 If you want to know how to get better performance out of Ecamm Live running on an older Mac or even a modern Mac really, then these top 10 tips are for you. Hello, and welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec. And in this video, we're gonna be looking at my top 10 tips for getting better results out of Ecamm Live running on an older Mac. But as I say, these are sometimes, I guess, good best practices, whatever Mac you're on really. Now it's no secret, because I've mentioned it before in some of my other videos, that I am actually working on a technically obsolete 2013 MacBook Pro. So eight years old and it's still going strong really. I'm sure it could be a lot quicker. I know everyone's all about the M1 Macs at the moment, but I'm kind of still holding out for the 16 inch laptop to come out with the M series chip in it. But until then, I'm soldering on with my original MacBook. And this has been actually really surprising to me exactly how smooth Ecamm Live runs on it, even though it is, as I say, technically obsolete. Yeah, originally went down the OBS route when I started having to make videos for a work related projects. And yeah, basically my computer couldn't handle OBS and it ground to a halt on many an occasion. And I just wasn't able to produce the sort of videos that I wanted to be able to produce. Whereas Ecamm Live has solved that process or that problem rather. And you can tell that there's obviously a lot of very careful consideration gone into the programming of Ecamm Live. And the developers have done a great job at making it run efficiently so that it will indeed still support laptops or computers as old as mine and even older still. But there are a few things that you can do to help it along and give it a bit more of a fighting chance at running smoothly. And so that is the purpose of this video today. I'm going to talk about my top 10 tips, but like I say, these aren't necessarily just for older Macs. They are equally as important for even if you're running on a newer Mac as well. So consider them my top 10 best practices for running Ecamm Live. So number one, the first one that I would like to talk about is, look at that, I've even rolled out the fancy graphics. The first one is to close any apps that you aren't going to be using during your production. I know it sounds obvious, but consider this sort of like a checklist to go through as well. And the best way to have checklists is to have them cover absolutely everything. Incidentally, I did also do a video about my sort of pre-production checklist and pre-going live checklist. So I'll link to that video in the description as well. And that includes some of these things in here as well actually, but here I've expanded it to another few things that you can do to help as well. So yes, close any apps that you're not going to be using in your production. Go down to the doc and make sure you haven't got any processor hocking applications still running away there that you aren't going to be needing. Essentially, we just want to free up as much of the processor and memory capacity as we can to, as I say, give Ecamm Live a bit of a better chance. Next, on a similar subject is make sure you have also closed down any menu bar applications or background processes you have. Sometimes you may have looked in the doc and cleared everything out and have only even Ecamm Live running, but there can still be other processes that are running up in your doc, sorry, in your menu bar. Now, I also did another video. There's going to be a lot of links to videos in here, I can tell, but this was all about the five menu bar apps that I recommend for people who are producing videos or live streaming. And there's a couple in there that I would recommend. So one of those is called, I nearly forgot it then, Trip Mode, and this allows you to actually limit what applications have access to the internet or bandwidth to network, because that's the other thing. You don't want something just firing up halfway through your presentation, deciding I'm talking about things like iCloud sync, Dropbox, Bond Drive, those sorts of things. If they kick in halfway through your presentation and decide that they're going to start syncing your files and folders and things like that, then that can affect performance. So an application like Trip Mode is a great application to help with that, and I'll leave a link to the video I did all about Trip Mode and those other four menu bar apps in the description as well. Next, another thing that I do is I actually adjust the resolution of my screen. So currently I've got my 15 inch MacBook Pro, which is normally on as bigger resolution as you can get it or smaller resolution, whichever it is, so that everything looks small on the screen with lots more pixels, and then this is running into a 43 inch Philips 4K monitor. So I actually changed the resolution of my 4K monitor to 1920 by 1080 instead. I do that for a couple of reasons. My feeling is it's not actually driving as big a screen, but also the reason is when I do my screen sharing, then it's not going to look so small on the screen, which I'll show you in a moment when I actually go into demo mode. But I think that that also helps with the overall speed and the processor usage as well. So having shut down all of our apps and things that we don't need, the next thing to do is I'm gonna talk about opening things because if you are going to be demoing a piece of software or there is a piece of software that you're going to need during your production, it's also good to get into the habit of actually getting that open before you start. And the reason is often when you start a piece of software, there will be a sort of spike in processor usage as it loads everything up that it needs to do. And so yes, just making sure that you have already got the applications that you're gonna use in your presentation or your production, make sure those are all open in advance of starting. Number five, still on opening things up, again, if you are going to be showing people websites or things like that, it's gonna be doing any demos where you are referring to websites, it's always best to actually get those queued up in advance and that again cuts down on those network calls and also on any processor usage by Safari or Google Chrome or whatever you're doing, actually using a processor in order to load those pages. So get those open in advance if possible. Number six is if you are actually going to websites to download things, I'm talking about me in a lot of these because I do do demos where I go to a website, for example, download a bit of graphics or something like that to incorporate in an overlay demonstration. So sometimes what I will do there, when I remember, and this is a best practice that I sometimes forget to do, but it is to actually sort of pre-download anything that I'm gonna be demonstrating so that I can show the process of how to actually go through and to get to the download for example, but then have already actually pre-downloaded it and then you're not waiting for any downloads and also again, you're not having the processor kick in to do that. So just downloading any content from the internet that you're going to be showing and then this also goes the same for any files or things like that, get the actual files opened up in advance if possible too. So the next one is actually we're gonna come on to things that are within e-cam live itself and so for this I am going to go into demo mode and you'll see how even though I'm on my 4K monitor, I have actually changed it to 1920 by 1080. It looks a little bit big to me, but it should make it a lot easier for you to see on the screen. So in the preferences of e-cam live, if we just come to here, in the preferences here, what we can see is I've just inadvertently, I press the wrong button and I just ended the recording. So I'm gonna have to actually edit this together but actually fortunately all I'm gonna do is just join the two files and hopefully avoid any editing software. So press the wrong button on my stream deck, nevermind. So what we need to do is if we come into the video section of the preferences and then somewhere in here we should see, actually it is in the general tab, right at the bottom we have this option that you can check, which says, use discrete graphics card for main screen. So this boost performance as it says here by driving the main screen through your graphics card and this increases performance but it draws more power and could cause your fans to turn on and this takes effect at your next launch of e-cam live. So do make sure that is checked. My fans are always on, my mic is so old that they kick in anyway. So I'm not too worried about that and also I use Audio Hijack Pro to Audio Hijack rather. I keep calling it Audio Hijack Pro, it's not been called that for years but I use that to actually cancel out the noise from my short MV7 microphone and I'll leave a link to the video I did all about how to do that as well. But so yes, that is just to make sure that that one is in fact checked in the preferences. So coming out of demo mode for a moment and the next one is to just think about the amount of graphics that you're actually using in your overlays. So I do tend to use a fair amount of graphics but not too much. So things like that, the little numbers and things like that I have for this top 10, doesn't seem to tax it too much really but it is just something to be aware of. If you were for example having an overlay with video running continuously in the background, something like that, then that is just something that's obviously going to take some level of processing power to run that and then also to capture that too in terms of the recording. So I think about how you may want to minimize too much graphics going on in your presentations but like I say, I've not really had any issues with the level of graphics that I have in mind albeit not very much. So the next thing is to, I would say, if I queue up my last number, number nine or second to last, it is to actually run through all of your scenes once you've opened up e-cam live and what I mean by that is if you've got scenes like this sort of countdown scenes that I've got here with these animations in, what I have found is that sometimes if you've just opened up e-cam live as a sort of freshly opened program, then sometimes the first time that you activate scenes that have graphics in them, it will take a few frames for it to actually catch up with itself and it's almost like it is buffering the video. I don't know, technically this is true or not but anecdotally what I have found is it will just occasionally skip a few frames and there'll be a bit of stuttering in the delivery of the animation. However, if I have just cycled through all of my different animated frames before actually starting the production, then when I click the button, then it seems to just come in pretty seamlessly. He says, waiting for the next scene. There we go. And that one did seem to stutter a little bit but there you go. So the final one, number 10 is obviously we're trying to reduce the processor usage that we've got. So if you are doing anything where you are running a presentation or something like that, I did a video yesterday in fact that was probably the last video I released or last but one, I can't remember but it was all about different ways that you can bring your slides from keynote and things like that into your e-cam live presentations. And so I do this when I'm creating course material or also when I'm just on Zoom calls or things like that for work. And so one thing you can bear in mind is if you can have your slides coming in from an external device, again, it's just gonna reduce the workload on your computer. And personally, I find that workflow of keeping things separately actually works a lot better for me as well. Anyway, I don't end up thinking I'm advancing a slide in keynote whereas actually I'm advancing a scene in e-cam live or something like that. So that was the number 10 is to try and run as much from an external device as possible. And bear in mind, this could be you could be running a secondary computer if you've got an even older Mac lying around or it could be from an iPad or even if you're running keynote slides you can actually even run them from your iPhone as well. So just look for ways to basically offload processes from your main e-cam machine. Well, I hope you have found those top 10 tips useful and if you have, don't forget to go down and like and subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so that you get notified whenever I make any more videos. But don't go anywhere just yet because I've got more great videos coming up next and I'll leave a link to my e-cam live playlist just there on the bottom as well. Have a great day.