's got these just these big buttons to control things with. So rather than fiddling around, maybe in your teleprompter looking for the mute button, you've just got a mute button here to mute your mic. This one is to toggle on and off the camera. So you see my camera goes off when I press that and you've got some controls here to adjust it. There is actually, although there's sort of one dial here for the mic, it can have three microphones attached. So there's the XLR mic. There's also a headset mic that you can plug in here. And then also you could be using this with a wireless mic as well. And there's two bits of software that you can use this with, either Road Central or the Unify software. If you're pairing it with Road Central, you basically are choosing a microphone. Whereas if you use it with Unify, then you've got access to all three of these microphones at once. So you could have a wireless mic and the main mic and the headset mic. Not that you, as a single person, would have all of those things on you at once, but maybe for different aspects of your production, it's good to have that versatility. And then the other thing that this has got, which is great from a Zoom perspective, is you can set these smart pads, which can do various things like voice changing and all of that kind of stuff, playing music. You can also switch these to be into presentation mode, which means that these buttons then become your forward and backward slides, advance your slides forward and backwards for Keynote PowerPoint or Google Slides. And then these are also then become other controls for your presentation as well. So actually, as a Zoom thing, for somebody who's not doing all of the live streaming, hasn't got all of the other stuff, but you just want to level up your Zoom things, it's really, really perfect because you do have all of the same onboard processing that we've got in the Rocaster Duo, the Rocaster Pro 2, but just in this really compact form factor. It has got a little screw thread on the back there, quarter 20, so you could have this mounted somewhere if you didn't want it on your desk, you could have it mounted up off your desk somewhere. But yeah, it's a really great solution for that. It's also a great solution for live streaming. I like the Duo because of some of the routing that you can do in hardware. So I've got my different levels for here. I've got my microphone. This is Ecamm Live, which is for the live stream. Then this is, and also, if I was in a Zoom call, then I use Ecamm to complain any videos or things like that through Ecamm into Zoom. This is where I'm controlling the audio. This is Discord and then this is Zoom. So I like having those four things with physical faders that are gonna adjust the routing on the fly. However, with the Streamer X, you can technically do all of that same routing with the Unify software, which they have, which is Mac and PC. It's still there in beta on Mac, but it's coming. I've got the version of it and it's a great bit of software. So you can still do all of the routing with this as well. So this is a really compelling product for me to give that really small form factor all in one way to just sort of upgrade your video and your audio in one go. So yeah, highly, highly recommended from that. So that would be a great sort of device, as I say, to just add in this, level up your audio and video quality with one thing. So after that though, you've got the audio, the video and the lighting sorted. Then there are some other things which they're not essential. None of this stuff is essential. I mean, you can just go into Zoom straightaway, can't you? But for me, it's all about leveling up the experience. And I mentioned this earlier about this idea of being able to give frictionless presentations where you're just kind of flicking between one thing and another thing with ease without really too much hassle going on. And that was where I was talking about having the screen real estate to be able to have everything open. Well, really the hub of everything that is controlling everything is the Stream Deck. And I do think that this should be like an essential bit of gear. If you've got a studio space or you're looking to build a studio space or you're just looking to level up your Zoom calls, even if it's not in a sort of more traditional studio, then the Stream Deck is kind of essential because this brings everything together. And I mentioned that I've got multiple Stream Decks on the desk, but just starting with the 32 key Stream Deck is gonna allow you to control your Zoom. It's gonna allow you to control if you're using Ecam Live or some other piece of software to add all the stuff that I'm doing on this live stream could be just fed straight into a Zoom call. So things like switching scenes and so on. This could just be part of your presentation into Zoom to show off presentations, to show off spreadsheets or whatever it is that you're doing. And the point about it is it's seamless. So when you wanna switch to a different camera, you press this button when I want to switch over to this scene, I press this different one over here and you see that sort of seamless transition. What really screws up the flow of a Zoom meeting or a webinar or workshop or whatever is where people are fumbling around trying to find the Zoom screen share button and then which window do I need to share? And there's that interrupt that I was talking about earlier. The Stream Deck brings everything together and holds the whole presentation together and gives it that seamless flow that then does not interrupt your message and the value that you're trying to deliver. All of these things that we're trying to do essentially is although we're adding in tech, all we're trying to do is make it so that you are able to deliver your true value and the tech is getting out of the way. I mean, I'm a tech geek anyway, I just love all of the stuff, but actually the reason for it, it's got a purpose which is to allow me in meetings and presentations or whatever to actually deliver the thing that I'm wanting to be talking about. Much like I'm doing now really, I mean, I'm flicking between different things but it's sort of pretty effortless to go between those things and if I wanna pull something else up, just being able to press a button and do it, it makes it seamless rather than spending time flicking around between this and that. So a stream deck really, I would say at this stage should be an essential bit of gear and there's the other thing about it which is that I bought the stream deck originally specifically for this purpose of switching scenes in ECAM. That's why I got one because it is a stream deck. It's for live streamers and live video production but what I didn't realize was what a productivity powerhouse it basically is in itself and now it's like it's just an extension of my arm really that I use it for everything that I do for all of the productivity side of it. So the other thing about the stream deck is not only will it improve your Zoom calls but once you get it, you'll realize all of the different things that you can do with it and it will just transform how productive you can be just in your day-to-day work. So stream deck is definitely one of those things on the after you've done the basics so the audio, the video, the lighting, it's still really all about leveling up the experience and the next thing should be definitely stream deck top of the list there and just not five but one is a great start. Then the other thing would be the teleprompter and I've talked about this and why it's important but that is another thing that I think that people think maybe don't appreciate the value of it until they've tried it. I think that that is the point here. It can seem like it seems like it's a bit expensive to add this other thing in if it's just for Zoom calls but if you're using Zoom or Teams or any other platform in your business just to have these calls with people it will honestly make a huge difference and it's these subtle little things in the connections that you have with people in remote working that do make all the difference and it can actually be make or break between you either getting a contract or not or you getting your message across to somebody that you're teaching or not you having that building the rapport with a potential client or with business colleagues I mean I was in a business with people that I'd literally never met some of them before because it came around during COVID and we set things up and so I was working remotely with people in New Zealand, UK, Pakistan and I'm in Thailand with developers in different places and we'd never met but we had that connection because of the way that we interacted in our online meetings and it's really, really not to be underestimated what a massive difference having a teleprompter can make to that. I will also say there are ways that you can do this with using like an iPad for the teleprompter part or for the screen part of it I should say so this part that's down here, this screen which I mentioned was the field monitor you could use just an iPad. It's a great way to do it because then you're just buying just the teleprompter bit up here and then you just put your iPad in the little tray there and then you do need to use either a bit of software get that off my face we do need to use a bit of software either what's it called? Duet display is one thing so that your iPad then shows up as an external monitor but you can flip it round. That's the one question that people ask when they're using their iPad is you're looking at the reflection of the iPad in the teleprompter and so everything is reversed and so there's this thing of if you use your iPad and just use it with the sidecar feature in the Mac which allows you to use an iPad as an external display it'll all look back to front and there's no way to flip it natively in the Mac however if you use Duet display that does apparently allow you to do the flipping there's also another thing called Lunar Display which is a dongle for the iPad and that allows you to do the flipping as well. Personally though I think that once again although there is an investment to be made in an actual field monitor for me the benefit of that is it just shows up natively as a display on your computer. You're then not using an iPad which in itself is a great tool you could potentially be using the iPad for video pencil for drawing on the screen but also it doesn't require any additional setup it's just showing up as a monitor it's always on when I put my computer to sleep that goes off when I start my computer wake it up or whatever then that monitor is just on it's always there I don't have to think about I've got to start the iPad and all of that kind of stuff so I think that there's a real value in having a dedicated field monitor in your teleprompter again if this is something you're using for business and it's a revenue generating thing that you're using Zoom for then as a business expense it's some of the best money that I've ever spent to be honest just because of this as I say the connection and being able to see people clearly and then being able to see me and it's something that I get a lot of comments about some people would just say where are you looking? What they mean is why how am I seeming like I'm looking at them and I guess the question then is like am I actually seeing them the same way that they're seeing me but the answer is yes obviously I can see them in the teleprompter so that is the second thing is Stream Deck absolute essential in my mind teleprompter really should be up there and the top priority list another priority though coming back to the software we're talking about gear but would be ECAM live that's what I'm using for this live stream so that's how I'm doing all the live switching all of the videos on my YouTube channel are all done in one take with no edits that's why the name is there I kind of forget that people don't necessarily know that but I was on a podcast just last week or interviewed for a podcast last week and kind of mentioned it there and they didn't realize that all the videos are done in one take with no edits and the reason for me doing the channel was to practice this process of creating videos in one take with no edits just like this live stream obviously is but that's because that is good practice for first of all for me was creating course content without having to do the editing process but also it's the same process then when you are just presenting something as it be a sales pitch or a demo or something like that into a Zoom call a classroom or workshop so it's all the same thing and ECAM allows me to switch scenes allows me to add on overlays so for example maybe I could say check out the Discord community for take one take and that little pop-up so that little pop-up is just a little animated overlay in ECAM Live that pops up on the screen so it allows me to add in all of those things but the other really powerful thing about it is it allows me to bring in keynote presentations but I do it as more of an immersive presentation foolishly I didn't have one set up for today which is a bit of a mistake but there is a video about it which I'll go back and leave in the description that I made all about how I'd make these sort of what I call immersive presentations using keynote and ECAM going into Zoom and what it means is that rather than having you in a little window on the corner with a slide deck I never do presentations like that what it would generally be is me on the screen but then I'm using keynote to merely animate in bullet points down the side or maybe a title block down at the bottom but it allows me to create all those things really quickly and easily in keynote bring them into ECAM and that is where that second monitor comes in second computer so this is my mini's under the desk but this is my secondary computer this is where I would run my keynote presentation that is literally just parts of it are used for the animation in ECAM so I'll just do that but it means that I can still see speaker view here which shows me what's coming up but the actual content of it is then feeding into ECAM on this primary computer so in terms of this thing definitely if you've not tried out ECAM definitely go and try that out you can find a link to it down in the description if you haven't heard of it or you haven't tried it yet and also if you use the code ALEC Zoom at checkout after you've done the 14 day free trial then you can get your first two months for free so you'll go through and add in all your billing stuff but you won't be charged for the first two months so it's effectively like a two and a half two and a half month free trial and if you can't monetize using ECAM or can't see the value of it within that time then yes, I don't know what to say it's just another one of these game changes the power of ECAM and the other thing then to think about upgrading like after you've done obviously the video the lighting and the audio and then these things that I'm talking about Stream Deck, Teleprompter, ECAM Live and all of that kind of thing is one of the biggest upgrades and I think the one that sometimes people neglect is upgrading your skills to coin a term or to use a term coined by Mr. Cameron Junkie he's got the t-shirts for that upgrading your skills and that's really why I created the Take One Tech Academy and that is for all the sorts of things that we're talking about here so you can check out a link to that down in the description but what that gives you access to is you may know that I've got a number of courses available well the Academy gives you access to all of those courses but then other learning resources as well so there's the beginner's guides covering all the sort of things that are kind of you can see they're kind of relevant to this so Discord, that's just because my community's in Discord the Take One Tech community but then YouTube beginner's guide Kajabi Home Studio, live streaming but these ones are all very relevant to the Zoom thing so audio with Rocaster Masterclass Ecamm Masterclass, Stream Deck and so on and more to come but then also there are monthly workshops so this actually that I'm talking about now is kind of like almost an add-on or a bit of a duplicate of parts of the workshop that was this month which I've just noticed I have not updated, there you go technical setup for virtual presentations and webinars which was June the 27th and so we have these monthly workshops which are kind of like a two hour workshop on a particular topic and then obviously this is done in Zoom as you can see with a Q&A there as well and so the next one that's coming up for that is strategies for effective task and file management essential Mac utilities to boost your efficiency the one that's coming up the following month is actually all about the business of setting up a content-based business much like I've done with Take One Tech and talking about the technicalities of how to do that excuse me so that is the workshops then we've got accelerators which are coming soon as well and then we've also got monthly Q&As and group coaching, sorry weekly Q&As I actually do two of those a week just to cover people off in different time zones so we do two of those a week and that's just a case of come and get your questions answered so that is the Take One Tech Academy and that is kind of whether it's this or whether it's something else but this idea of upgrading your skills and understanding what you can do with it I mean I'm talking to the converted because everybody who's watching this is probably trying to glean something from it so you know I appreciate I'm preaching to the converted here but yeah this idea of just upgrading your skills and understanding what is technically possible as well because I think that that is one of these things is you know you get these tools but maybe don't realize the true power of them that thing with Ecamm Live for example I know that people use the Ecamm Live virtual camera to go into Zoom and maybe use it for doing a screen share or something but didn't necessarily realize the whole thing that you can do with Keynote of bringing that in and making you know an immersive presentation in that respect so let me just come and check in the chat a minute because there is another point that I'm going to go on to which is all about this idea of an upgrade path because what I think I've covered so far is yes the very basics then what I still consider are essential so the teleprompter, the stream deck and things like that and upgrading your skills but then there are you know a large upgrade plan obviously I've got a lot more stuff in my studio right now than I had previously so I'll come onto that in a moment let me just check in with the chat I've lost where I was up to but let me just pick it up somewhere so it's going to the question what's the lighting are those that look like honeycombs? right so what that is is what you're referring to there is on the on the soft boxes so this is a none light 460 light you can find a link to these down in the description in the chat but in the description and so they've got these meshes on the front which are they call it a grid and what that is for is it makes the light here is just being directed at me and if I was to turn it oh actually I can't turn it because I've got something hanging off the top of it but this one you can see how you're not really seeing the light coming out of it so much you're just seeing the side of that grid and what the grid does is it basically just directs the light and it stops the light from this from basically illuminating everything like on the back wall for example so when you see the back wall there is not really any of this light from my light in front of me is getting onto the back wall that is just purely the lights that I have behind me which are none light pavo tube 6C so that's what's giving that kind of like glow on the wall behind I've also got two of those outside that are illuminating the those are acoustic panels so these things here are acoustic panels I've got those all round I mean this is like another extreme where you can treat the acoustics in your room we talked about microphones you can certainly treat the acoustics in your room so that you're not getting that sort of echoey room noise you don't necessarily have to go and build acoustic panels like I did but you know just think about having more soft furnishings in your room you know maybe you can get acoustic what do they call it acoustic blankets you know that you can hang up that just sort of help to deafen the sound certainly when I yeah there's a video on my channel actually when I was building out this studio 18 months ago or so and I did it before or after you know with the acoustic panels in and without them and with them in it just felt like a really echoey room the floor I should really put something down on the floor but it's just tiles so but if I had like a you know a rug or carpet or something that would help to deaden the sound as well but certainly even without that it's fine with these acoustic panels but without them there was a lot of sort of echo and reverb in the room so yeah that's anyway a slight digression but those lights are the none like pavo tube six C's you can find those in the description as well that's what's given that sort of color on the back of the wall but so to answer your question though that was what those grids are for it is to stop the light from spilling out to either side and it just keeps it to directional in the the direction that you want it to go in and by the way the size of these you might think well what's the point in having such a large light the larger the area of the diffuser of the diffuser the the the softer the light is going to seem on on your face so that's the the reason for having like a large light source whereas if you have a point light you would end up and end up getting quite sort of harsh shadows and things like that so I mean I've not talked about three point lighting apart from mentioning them but the key light is the main light that you have and having it off at 45 degree angle to you so the ring lights suddenly became really popular for some reason you know like a ring light with the camera in the middle of them but they actually give you a really harsh harsh light and so I don't necessarily recommend those lots of people seem as though they are not so much in the live streaming community but lots of people on zoom seem to use those because they just seem like this I don't I don't know why they came to such such prominence I suppose because it was easy to to mount them in a in a camera or whatever and have the the ring around the outside but they actually give a really bad quality and harsh light generally and so yeah having something off to the side is better also another thing that I see as a mistake sometimes is just having the light directly in front so you definitely want them to be positioned kind of off you know 45 degree angle for the for the the the key light the main light then you have what's called a fill light which is over on the you know the opposite side again at 45 degrees off so I've got them both here if you also want to wear as glasses then make sure that the the the lights are sort of I mean they should be positioned slightly above you anyway but one of the things that I get asked about is somebody wears glasses they're saying that they're getting this reflection of the light or they're getting the reflection of the screens it's just a case of you know managing the angles really because whatever the camera is seeing is bouncing you know off your glasses and or is bouncing off the source and then going into the camera so it's just a case of adjusting those angles to be able to to be able to avoid that that glare the best solution I've seen for this ever is Bradley Vincent who is a great guy in the e-cam community as well he does keynote tutorials and e-cam tutorials and all that kind of stuff as well great guy but he was he's got these sort of like trademark glasses and somebody asked him once in a live stream like how do you manage to avoid the glare we can't see the glare in the glasses at all and he took the glasses off and put his finger through them because he had actually had corrective surgery on his eyes but he kept wearing the glasses because it was part of his brand so I thought that is always a way to combat glare is to take the lenses out of your glasses anyway not always practical so that is the the the key light and the fill light and then the the hair light which amusingly called is the one that I've got sort of you can't see actually but just over my shoulder and that helps to give you some separation from the the background and nanolites aren't able to be controlled natively on the Mac but there is a a nanolite mobile app and so you can actually run this on a on a PC not on a PC heaven forbid you can actually do it on a on a Mac though so you can run iOS apps on a on a Mac so I've just got the mobile app running on my computer but it means I can control the the lighting and what if I just give this a moment to connect so if I show you the the hair light going off it's only slight difference there but it's just adding on a little bit of something to the the back side if I turn the fill light off if I want to have the sort of dramatic look so that's the fill light that's over this side and then if I turn the key light look off then this is me going into witness protection mode and then that is just the the fill and the key and so the point of the the fill light then is the key light is the main primary source but the fill light is usually going to be slightly lower but that is intended just to fill in the the shadows on the other side and as I say the the other one here behind is intended to just add some separation from the from the background slightly it's not not so noticeable here because I've got obviously quite a bright bright background so it's not as noticeable to you there but that is the the different lights and that was a very long-winded answer to your question of what those got those grid things are called well the honeycombs are called they're called grids you certainly can do an excellent video with an iphone for a stream yeah and especially with there's applications like camo you can find a link to that on my on my resources page that I linked to earlier camo is great for that that you can use your phone as a webcam the thing that's good about camo is you can do you can have access to all of the you know the iphone's built-in image control so you can adjust things rather than doing it in in you know post as it were so adjusting things from the thing let me get that's right rather than just sort of you know adjusting the brightness and contrast and stuff like that in the software and I understand it's actually doing it more and it's got the control of the the the phone controls at source as it were of course we've got continuity camera as well for them for the mac now which is just the apple's built-in thing to allow you to use your iphone just as a webcam camo does still have some additional sort of functionality over the top of that but you're totally right as I said and just adding some lighting iphone camera is is absolutely is absolutely fine so yeah definitely not necessarily the first one the first thing on the list is you know buying an expensive camera yes I've I've outed myself finally publicly my old iphone recently purchased an obspot 2k 4k yeah those those are really good actually I like the they've got I think that's the one that's got the automated control you know you can use hand gestures to signal it to do different things stream deck for vmix yeah but it's ideal for any of these live production things like vmix I use ecambut vmix is another one obviously OBS is another similar software that allows you to do all these kind of things so yeah using it to control these things is just a game changer and yeah that was my that was my whole thing my my whole thing about me being my own worst enemy when it came to editing with multiple takes and all of that so yeah definitely for me it was very very liberating to just give myself permission to do the thing in one take and then it turns out most people don't really mind the odd mistake here and there as long as it's not critical you know the mistake of course but in terms of just the odd omen are it's not really not really an issue so do I integrate your camera in keynote directly so I do actually yeah there's a feature in in keynote called the live video feature which enables you to bring your camera into keynote as an element in your keynote presentation so there are two ways of actually using keynote with the first way is that you do a screen share well there's several ways actually but the first way is you're just sharing your keynote presentation and you're bringing it into ecam that would be step one the basic is just you've got a keynote presentation you run it in a window you've got ecam with a camera on one side and then you've got a snapshot of your your keynote screenshot over on the other side so that's kind of like you in a little window keynote full-size traditional style presentation over on the other side so that would be one way of of doing it when I talk about immersive presentations that's where the information is coming more like over the top of the screen so like you know something sliding in from the side I really should have queued up something to demo this and there's a couple of ways you can do that so the first way that you do it is you have a keynote slide where basically the slide background is just green so we're going to use green screen and then you animate all the other stuff over the top of a green slide then you use screen sharing in Ecamm to share that presentation but you toggle on the screen sharing green screen function so it just removes all of the green and that means that anything that is not green you see and everything that is you don't so if you just animate something coming on the screen I mean it could be anything you know a little person walk it across your slide animate that and the way that that would appear in Ecamm is you wouldn't see the green you would only see the the animation so that's one way of doing it one issue with that or one thing that I wanted to solve with that is let's say that I'm doing something now and let's just for the sake of arguments say that if I press the right button let's say I want to bring this this book up and talk about it but as a imagine this is where I've got bullet points let's say so I've got bullet points all down the side this is part of my presentation you can see that now I'm kind of like in a weird position on the screen it would be much better if I was kind of like there so I was still centered on the screen now obviously you can move but that's you know one way around it but in Ecamm you can't do animation of cameras so the camera is basically either fixed in this position or I could create another scene and have it with my camera in a different position but then when you're doing these things and you want the the things to slide in and out of the screen as you can do with keynote the camera is basically fixed so there is then the live video feature in keynote which allows you to bring your camera feed directly into keynote but the benefit of that is you can do all the same kind of animations as you can do with any other element in keynote and what that means is you can create a slide transition that goes from one thing to another and your camera just like moves over just like that I should really just get this up let me just bear with me one second while I get this up let me see if I can find something really quickly to demonstrate this because it will make it a lot more easier to understand so then what I do is once I've once I've done that I can probably just bring up this e-cam advanced one this one should do it once I've shared my once I've set up a scene in e-cam that is sharing my entire keynote scene then it is bringing the camera kind of through keynote and then into e-cam let me show you what I mean if I just start this presentation so I need to just quickly select a source for my video and then this will work in a moment and then if I play this in window so we'll see this should work right so this was actually a presentation I did for e-cam and let me just check if I'm on the right thing one second okay this will make a lot more sense and it will give it a bit of context as well so if I just add this into my scene obviously if you're a professional you'd have all of this sorted out in advance but and I probably should have had it queued up I'm just looking for my keynote now let's see if that is the one right so what you're looking at now is you're looking at e-cam screen sharing a keynote presentation but the keynote presentation has the live video in it so now my camera is going into keynote and then keynote is feeding into e-cam but what that means is if I advance my slides in keynote then that thing there that you just saw of the camera transitioning across from the middle from one position into the middle was all just done with an animation in keynote and so then I can bring up these different things so this was the e-cam advanced series that I did over on e-cam live's channel I'll go back into the description and leave a link to this but this is where we talked about using multiple cameras screen sharing interview mode so this is the benefit of doing what I call immersive presentations it's still keynote but you'll notice it's not just me as a little dot in the sides of the window and then some full screen presentation the person who's presenting should be the focus still the information that you're bringing up on screen is just in support of what you're talking about but now if I press the button again then well this is where we went into this section let me just skip through this because you'll see some more of these transitions so this is where we're talking about what we're doing on day one but now I can add in that was the free download with it and then it moves out of the way but that whole animation thing of things coming in and out and I mentioned before about using it for like titles so here is you know where we're talking about features of e-cam so again you can still bring up tabular data you can still bring up charts you can still bring up graphs but you can see that I'm now positioned exactly where I need to be in there in screen as opposed to you know this kind of chopping me off or switching back and forth and all I'm doing then is I'm just using you know in actual fact I'm using my stream deck I've got a button to go to next slide next you know build of the animation and then you can use it for titles coming up and all of those kind of things so for those kind of presentations I will actually use the live video feature directly in keynote and so it's passing through that and into e-cam in that case you can then still have all of the same scenes as you've got normally so I'll have the the presentation part done in keynote but then I'll still have my other scenes with screen sharing and stuff like that but just for that content that will all be done through keynote so that was the long answer to that one the video pencil app you'll find a link in the description I haven't just got it to hand actually but if you go and look in the video description it's down there for yeah link to try out video pencil are all your comments in the chat automated in advance with keyboard nice throw or integrated keys in the stream deck with so the chat for this right now so these chat messages it's just a I'm clicking them in the e-cam chat window and that brings them up onto screen there is a button though that you can press on stream deck to hide the last comment so those are done like that I don't automate putting comments up on screen because you never know what people are going to post in the chat and yeah you can get caught out by just putting up comments on screen the same goes for some people will capture the entire chat window in live streams and have it up on the side so it's just streaming up so it's on screen so you can see the chat on screen that's a very dangerous practice as well there was who was it now there was a big major channel and if I forget who it was I want to say it wasn't restream it was somebody else anyway they were doing their stream yard I think it was they were doing their stream yard Q&A or something and they were putting up comments on the screen and didn't notice that somebody had an avatar so the message itself was fine but they got like a pornographic avatar or something for the for their image and the the whole YouTube channel got taken down they went and appealed it and got it back up but yeah there is a there is a danger in having it auto posting stuff onto the screen so no I just I click in my ecamm window to put the thing up but then there's a button in the ecamm stream deck plugin that is hide last comment and so pressing that will just take the comment down again what size is my desk good question it is 59 inches 150 centimeters by about 34 inches 86 centimeters so so there we go are you using powered hub to feed all of the stream decks in yeah so I've got two um two powered devices one of them is the wavelength hub that I mentioned earlier and that is to give me the the two monitors I have got other stuff plugging into there as well that's got other USB connections I'm also using a cal digit element hub so there's the cal digit t3 or t4 docks but then they also make what's called the element hub which is USB sorry Thunderbolt 4 and then it's got I want to say three more Thunderbolts and four USB regular USB or you know USB-C and regular USB but that's actually where my stream decks are plugged into whereas I do have another external hub that is unpowered and I'm actually using that for my stream deck pedals I did have an issue with my stream deck pedals when I had one and then I added in an extra one and they both died and I think it's because I kind of hot plugged them or unplugged them and plugged them into a powered dock I don't know if they got like a power surge or something but it was working fine for like eight months and it was literally when I just unplugged it and plugged it into another powered thing that it had an issue and I figured that the pedals they don't really require power they've not got any screen on them or anything so my pedals and actually a couple of the remote cameras like this one this camera is just a webcam over there and then I've got another webcam over on this side this is just a little webcam because I don't use it much you can tell the image quality is not good got my big shiny head there and that's down to largely the quality of the webcam but I don't really use those too much I've used them a lot today but those are also just plugged into an unpowered hub so literally just a cable with a series of you know four little USB things so that's what those are plugged into and my cameras are my pedal the small cameras but yeah the so in terms of the dock it's the wavelength dock that I linked to and then also the CalDigit element hub which is which is good that's a powered hub as well obviously so yeah so exactly this is the point great to have all this gear but you need to learn how to use it before upgrading all the time and that's the thing really I think there's two sides to this there's people who don't make a start because they haven't got all the gear and they think that they need this gear for them to make a start so that comes back to you know me repurposing a 10-11 year old camera and just having some low-cost lighting to begin with but just always thinking to be on this path of continuous improvement continuous learning as I say preach into the converted you know if you're watching this it's probably likely because you are doing that so but yeah there are a lot of people who go and buy the latest thing because they hear that somebody said I mean to be honest it's a bit like the cameras really I'm using a Sony ZV-E10 and a Sony ZV-1 is my top-down camera there and I'm using those because of a recommendation from Doc Rock who's you know this when I started out I was doing Docs weekly calls and you know he was my sort of mentor that I've been learning from and so you know I'm using these and the nanolites as well I mean that's because you know of a recommendation from him as well so we do have you know people who recommend stuff to us but at the same time you know I know people who have got you know really great Panasonic cameras in fact not this Michael another Michael in the chat Michael in Sweden you know I know you've got all your Panasonic cameras as well and so just because you know I'm using Sony it doesn't mean that oh well got to ditch you know these great cameras to switch over to something else so I think that that's another thing is people who are constantly chasing the the gear because you know somebody else has said that they use it or they need to use it really if you're going to upgrade your lighting I'm using nanolite I do like them but it could be anything it could be really be anything and it's more about like you say Michael the understanding of what you're actually doing with it rather than necessarily specific brands I mean I will say stream deck versus loop deck stream deck every time so don't be fooled that they look similar the stream decks are infinitely better but but generally with other things you know like cameras and so on yeah they've they as long as you're using you know something that's upgrading your system and you know what you're doing with it as well is is the important thing yeah the ring lights not not a good yeah so that's the other thing for every person who things like that there is many who buy the thing because it's cool to be honest I mean I do that too and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna claim that oh yeah every single purchase I make is a very you know very very considered informed decision sometimes things are just cool so there is there is room for that too I think but yeah definitely understand what your your need is so so you do live events so your zoom studio uses a lot of audio gear that I own and I'm not sure I'm reading that right but yeah there is with the the audio rooting and stuff like that that's the reason why I use the Rocaster for me it is it solves the need that I had to want to be able to do this rooting of first of all Ecamm Live rooting the thing of let me just step back a minute the reason why the Rocaster and Rocaster Duo or Rocaster Pro 2 for me are good is I mentioned before having like the actual hardware switcher here or hardware audio interface versus the Streamer X which can do the same things but in software I do like to have the hardware device in front of me and this really does what I need it to do so there are different events and things you might be doing where you might need more but for me this has just got everything that I need in it which is dedicated channels so the thing that is different about this to other audio interfaces or just taking a single mic in there is that I've got these separate USB channels so although it's only got two cables going into the computer it actually gives us three USB channels so these are effectively here one, two and three and what that allows me to do is have my Ecamm Audio on a single channel but then I can have at the moment I've got Discord here and Zoom there but this channel also becomes Zoom ISO so if I'm doing something with an event where I'm using Zoom ISO to have speakers in Zoom ISO and the participants in the regular Zoom then I can use this one to bring in the Zoom ISO to feed it into Zoom and back and you know back and forth the other way and the same if I'm recording in Ecamm then I can route the audio from those two back into there but I can also switch it off so right now like we've got the the Discord channel going but this is currently muted I can still hear it but it's muted so it's not going into the stream so I like to have this hardware device that gives me that control over where audio is being being routed but yeah there is obviously depending on use cases you can go to much different levels with this but for me when the ROCaster Duo came out I was just that's why I ran a giveaway for the ROCaster Duo just because it kind of felt like the perfect device for me and a lot of the people that I tend to speak to so yeah the witness protection mode is yeah all of the key lights off let's have a look useful information be aware of persistent use of non-words in your presentations and lives like Omanar these utterances they do totally yeah of course um he says just saying um trying to combat that you'll notice actually if you look at some of my earlier videos I did have a much slower pace to the videos when I first started and all my videos tended to be a little bit more like this because I was trying ever so hard not to Omanar and what I found was in later videos I have started speaking faster and that has led to more of the ums and urs as I've tripped over myself but I've been trying to find the balance between having something that just felt like a more natural conversation versus something that was a bit more like C3PO somebody once commented anyway so so yeah but totally it's it's about that's a constant a constant battle for me certainly is trying to keep on top of that but yeah they can be totally a distraction thanks Rich for dropping that in that thing about screen sharing that was in the e-cam advanced thing much appreciated lots of ums and urs there what I did was practice a lot with recordings and reviews of that material to modify yeah that's that it is useful to kind of watch yourself back I tend to watch myself back at double speed which just because I need if I'm going through to put in timestamps I don't do that with everything but yeah um oh and here we go I've just got some responses this was talking about the messages hmm I mean the messages from ah I see you mean the messages that I'm dropping into the chat from take one tech so you mean things like this if I was to say check out the take one tech academy and it will put that message up on screen and it will drop that into the into the chat as well so what that is is in in the stream deck there is an option to post a comment let me yeah let me just get this up and I'll show you my stream deck setup and get this one up here move it to a different page right we will share the screen here we go we're in stream deck so let me just get rid of that button that's the finish button I don't want to end the stream if you look in the e-cam actions I always say this but I've got to just shout them out again e-cam I've got the biggest plug-in for stream deck it's just awesome you know anything you can think about that you might want to do with stream with the e-cam you can pretty much do with stream deck but if you come down to here you've got to here add last comment to screen so that's the one that you can just add the most recent comment up on the screen I don't use that because I'm always late catching up with the comments anyway you've also got this one hide last comment so that's the one that I mentioned earlier to remove the comment but what you were actually asking it turns out was how am I posting comments into the chat well there is this one here post comment and what you can do with that is you can type in a message so I can say hi this is a test so I've now got that assigned to a stream deck button and now when I press that button it is going to post that into the chat but what that means is you can go through and set up these things in advance with you know things that you want to post in the chat like the links and so on you can make those all in advance as in individual ones here so I could just copy that and I could do a whole series of different messages that I might want to post in the chat later and then I could just be pressing the stream deck buttons excuse me as I go through the stream but what you can also do though is because you notice that I had an animation come up there so what you can also do is you can do a multi-action so if I do create multi-action and then what you do is you post the comments just as we've done so then you could put link to call to action or whatever or call to action link that should be so that's the comment that you're going to post but then what I can do is also show and hide overlay for example and then I could pick out one of these things that I've got in here whoops where is it that's not the right one that's a folder where is it let me see animations so let me just let me just put up this one so I'll just press this button now it's not going to make sense but what you'll see is if I press this button it's triggered the animation but it's also posted at the same time into the chat so that's how I'm doing that thing where it's doing those things it's a series of multi-actions basically that consist of posting the comment and also you know triggering that animation what you can also do is if you're going through and you've got your a flow to your live stream and you know that you're going to be making certain things at certain points you might also want to consider using time stamps and so if you come down to the bottom where is it add marker here you can add in a time stamp and you can give it a name as well so let's just say this was academy call to action then what happens is when you finish the live stream as well as getting the the recording out you will also get a text file that will have a series of time stamps and if you've given it a text here a market text it will have that in it so if you were planning out a live stream to be honest I should do this but I don't do it because I never have these live streams so meticulously planned just have a list of things that I want to cover but I could actually plan the live stream out with specific things that I'm going to hit at specific points and so as I'm pressing the buttons not only is it triggering the calls to action or triggering you know a stinger to come across the screen or triggering whatever it is but it could also be generating that time stamp file and so then you end up with a file that you can just copy and paste that drop it into YouTube and then you've got a fully time stamped thing at the end of it so yeah sorry for misunderstanding there but that is what that is how I'm doing that it is in fact the what do they call it I've just forgotten the commenting feature in YouTube so there we go let me see where we're up to you're totally right yes anything that distracts your audience from your message should be avoided but I will say not to I mean my whole thing is recovering perfectionist the other thing is that is it better to you know get something out and and be helping people with it rather than feeling like being held back because of you know of not being perfect at it so it is still definitely a work a work in progress that that that you know I'm constantly trying to work on but yeah I do totally get it certainly ums and urs can pull people out of the presentation but there's also another thing which is when you're doing the live streams there's a whole load that's going on it's kind of like my my public speaking experience standing on a stage doing thing is one thing but there's actually this whole other thing that goes on when you're live streaming where you've effectively you know you're not just the you're not just the presenter you're also the you know the audio technician you're also the lighting guy you're also you know all of these things and you know controlling everything as well there's a lot going on so it is a lot easier to be distracted so I'm fine with with where I'm with it and I'm obviously you know trying to improve all of the time but just for other people to this is something that I think does hold people back this feeling that they're you know they're not necessarily perfect and need to need to get to that level of perfection before they start doing stuff so definitely don't ever let it hold you hold you back from doing stuff let's see where we're up to though yes yeah the the F words and things like that we had this conversation with somebody because you know I keep my channel completely clean as it were in terms of when I'm talking and I have to say that you know I'm not necessarily always like that in life there are what's the words that come out of my mouth in real life that don't come out on the streams but I was having this conversation with someone about is that being authentic if you're speaking in a way that you wouldn't normally and I just think well that's just down to sort of professionalism I know this isn't the point that you're making here but there it for me it just comes down to that and why yet why risk sort of offending people that was a complete side issue there but what about regular touristy video cameras as yeah well I'm not sure but the people don't tend to use like this is camcorders I guess you're talking about here but yeah they are not traditionally used which is it kind of seems like it would be the obvious choice isn't it so why wouldn't you why wouldn't you use that certainly if you've got one it can't hurt to to try it if it's another alternative I'm also on 30 frames per second I'm not sure where that what that is related to specifically so this is coming back to that multi-action things so could you also use a multi-action button and program all your things in advance all your comments in advance with a delay in between each of them let's say every 10 or you certainly could do that yeah you could have it so that you the comments come in like that one thing to bear in mind with that is that you would want to have I tend to you know have things with context you know so when I'm putting up these things it's generally when I'm actually talking about the thing that's you know I'm talking about let's say for example I wanted to mention that you know I have this event coming up called the digital stage revolution and you can sign up by going over to my website at digitalstagerevolution.com this is actually my first in-person event that I'm doing since COVID and certainly the first for take one tech as well but yeah this is the first sort of public speaking event I'm doing since COVID and it is it's my event it's a four-day event in Dallas in Texas and it's basically a four-day workshop that's going to be kind of covering all the same kind of things that I cover on my channel also in the academy so the academy's all about building this on-screen presence and how you know with the new digital landscape so many people are still just not taking advantage of the sort of tools that I'm talking about here today but this will be the workshop that sort of teaches you all the ins and outs of how to do it with some practical hands-on experience as well so that is the the first event that I'm doing is in October but I will be looking at doing these in other locations as well so if you want to be kept abreast of this and also the other upcoming events then definitely head over to digitalstagerevolution.com so there just to give that as an example that was done very timely with what I was talking about had that just been delivered you know part way through as I was talking about something else and then that link come in it wouldn't have had the context so I don't tend to do things with you know automated like that there are other services you can use as well there is a chat bot called I forget what it's called now actually forget what it is called I've got it in my discord server as well but it is a a bot that basically will do this for you it'll automate the posting and what that does is that actually looks at the traffic in your chat as well so what you don't want is like a chat and then let's say you've not got anyone in the chat talking and then it's just like a series of your links just getting posted one after the other so with that particular service it will actually monitor the traffic and it'll say post these every 15 minutes or every 10 or 20 chat messages whichever comes you know sooner or or later or whatever I'm just forgetting the name of the the actual bot now nightbot it's called n-i-g-h-t-b-o-t so if you search for nightbot that is one that you can use that will do that auto posting of your things but in a kind of it's still not going to be timely with what you're talking about but it's going to avoid you know just repetitive posting of stuff if there's nobody else in the chat and then they feel like oh you're just basically posting a load of stuff so that is that yeah the stream deck XL I think that this is a common thing with people when they're looking at the stream deck and then they buy the the stream deck the regular stream deck which is 15 keys because it's very easy to think what am I going to use it for even if you're using it for a zoom meeting or webinar or whatever you might think well what am I going to control I want to maybe start and stop a recording in e-cam I've maybe got three or four scenes in e-cam you know me face on a screen share a presentation maybe another another camera view or something so now we're up to five buttons then I want to advance my slides and keynote forwards and backwards that's another two I want to be able to mute and unmute and toggle my camera on and off in zoom maybe exit the meeting so I'm now to 10 buttons I've got five spare you know what do I need something bigger for and certainly when I started with you know e-cam and stream deck that was kind of the way that I was thinking I did try the stream deck mobile app and by the way there's been an update to stream deck just recently and now the stream deck mobile app whereas before it was a free trial and then it was three dollars a month or something I think it's still three dollars a month but actually now you can get six buttons for free forever so but the stream deck mobile app is a great way to actually try it out with without you know actually going and buying a device you can just get the free trial just to understand you know what stream deck can do but now they've also one of the other things that's changed with it and there'll be a video coming out next week about this from on my channel is that you can also whereas before the stream deck mobile app was limited to 15 keys now the stream deck mobile app can have up to 64 keys in a single like instance of it but you can also run two instances side by side so in the same way that in Safari on the iPad you can you know open up one Safari window and open up another one next to it so you're viewing two websites at once we can actually do the same thing with the stream deck so technically you could have you know 128 buttons on your iPad but the other way to use it though as well is to have one side of your screen is one stream deck profile that you are then using to switch profiles on the other side of the screen so the suddenly the the mobile app for stream deck just for me has become a massively powerful thing certainly for if you're you know on the road or whatever but maybe in addition to an existing stream deck so if you've got like an old phone or an old an old iPad that you're not using during your meetings that can be another way to add in more buttons if you've got the the 15 key and wish you had a few more buttons on there and as I say you can get six six free with you know perpetually with this the mobile app and then if you pay for the subscription three dollars a month or whatever and then you get all of those others so that might be an intermediary solution before buying anything anything else hey Kath great to see you here thanks for stopping by yes the the whole thing of wearing many hats and pulling all these different strings at once can become a bit of a thing to manage however I will say that that again brings back to the the stream deck if you think about controlling ecamm live controlling zoom controlling keynote maybe controlling some other applications that you're using in your presentations then then the stream deck brings it all together it really has this kind of like unifying quality to it where instead of feeling like you're using lots of different things you know be it's you know an on-screen mouse pointer you know to highlight something on the screen a bit like a bit like this you know this kind of this pro mouse thing that allows me to zoom into different areas that's just a button on the stream deck so you can be using a whole host of different applications but usually using the stream deck as the thing that binds them that binds them all together so so yeah hey great to see you here thanks for stopping by indeed there are no perfect people and you give them give the community far more value as is keep oh thank you very much I thought that was going to be a general comment but thank you very much I much appreciate the compliment there and and that is really you know guess what that's why the title of my book is is all about imperfect presence so it's because of this thing that people do strive for perfection and sometimes it does hold people back from doing it but it's much better to show up and you know get your message out there and you know in meetings and things like that people are a lot more forgiving of the odd om and ur than they then they might be of let's say you know poor quality video trying to trying to find the thing that you're trying to share the screen with if you've got the the odd filler word in there but you're able to switch seamlessly from one thing to another using stream deck then then that's that's far more far more beneficial so yeah definitely check out that I will have some there will be a so pre-order discount on the book by the way so if you want to check out that at imperfectpresence.com and sign up you'll get notified when when that comes out and then there will be a pre-order I'm going to run some competitions and giveaways as well for that before it is formally released too so yeah that's the the perfection thing is a big thing for me so let's have a look I use the multiple instances to control multi-max oh that's the other thing yeah thanks for reminding me about that Bicky the other thing about the the stream deck mobile app is you can pair it with multiple computers so you can have then have two computers on the same iPad you can be controlling two computers with the same iPad thanks for reminding me about that that's a great point so we've talked about then as we've come sort of full circle around all of the you know I think so are the basics and then you know kind of essentials like teleprompter and so on got a bit distracted with the the chat there but also then what is the upgrade path and where is the where is the limit to it as I say once you've started adding in things like the stream decks and so on you'll find that another thing that you might you know require is the docks we've talked about the docks earlier as well you know actually adding in all of these peripherals but once you've got those sort of basics there isn't necessarily anything more that you need to add but I do just want to talk about the things that I did add in and why I added them in so we've already talked about the lighting the reason why I upgraded to these from my existing lighting as I said it was difficult to control my other lighting that was just basically a case of screwing in and out the bulbs the other thing that you'll find with video lights that are not not actually proper calibrated video lights is you sometimes can get you know flicker on the screen coming in on your camera your camera will see this sort of flickering light so that can sometimes be an issue I have technically got some on those that the the light that's just going round is behind my my acoustic panels there that's just some strip LED lighting that's sort of giving that little glow out from the back of it those technically are not high quality video lights and technically if I was to focus in on that you would see that there is a slight flicker going on there so I'm not too bothered about it there because it's just some decoration it doesn't really show up too much but certainly with the the other lights when I changed my camera I wanted to upgrade my camera to get higher quality video although as I say it wasn't the most essential thing on my list hence it took me about 18 months to actually upgrade the camera but one of the reasons that I upgraded the lights was I did that at the same time because then I was noticing that with the increased quality in the camera then I was noticing a difference in quality with the lighting as well so that's why I ultimately upgraded the lighting this then also gives me much more finer control over it so you can see earlier whoops oh thank you very much Glenda oh that's a renewal of Glenda's channel membership channel memberships are available click down below and thanks again Glenda great to great to have you on board but with the lights yeah you just get a lot finer control so if I was to you know dim this light down I can really have a lot greater control over exactly where that is thanks again but yeah as well for being a loyal channel member too great to have you here too so the the nanolink though allows me to basically control like the intensity of the light and I've got much more control over that and I can just do it as I say from my my computer so that was something I added in when I just wanted to be able to adjust things and have that little bit control over it so the lighting is something that yes you can definitely start with anything even just regular household lights by the way the one thing I did as well when I before I'd got any lights I was actually just using some led ceiling lights so you can get these panels if you know like a suspended ceiling you know the sort of two foot square things then there are panels that you can get lighting panels to drop into those and at one point I did try using just those that I had in a kind of like a more mobile setup and the thing to do with that is when if you're like in the the hardware store because you might not know whether it's going to have this like flickering effect in the hardware store where they have these demo boards with all the different lights on is if you just take out your camera on your phone and hold it up you'll you'll see that there are some that are flickering and some that aren't and so you're going to know that whether it's the flicker is going to come through in your in your camera so if you're looking for a real budget option just going and using some regular led panels but just do that little test before you buy them in the store can also work eventually as I say I came around to these this lighting setup I did eventually upgrade my cameras as I say you know this 12 year one I had some issues with it and it was just always going to be part of my process wanting to upgrade the video quality and so I bought the Sony ZV-E10 and then the ZV-1 is my top down before I don't really do a lot of I don't do a lot of sort of product demos as such where I'm using the top down camera but when I do it's nice that they're in focus because before when I first started the channel I was just using a Logitech C920 is it? Or the popular Logitech that everyone uses used before before the 4k Logitech that came out but anyway so having the top down camera that is just a better quality means that when I'm showing stuff off on the desk like this ancient Mac keyboard then it's just a better quality for that but as I say the reason for the choice of that was I guess the circles that I was mixing in but if you've got a good quality camera I think that it's fine whichever whichever one you're at whichever one you're using and Michael so do you can control the warmth of the light actually the nan lights that I'm using are the 4Z60 and there is also a 4Z60B the 4Z60B has the the color temperature color as well these ones are actually fixed because I'm not actually bothered about changing up the color temperature I just want it to be the the daylight but I'm just changing the intensity intensity so the 4Z60B though has that full range of you know color change the one that I'm using over here for my hair light is actually a color one as well so there's a 4Z60C which has got the color thing so with that one although this one is actually what they call the mix panel but with this one I can change to be the color mode so now I could put on a you know a different hue as you can see here this is where I'm basically changing the color of that that panel behind me but you can anything that is possible to change in the in the device itself I can change in the I can change in the in the in the app so you do have sort of full control over the lights there but as I say I'm specifically I just use the regular one because I want this this sort of natural color to the the key light and the fill light so that's why I went with with that one in particular do you know why road streamer x secondary usb input is not working only output working right now I cannot use skype or zoom right so this could be actually the dock that it's being plugged into I had some issues with the road streamer x when I first got it where it was actually conflicting with the roadcaster pro 2 that I had so it was I would have them both plugged in but when I'd got the streamer x plugged in and when I plugged that one in or when I switched on and that one was plugged in and I would kind of lose two of the channels on the roadcaster pro 2 and I thought I wonder if it's something internal with the way that they've rooted the audio or something like that that it's it's not working it turned out it was down to my dock so when I plugged the streamer x into a different a different port or a different actually a different route into the computer all together then it kind of solved the problem keely as well hashtag keely is right but she bought the the streamer x and she had some issues setting up originally where I think it was the camera wasn't showing up or something like that but again it was the dock that was the issue in that case so it might well be that it's just a a dock issue or you know depending on where you've got it plugged into um other than that I'm not I'm not too sure but certainly that for me has been an issue that I've heard with a number of people is it can be down to the you know the traffic because bear in mind as well with the streamer x as well as rooting now audio we're also potentially rooting video as well so that's going over the same usb and I I think it sometimes just depends on the you know particular usb bus that all of this stuff is going in the funny thing for me though with my issue was that the streamer x was plugged into a different dock than the Rocaster Pro 2 and so I thought well you know they're not on the same one but they're all essentially going through the same internal bus on the the Mac mini so that's uh that's why that was um so yeah that's what I would suggest is is just try plugging in somewhere else and see if if that works but I've I have not had any issue myself with it working after resolving that issue so they do both show up for me and thanks for stopping by by the way and yeah it's the C920 was the old old Vodgetech that I had so in terms of the the lighting we've talked about the the lighting upgrade and the audio interfaces I already talked about what I'm using my my Rocaster 4 and it is this this audio routing and it's not by any means essential for zoom or anything like that however it can really be beneficial to have that control over it so this is certainly something that for me is you know one of those nice to have additions to give you that finer control over your your audio routing to be able to do some slightly more complex stuff maybe if you are bringing in people using zoom iso or maybe using ecams interview mode and you want to have people coming into ecam live production and then feed that into zoom and you also want the people in interview mode to be able to hear the people from zoom you can do this always software with applications like loopback you can take the audio from ecam directly into zoom in any case but the return feed you'd need something like loopback but for me having it in a hardware device is something that is certainly a sort of nice nice to have there the other thing then is about stream decks and I mentioned that you know if you if you can and the budget is allowing it then definitely definitely consider adding in a stream deck and I would recommend going for the stream deck excel as the you know the sort of first option just for the sheer number of buttons and if you don't think you're going to fill them trust me you will but then when it comes to adding in additional stream decks I already showed you the sort of setup that I've got here with two stream decks the stream deck excel in the middle here is then controlling those but really the critical ones for me are these two because that gives me full control over you know ecam and some other controls over here that you know I've sort of spilled out and as I say it's for when I'm in a live environment where I'm going to need at least all of these buttons I want to have them to hand without having to switch between pages actually in a zoom meeting if I come into this setting then here I've got all of my zoom controls on here so these are specifically for controlling zoom and these are specifically for controlling ecam and the whole sort of presentation side of things so that means that I've got total control of my zoom meeting on these these two devices the stream deck though the stream deck excel in the middle has become useful for as you just saw you know if I press this button it'll update both of those stream decks if I press this one again it will change what is being shown on these stream decks this becomes kind of like my home profile home button home device that updates the other two and then the dials are useful if you've got a roadcaster you know the dials might seem like you know overkill or unnecessary rather but they are useful for controlling levels in ecam specifically such as you know interview guests and so on I can control those or with these individual dials and then from a productivity point of view you know using them for controlling things like brush size in photoshop and all of that kind of stuff and things where you want incremental adjustments in apps they're useful for that I also do use the stream deck pedals as well and they are really handy and you might think you know is that really necessary again none of this is technically necessary but they can be quite useful for you know easily switching between scenes maybe you're in a meeting you're taking written notes as well potentially or jotting stuff down or you're using your your apple pencil or you're using something else or you're just you know got too many other things on your your regular stream deck having things on pedals so being able to switch between different scenes with those is really useful and I use those in my live stream as well so not everything's done with the push of a button you know if I want to switch to you know the other scene up at the top I can just press this pedal down here if you want to switch back I press this other pedal so I can switch stuff you know with the the pedals as well and actually you do get really really sort of used to controlling things with your feet so again not an essential thing but definitely something to to consider if you want more control I don't use a teleprompter as you can tell with all of these scripted ums and urs but I do I do sometimes use a an actual teleprompter with text on it for example on my live streamer backstage podcast the guest intros I always have a script for that actually because I want to make sure that I yeah I get their their critical information and their intro right and so then I control the the scroll of that with the foot pedals as well so it's useful for for that purpose and then yeah really it comes down to just all of these other little things that are nice to have but I would say that first of all you know where I am now with my studio I've pretty much got everything that I need for my my regular zoom calls the only thing that I'll be upgrading imminently is actually the mac itself so uh so yeah just making some considerations there and have to put aside the actual time to do it because that will be a week in itself to just like set all of this up but that is really the only thing that I feel I need to upgrade in my studio setup at the moment just because now I you know I run into process issues from time to time and so on um and that is largely as well when I first started you know the the mac mini and one is the one that I'm using at the moment and it blew out of the water you know any previous mac that I'd owned and I thought this is you know this is amazing I always used to buy the top end max every time uh whereas this was basically like the bottom end mac and it was still you know way faster than anything that I'd had before and anything that I felt that I needed but as you start doing more things um yeah I'm probably going to read just that going forward um but now you know with doing all these other things of you know sharing multiple max multiple screens multiple cameras then yes actually more processor is is useful so the next upgrade will be to to combat all of that but in terms of the other setup though I'm pretty much there so I just wanted to say that just so that you know that the gas does have a limit there's always new things coming along but there is what is a perfect setup that you can have that will really help to elevate your online meetings and allow you to have those sort of seamless presentations that really the ultimate thing it's all about um yeah it's all about having that sort of flow in your meetings um so just a last few okay don't you Jeff Jeff just a little voice in my ear from the discord great to see you Jeff so yes just coming back to these last few questions have a similar problem with your stream deck not being recognized says no device found if that is your stream deck pedal I don't know if that is your stream deck pedal if it is your stream deck pedal then definitely get in touch with Elgato because yeah I I had it with my two stream deck pedals where the little light on the back didn't come on and as I say it was after I seemingly had like popped plugged them which I didn't think it was a thing but I wonder if that might be it that uh yeah it it didn't recognize them and there's no way to reboot them or anything like that so if it is the stream deck pedal specifically that you're having that issue with then definitely contact Elgato well even if it isn't actually contact Elgato their support there is really good and they had them replace for me very rapidly so that was all all great hey there Mr Riley great to see you thanks for watching thanks for stopping by have you been causing trouble again Rich deleting messages it's still there in the it's still there in my thing so we've still got it you might have deleted it from the actual chat but yeah it's still captured in there in the e-cam waiting for the next MacBook Pro so I was looking at the the studio and the Mac Pros and I've I might have had a change of heart about the direction of going in that but yeah so yeah I've got that as well fat finger syndrome there was a great episode of The Simpsons which was where Homer calls some weight loss clinic and it said something like you know if you want our free guide to weight loss mash the keypad now yeah all right so it's not the not the pedal that you've got the issue with it's the 15 key right definitely get in touch with them Algato then about that in any case like I say they have got really good customer support and if it's saying it's not recognized when it's plugged in do all of the things you know reboot try it plugged into a different socket and so on there is a thing in the stream deck app where you can like select to forget a device as well so that would be one thing to do and then try plugging it in just a little public surface announcement then I guess is making sure to back up profiles as well so if you come into your stream deck so in stream deck here if you go into devices this is where you've got your different devices list listed down here there is one of these which is no where is it now there's one place where you can forget device somewhere I think I definitely did that before I'm just can't find where it is now style not that one there is somewhere where you can forget the device I thought it was in there or am I going completely mad yeah maybe I'm going completely mad there I'm sure I did that somewhere how do you do that I'm not sure not sure somewhere there is a forget device button hmm okay maybe there isn't I'm sure there used to be I'm sure I did that with my pedals when they weren't working but yeah apart from that useless bit of information I can't find yeah if you if you go through and try to just restart I'm guessing you've probably done all these things anyway but yeah do the restart unplug it plug it in try it in a different socket as well so that yeah it might be just some conflict with something else that's in your dock oh yeah and the the backups by the way thanks for the message Mike I just sort of missed that but the backups if you come into your stream deck you go into profiles and then right down at the bottom there's this little arrow you can do backup all so that's the first thing is just say create backup and it will back up absolutely everything and then you can obviously you can see here restore from backup so it's worth doing that if you if you're doing work on your stream deck like building it out then you know set a recurring task in your task manager to go and just back them up so I do it like basically monthly but then you can also restore that but you can also just export a single profile as well so if you're doing something where you want to share from one thing to another you can export it there by the way if you've got multiple stream decks and you've got like the profile set up on one but you want to use it on one of the other ones you can also right click and go copy to and it brings up a list of all your other stream decks so you can send it to you know use it on that particular stream deck as well so yeah that is definitely recommended but yeah the the backing up it's it's always one of those things isn't it that we we tend to learn the hard way on these on these things let me just get this link though because there is where is it somebody's asking about video pencil I've got a link to that somewhere description so let me just pull it up here but yeah if I if I'm going to leave you with one message it is definitely don't let the gear sort of hold you back but it is also you know to have an upgrade plan to think about how you can improve and which I mean this could be live streaming or or zoom to be honest or teams or whatever but yeah having an upgrade plan in path in in having learning how to speak is also a good thing spend some time on that having an upgrade plan or an upgrade path planned out is is definitely always a good thing too to to sort of be constantly improving and constantly learning about these things too I can't just find the link to video pencil now it's definitely in the description though so if you go and look in the the actual video description it will be just down beneath the main description and then I've got something in there about the the academy and all of that kind of stuff and then I think it's just under there just above an e-cam thing I will just go and grab it though it is nearly there now it is oh actually guess what guess what I've got a stream deck button for that there it is what an idiot also if you're going to set up stream deck buttons always remember what buttons you've set up all that time people asking for the link and I've actually got a button for it over on another page there you go that's the problem with having things spread out over pages though I guess good luck with the stream x I'm sure you'll you'll love it and I'm not sure if the beta of the unify software is out yet I've got a pre-release beta and I'm not sure if the actual formal beta has been released yet but that is great for like some of this advanced routing that we are talking about thanks everyone for stopping by if you've got any questions about any of this by the way best place is to go and check out the discord community and it's free to join and don't be put off by the fact that it's discord or it's called a server it's just basically a family and it's a place to go and chat and ask any questions and it's the best place to chat just because everyone gets to benefit from the responses to the questions there and also you're not just getting my response potentially but other far more learned people than me here in there too so yeah but also if you do want any other information feel free to reach out to me as well and don't forget to check out the academy if you want to really level up your on-screen presence and impact too thanks so much for stopping by I will try to remember as soon as it's finished processing to go and leave a link to some other relevant content over here on the right hand side look forward to seeing you in another video a few more videos coming up this week about the stream deck developments and so on take care see you next time