 If you have any issues or frustrations with screen sharing in Ecamm Live, then this video is for you because I'm gonna be sharing some best practices that will help you to get the results you're expecting consistently out of Ecamm Live. So if you are having any difficulties or some things are not working as you're expecting, then you are certainly not alone. It's something that comes up quite a lot in the consultation calls that I have with people, helping them to get their Ecamm Live setups working. And there are a couple of main issues really. The first one is to do with the sort of sizing and positioning of the thing you're sharing within the scene itself. And that's because we're kind of working with two different moving targets. We've got the size and shape of the actual window itself. And then we've got the size and shape of the overlay within Ecamm Live. And sometimes that can be a bit of a balancing act to try to get those matched up. And then you just get one right, you make a change to the other, and then suddenly it's all looking terrible again. So don't worry, there is a simple way around this and a simple way to think about it that should help you get all of these things set up. And then once you have got them set up, how do you make sure that it looks the same next time you open Ecamm Live and everything all in the right place? I've got a little tip for you with regard to that as well. Finally, the last thing that comes up many, many times in certainly in the Ecamm Live group, I see this time and time again, is if you are using something like ProMouse or MousePose or one of these apps that allows you to create a little halo around your mouse pointer, zoom in on different areas of the screen or highlight areas of the screen. Why do those not show through in screen sharing mode? Well, I've got the answer for that and I've got the way to actually get it to show at all times as well. So that's what we're gonna be covering in this video. In order to do this, I'm gonna just do a little demo. This is not a complete Ecamm Live demo by any stretch, but what I have done is I've created a new scene for us. So this is the scene that we've got. Here we go, just go out of demo mode. We've got a blank space there. That is where our screen share is gonna go. I've then got on my screen, I've got this window here that this is my Safari window. That is what we're gonna use for the purposes of this demonstration to share. So I'm gonna assume a little bit of understanding here that we know how to actually share a window. So I'm gonna come down to the bottom, click on the little screen share icon here, and then from here we can share our screen. So the default behavior is that it is going to want to share the desktop. So that's what we've got here. If I just move that across, look at that. It's already looking quite nice and well proportioned as a scene, isn't it? So if I come back out of demo mode for a moment, that's what we're looking like now. We are sharing the whole desktop, but we want to share that Safari window. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come back into demo mode and then I'm gonna click on this pencil and we do have some options now. So we can show instead of the primary display, come down here and I can select Safari. And now it is tried as best as possible to fit that Safari window into the window of the overlay or into the space that we've allowed for the overlay. There are a couple of things to note here. First of all, what you may see on your overlay may be slightly different because if I come into preferences, there is this option in screen sharing in preferences to add margin when zooming to an app or window. And if I click that one, if you just have a look at the preview up here, it's basically gonna always try and leave this little bit of a border all the way around. Now we've got these extra thick borders on the right-hand side, but that's just because the shape of the thing that we're sharing is different to the shape of the space that we've allowed to share it with. Now personally, I don't like this little margin. I like everything to go right to the edges because then I'm gonna add my own borders indeed as I've done here where I've got this sort of yellow border running around it. So when you are creating the overlays and you want to try and get everything to fit nicely, which do you change? Do you change the shape of the overlay or do you change the shape of the window? Cause as I change this window shape now, if I was to make this really sort of short and wide, then you can see how now it's fitting into the width whereas if I make it sort of tall, it's gonna fit it into the height and we've got these extra sort of border things down either side. So how do we go about sizing this? Well, first of all, I should just point out as well, the default will be that it will be set to widescreen. So we might actually want to change that to custom in which case we can actually change the shape of it this way. I actually liked it the way it was in any case, but just for the sake of this, let's just resize it a little bit, to put it over here and drag it this way. Now, let me tell you a few things that I often see catching people out. First of all is when you are, let me just close this one down, first of all is when you are resizing the window in here. Now that we've changed this to custom, if I want to change the width of it, so I want to change the width of this overlay, you would think that you grab the edge and you change the width that way, but what that's doing is that's actually scaling it. It's not actually bringing just the changing the width in the same way that on a window, if you think about you grab a window here, so now I'm over on the right-hand side, if I grab this window here, then that is just gonna pull the window left to right, whereas in Ecamm, you grab the overlay window and you drag to the left or right and it's actually scaling the whole thing, so it's scaling proportionally, which kind of makes sense when you have got a fixed size of a camera overlay or something like that and you just want to scale it down, but in the context of this, it behaves differently to the actual app itself, so I notice that this catches some people out, so if you want to adjust the actual width of it, then the way to do that is to actually drag the corner but maintain the height, if you see what I mean, and similarly, if I wanted to make this shorter, then I would just move it up, but I am actually moving in, I can move it in any direction, so that's the first little issue that I see people having is trying to drag the side and then suddenly it's just resizing it all. So then the question is, well, what do we actually resize? Do we resize the window and try and get that to fit in here? So if I was to try and resize, sorry, resize the overlay, I could move that like that and now, look at that, it's perfect, isn't it? It's actually now perfectly fitting the Safari window. However, now, how do we get this bigger because it looks a bit weird like that in the middle over there, it's kind of the wrong size, so how do we now change that? The trick for me is to get the actual ECAM overlay to the exact place that you want it, first of all. So we're going to create this like this and let's say we want to fit the window in here, something like that. I'm just going to line it up with the center. So we've got that little center alignment. So now we've got the actual shape of the overlay that we want. So if I come out of demo mode, it's now, you know, let's say that is the actual shape that we want. Get that sorted out in ECAM first, then come over to the window and adjust the window. So now that we've got the height is obviously fitting, then we can move this over and expand it out to make it wider. And you can see that it's actually filling up the overlay that we've got here because we're not changing the height. So it's just basically matching the aspect ratio. And that now is perfectly fitting within that window. So now if I was to come out of this, you can see that it's now fitting perfectly. One thing that you may want to do though is you may have elements on the screen that are part of the window, but that you don't actually want to show. So for example, I might not want to show the address bar or sometimes I might have multiple different tabs open and I don't want to show all the tabs, I just want to show the content. Well, in that case, what you could do is once you've got the sort of size of it correct, you could then crop into that space. So the way to do that is if I come back into demo mode, then what I'd do here is I would just hold down the option key and holding down the option key and clicking in any top or bottom. In fact, let me just zoom in a minute. If I hold down the option key here, I can crop in and remove that top and then move this up again until it is centered. And now I'm just literally sharing that top part of the website. In fact, I would probably crop that part off as well, like that. So there we go. So that is now basically the way that I would crop in to that particular app window. And if I come out of demo mode, that is what it looks like for you. So now as I browse that particular page, you can see how it's all fitting nicely into my scene. But one thing that's missing from there is this pro mouse. You can see how the pro mouse is appearing on the demo mode screen. But if I just come out to demo mode, you can see that you're not actually seeing that at all. You can see this mouse pointer, but incidentally, you can only see that when I actually click into the window. So if I click out of the app, now my mouse is over it again. Look, you can see it here, but you're not seeing it in the output. And that's because I haven't physically clicked into this window. If I click into that window, you can see that the mouse pointer then appears. But it crucially is not the pro mouse pointer. It doesn't have the halo. It doesn't have the little zoom feature. It doesn't have the spotlight feature or anything like that. So why indeed is that? Well, that is because what Ecamm is doing when you are sharing a specific application is it is sharing that application to the exclusion of all others. Now pro mouse, or if you're using something else like mouse pose or any of these kind of apps, those in themselves are all apps. And so Ecamm by definition is ignoring those because it is only showing that one particular app. And that is why you are not seeing it in the output. The way around this though is to rather than share the specific app is to share the whole desktop because if you share the whole desktop, if I just come into my demo mode for a moment. So if I come back into that scene that we were just in and rather than share the app, let me just share the whole display. And what I'll also do is I'll just click reset crop. So if you have ever cropped in anything, by the way, on your overlays, you do always have this option here reset crop. So if I do that, you'll notice how it's gone back to that larger size there. What I might want to do here, in fact, no, I won't do that. I was gonna say I'll change the size of it, but we're gonna be cropping in in a moment anyway. So it doesn't really matter. But what you can see now is already if I come into my demo mode, you can already see that my pro mouse is showing up. And that is because Ecamm Live is showing all apps excluding Ecamm. But it does show my Safari. If I had other apps open, whatever they happen to be, it would show those. And so it is also, as you can see, showing pro mouse on the screen as well. So the way to do screen sharing, if you want to share a specific app window, but you also want to be able to use something like pro mouse, go ahead and share the entire screen. But then what we're gonna do is we're gonna use that crop feature again. So if I just zoom in here, then what we're gonna do, we're sharing the entire desktop, but I'm just gonna come over to this side, hold down the option key, and then I'm gonna crop in like this. I'm gonna crop in from the top, maybe move this over now. And then I can also crop in from this side and crop in from this side. So now we've cropped into the particular part of the scene that we want. But now I'm just going to increase this to be the size that we want. And just about there. There we go. So that is now cropped in on that particular window. In fact, I could probably just crop out a slight bit on this side as well and make that a bit bigger. That's my OCD at work there. There we go, that is fitting. So now we've got exactly the same effect, but if I move my pro mouse over it, as you can see, you're now seeing my pro mouse as well. So that is the way that you get your overlays and your screen share overlays to also show your pro mouse, mouse, or whatever it is. I should just point out though that if I come back into live demo mode, there is some options related to mouse pointers, even if you aren't using one of those applications. So if you come into preferences and then you come into screen sharing, you have got this option to include mouse cursor. So this says include the cursor within the broadcast. If you are sharing a specific app window though, just bear in mind, you do have to actually have that as the active window as I pointed out. So you would need to sort of click into Safari, for example, in that case. And then you would see the mouse. But what you can do is you can change the size of it. So you've got this little slider here that you can change between the normal cursor size, all the way up to officially gigantic. So you can make a really big mouse pointer so that it's really clear where you are on the screen. You've also got this option to show mouse clicks as well. So that means that as you are clicking on the screen, it will get highlighted on the screen as well. So even if you aren't using something like mouse pose or pro mouse, then that is something that you can use as well to just highlight what you're looking at on the screen. Now there's one other issue that some people run into which is related to audio in screen sharing. And since I've got preferences open, this is in the audio tab. You've got this option here, which we've had for quite a while. And this one says broadcast system audio. And you've got some options here, which is either never when sharing the screen or all the time. So all the time is probably not wise because that means that any little app sounds or things like that that come in during your production, even if you're not sharing anything would come through. So that's probably not what you want. You've also got never so that you can never hear any audio coming through or when sharing the screen. So that is the one that you want to have on to enable audio to come through whilst you are sharing the screen. But as of version 3.9, there's an extra little step to take with this. And that is when you are sharing a screen, doing using the screen sharing overlay rather, click in the little pencil. Because within here, we've got this option here, activate system audio capture. So even if you have it toggled on in the Ecamm preferences, as I've just shown you, if you don't have it on here, then the audio won't come through. So that is something that sometimes catches people out because they're wondering why they can't hear the audio from, you know, if they're sharing, I don't know, a YouTube video or something like that actually in the browser, why it is that the audio isn't coming through. And it's likely that you don't have that one checked so that the audio is coming through for that specific browser window. There are plenty of other things to say about overlays. And so I'm not gonna go into all the different screen sharing processes and things like that. But those are just some common questions that certainly I have when I'm speaking with people about Ecamm Live. And so I hope that that just helps to solve maybe a couple of the common issues that you might be having. But there are a load of new features related to overlays incidentally. And those are all coming up in the playlist over on the right hand side.