 Ecam Live beta 4.1 has been released and need I say it, it is another great update because they always are, aren't they? So let's just jump straight in with the new feature, shall we? You could say really that this is an overhaul of overlays in general, actually, because most of the features that we're going to go through are specifically related to overlays in some form or another and just enhancements to the functionality and really making Ecam much easier to design in. So previously, if you wanted to build out, you know, scenes, there's loads that we can always do. It's so quick to do things. But there were certain things that we would still need to go to an external editor for specifically related to images and so on. And if you wanted to sort of create shapes and so on, there were ways to do that through text. But now we have got a brand new type of overlay. So let's start with that first feature up there, shall we? And that is the new shape overlay. So I'll come into my demo mode and over here in my overlays window down at the bottom, you'll see that instead of those eight little buttons here, we've now got an extra one for a new shape overlay. So clicking on that, it will add a shape in. So here we've got a rectangle. I can just resize that on there. Click the little pencil icon here. So this is obviously where we can adjust things related to that specific overlay. So the same way we always have been able to. But now you can see that we've got these options here. So rectangle, I can change to a circle or a squircle. So actually building out and squircle being those slightly funny shapes where they've got sort of dual radius rounded corners. Anyway, so that is the the shape overlays. And here you can see it says at the top adds shape overlays with linear gradient, blur and effects. This is where this starts to get interesting because yes, we've got the borders just like we've always been able to do with other types of overlay. Yes, we've got the border width there and so on. But here you can see with the fill. Now we've also got gradient. So that is where we can apply a gradient. You can see now we've got the color picker there. We can choose two colors. And then we've got this little dial here, which is showing the sort of angle of that. So as I'm rotating that around, you can see what's happening. It's putting that different gradient on. So this is something that is seemingly so simple, but previously you would have had to have gone to an external site or would have had to use your image editor to create this gradient. Maybe you just want a gradient to go in the background of your scene, for example, where now you can just do it directly within Ecamm. Then if we come down here further, this is where it starts to get really interesting, because if I just place this over my face for a minute, you'll be all pleased about that. If I click on this little pencil icon here, then where it says fill, instead of gradient, we can also use blur. And what that's doing, obviously, as you can see, it's blurring whatever is behind that. So right now, this rectangle is in the top of the stack of all of these different overlays. So you can see how it's also blurring out all of this text. I could move that down in the stack. So now it's down beneath that text overlay there. So now you see it's only blurring me. It's not blurring out that. Incidentally, this whole sort of format here that we've got here with these tools, this is actually the same for all overlays now. So there's some slight discrepancies. But generally, this is kind of unified the way these things all look. Previously, there were sort of a different look to these little contextual menus for different types of overlay. Now they all look the same. So if I was to go into this text overlay, for example, here you can see that this specific text overlay has got a gradient on it, all with a subtle one. But I could also have a blur effect on that. And so this would be a great way, if I just move this out of the way, this would be a great way if you've got text on screen and you want to just sort of subtly blur out the background. You can see what's happening there. So that's a really nice little effect, a way to have text on screen and just make it more prominent without having a big block on the screen if that's how you wanted it. In fact, why don't we just leave it like that for now? So coming back to this one though, because this will show some of these effects off a little bit more, we've got the blur effect there in force and you can affect the level of blur as well with this little slider. So the fill, that's where you've got the effect and then you've got the slider here to affect how much or little that is being affected. Down here, we've also got zoom. So this is a zoom effect. It's not actually zooming in on the screen, it's giving the illusion of zooming, going at warp factor, whatever. Next, we've also got motion blur. So that's a very similar thing, but sort of side to side effect. Then coming down, we've got pixelate. This is something that actually I can see a real use case for. For example, if you are doing screen shares, sometimes I'm sharing parts of the screen where I'm showing something to do with account settings or something like that, and I need to have certain areas of the screen pixelated. Obviously it works for the old witness protection look as well. But you may want to have it so that you are just sort of selectively blurring out a portion of the screen and you can see what's happened there. It's just sort of blurred out that text. So that's another potential use case for this pixelating effect. But let me just bring it back over my face again and pixelate me out for a second, because there is another option down here, which is hex, basically the same sort of thing as pixelating, but instead of little blocks, you can see if I make them much larger, we've got little sort of hexagons going on in there. And as I say, this just applies to anything that is below this particular overlay. Further down here, we've also got a comic. So that's an interesting effect. The slider doesn't appear to do anything for that one in particular. So I guess that one is just an on or off sort of thing. But if you want to have that sort of comic effect, you can apply that to absolutely everything. If I have it over the whole screen, if I wanted my whole video to be comic effect, that's how that would look. Next up, we go down the list still. We've also got underneath comic, we've got twirl, twirl in one direction or the other. So that's what the slider is doing there. Then we've got pinch, great look there. I think I'll keep that one. And then we've also got the bump effect, which is something like that, as you can see. So those are the different fill effects. So plenty of fun that you can have with that, but actually some real practical uses for some of those as well. So that's all related to the shape. But as I say, this sort of whole new sort of look to this little interface here is similar for all of the other different overlays like camera overlays and so on. And there's actually some more options down here. I'll just expand this out because we'll be coming to some of these in a moment. Next down here, adds overlay borders and rounded corners for all overlays. Now what that means is we've already seen that you can add rounded corners and borders to this shape overlay. But previously, before shape overlays were here, we only had it on camera overlays and screen share overlays. It didn't apply to the animated video overlays nor to the image overlays. Whereas now it does. So if I was to just bring up an image on screen, now if I just open up the little contextual menu here, you can see that it looks the same as we've just had. So we've got the now border width, so I can add a border to it. We've also got these different things here. So as well as just being able to add a border and by the way, the rounded corners. So let me just add those on. This was something that previously I would have had to have done in external editor if I wanted to create the, you know, an image with rounded corners to bring it in. This makes it so much easier to just sort of bring this in and be able to do all of this directly in ECAM. It's got another trick up its sleeve that I'll show you in a moment as well. But this border though, it's more than just the borders that we had before. There's a whole new functionality added in terms of borders and that is these two here. So first of all, we've got gradient and you can see what's happened there to that particular border. Maybe if I just make the border width a little bit larger, you can see that we've basically got the fading from orange over to blue. And that's because we've selected gradient. We've got these two colors. And then if I rotate this round, you'll see in the background that it is rotating the sort of angle. So now we've got the orange over on the left hand side or the right rather and the blue on the left and then vice versa. So I can change that round and put it whichever way round I want. There's also another option here though in the border, which is as well as gradient. You can also have motion. I really like this one. What this is doing is it's using the same two colors there, but it's actually just sort of cycling them around 360 degrees. So if I just sort of take my hands off, you'll see that we've got orange on the left. Now the orange is moving subtly around to the right and so on. So it's just sort of cycling through those colors. It's great to have some sort of movement on the screen in your live streams and in videos, but some people go a little bit too overboard in my opinion. Too many sort of flashing moving things going on that's really just a sort of distraction from the message that you're trying to give. But actually something like this that's really subtle I think is a really nice little addition and a nice touch. So I do like that. So here in the release notes coming back to those adds a linear gradient option for overlay borders. Yeah, it adds the linear overlay, but also this motion one I think is really great and it wasn't specifically mentioned in there. So let's just leave that one nicely cycling away. That'll just reduce the size of the border a little bit. Next thing though is adds overlay drop shadows. And once again, this applies to all overlays. So what we're doing here with an image equally applies to an animated video overlay as to a camera overlay. So if I was to drop in another camera, just so I don't mess this one up. Here you can see I've got a camera with a similar sort of setup going on with the rotating overlay and so on. So as well as that though, the next thing was drop shadows. And this is something that's actually a little bit more than just a drop shadow opening that up. Again, this little contextual menu just dropping off the edge of the screen now down at the bottom in these, this more options space. You can see down at the bottom, we've got a shadow. So if I click on that, you can see what's happening. It's adding this little drop shadow. Let me just adjust this so that it's a bit more prominent maybe move this out of the way of my head or move my head out of the way of it. There you go, you can see what's happening there. We've got a clear shadow that is being cast behind that overlay there. And you can adjust this, if you want to adjust the sort of opacity of the drop shadow itself, then that would simply be a case of coming in here and changing the color. So here you would change the opacity there. You can see what's happening to the shadow just up above as I change that. And then also you can change the blur from zero all the way to 100. And so that is, as you can see, zero blur is just dropping exactly a duplicate shape of whatever is above it there with this offset. So this distance here is the offset so I can change how far away that is, change the blur. So something like that looks like a reasonable sort of shadow. And then obviously here, you can also change the angle. So if you want it over to this side or maybe the top or the bottom or wherever. Now this is, although it says shadow, it can also be used for more like a sort of outer glow effect. So if I was to change the color, instead of it being a dark color, like the black that I've got selected there, if I was to select the white, then we could also do the same thing here. We could add some opacity to it. We can change the blur and we might want to also change the distance perhaps if I change the distance down to zero and add some blur. Now we've just got a sort of outer glow effect going on that particular overlay. So although it's called shadow, technically it is a glow as well. It just depends on the particular color that you choose to use for that. So let's just give it a bit of a shadow standing off like that. So that is adds overlay drop shadows. Next one is we've got adds overlay blend mode options. Now what this is, is if I bring my little square up, I'll leave that one just up there. If I bring my rectangle back onto the screen, here, and I'm gonna cover my face again of course, it's the best place for it. Here in the more options, we've also got this blend mode. Now if you've worked with things like Photoshop, I think Keynote does some of these as well, but this is basically similar to the way that we had the fill was affecting things that are beneath it, then that's the same with the blend mode. So here, this is choosing how you want this to apply to the layers that are behind it or the overlays that are behind it. So if I was to go to this one, for example, Darken, you see how it's applying the color of that particular overlay, that shape, but it's just darkening the layer behind with that particular tone. So if I was to come to multiply, then it's gonna have a different effect, the linear burn, color burn, all of these. If I was to do difference, it's the difference between the two colors that are in the layer behind it and so on. So you can get lots of interesting effects with it. I'll leave you to play with these to decide which ones you like or which ones you want to use, but you can get some really nice sort of effects with these, not necessarily this here in this context, but for certain design situations, they are going to be useful. So let me take that off for the moment and get me looking back to normal again, as normal as can be. So that is the blend mode options. The next one is free rotation of overlays, including gesture support, if I can speak properly. So this is basically, you can now rotate any overlays, as simple as that. And before we used to be able to rotate things by 90 degrees and 360, 270 and that sort of thing, but now you can just come in here and there is this rotation option again, in these more options. And now I can just rotate that to any degree. And that applies to images, it applies to cameras, it applies to everything. So if I want to have some text that's rotated on screen, I can come into this text box and rotate that too. You'll see that this just looks so familiar now that it is the same for every kind of overlay. You don't have to sort of think that there's one way to do things with one kind of overlay and one way with another. So everything's just really, really consistent. So I really, really love that. Next is, where are we in this list? Adds image and movie overlay green screen feature. I know this has been much requested. Obviously we've had green screen in the cameras so that you can remove your green screen background if you've got a camera and a green screen behind you and put a virtual background. We also had it with overlays. Sorry, with screen share overlays I should say so that you can bring in presentations with a green slide background and get some animations coming over the top of your screen. Well, now it also applies to video overlays which means that technically you could do something just like this. And what I've got here is actually a video of an elephant walking in front of a giant green screen. Well, it was actually a video that was created as such. So if I just show you what this looks like, this is the actual video. But basically now you can just remove that green screen from that video. You don't need to take it into any external editor which you would have had to do before and extracted the green part from it. You can just click on the little pencil icon here. Once again, same place as always to adjust these things. And then now if you come down to blend mode. So whereas before we've just seen the blend mode and we've got dark and multiplying all of those other things, specifically for images and also for the video overlays like I've got here then you also now do have the green screen and blue screen. And basically just click on that, it's gonna remove the green. And like I say, that will work with videos and also with images as well. So it just saves this extra step and this is what I was talking about earlier. There's so many things that previously we would have had to have done in a separate editing program and image editor or whatever it happens to be. Whereas now we can just do it directly in here. So that's just a really nice feature. Next up is something related to text overlays. And actually text overlays have changed in a way. If I just add in a new text overlay, there's been a bit of a change in the overall interface here because if you recall as of two minutes ago, depending on how often you updated, how recently you updated, there was a different set of tools over here. So this is where you would apply the borders for example. It's where you would apply the background color and things like that. Now what they've done is they've moved that out to that same contextual menu. So where's that just gone? If I drop that little text thing here, I'm just gonna leave that as same text and we'll drop it in. So we've got ourself a text box here. It does make much more sense that those controls for border, for shadows, for all of those different things, rather than those being in that sort of text menu there, we've just got them here. Click on the pencil, they're in exactly the same place as for every other layer. So you can just go in here, you can change the border radius, the corners, the border background. You can add all of those other things. So the background blur, the color and everything like that. You deal with all of that in there just like you do for every other overlay but then you can see here we've got edit text. So this is where we've got some slight changes here. So here you can see that we've also got this option for now more sort of text based controls for kerning and line height. So if I just come in here and we'll just add in a few more layers of text, I'll just write text a few times like that. And let's just make this, all this text a little bit larger as well. So I'll just scale that up. So basically what we can do now is we can adjust the line height like that. And then you can also adjust the kerning which is effectively the distance between each individual character in that text. One thing to note is you do need to make sure you've got that specific text highlighted. So if I was to come in here and highlight that text it's gonna affect that. So if you just come in and sort of edit the text all as one thing, so come in here and just go to edit text. Then yeah, if you come into here without selecting anything these aren't actually gonna do anything they're only gonna affect that last character or the one that you'd got selected. So just make sure that you have selected the right character. If you click on edit background then you can still get to those little things there as well. So it is still technically in here but I certainly like the fact that they've moved it to here. So this is where you're sort of adjusting the background but whilst you are in here you can still get to those things as well. And you can change all of those other things the motion background and everything like that as well. So that is the text. And by the way, there is also one second in here somewhere. Now where's it gone? I've just lost it. Oh, there we go, cut out text. That's the one I was looking for. So you can also activate specifically in text you've got this option to cut out text and hopefully you can see what's happening there. In fact, let me just go and edit that text. I'll make the font a lot bigger and then let's just change it to something else a little bit bolder maybe that one and change it to bold and then let me adjust I've screwed up all of the look of this. There we go. Let's try like that. And then hopefully we'll get there in a minute. Don't worry, bear with me. Text margin, I'll take that down but then here, this is the one cut out text. So now you can see that that is cutting out the text. So there's plenty of scope to use that for like title slides or something like that where you still want to see behind a little bit then you can do that in there. So that was the adds a text to cut out options. That was the one that we've just looked at and then also the line spacing and character spacing adjustments as well. There was one other thing that I just want to circle back to which I neglected to mention. So let me just mention that right now and gloss over that as if it was intentional. Here you can see this image that I had before and I said there was one feature that was really neat in here. And that is that if you've got this set up exactly as you want it with this thumbnail, let's say that every week on your live stream, for example, you want to mention something that's coming up next or the most recent episode of your podcast, whatever it happens to be. And you've gone to the effort of styling this image and putting the right border on it, the right drop shadow and all of that kind of thing. Then there is an option in here as well just clicking on the little pencil icon to replace asset. And that means that you could just update that with a different image. So if I want to just pick out a different image I'd be able to do that from that list. So that's just a nice way to have a template that you're using and then just be replacing the images in it. And that could be maybe different logos for different client work or whatever it happens to be. Lots of use cases for that. But I just wanted to circle back to that because I almost forgot it. And it's not mentioned in this list. That's why it's an important one to just note there. Next is adds a recent section to the profile menu. So that is when you are in your profiles. Let me just zoom out. You've got profiles in ECAM. And then now we have a here recent profile. So it just has a list of different profiles. These are all of my profiles, but these are the ones that I've just used most recently in this list. So that's what that specific thing was related to. It was just the recent section in the profile menu. Next thing on the list then is the next one down, which is adds a Mac OS shortcut trigger for YouTube super chats. So this is in ECAM live preferences. And if you go over to the shortcuts, in ECAM four, they added in this integration with Mac OS shortcuts. And you can have things that are triggered when you open ECAM live, when a broadcast starts. So maybe when you open ECAM live, you wanna shut down certain things. Maybe when a broadcast starts, you wanna quit things like drop box syncing and all of that kind of stuff. And then when the broadcast finishes, maybe you want to set up a shortcut to start it all back up again. Maybe when ECAM live quits, a whole series of other things happen. So those four were added in ECAM four. Well, now we've got an extra one. So when a super chat arrives, then you can basically come in here and you would select one of your Mac OS shortcuts. So it's not a shortcut in ECAM itself, but you could have a Mac OS shortcut that was to trigger an overlay or something like that. Or you might want to have it flash your lights on and off in the background or whatever it is. So it's all done through Mac OS shortcuts, but it is just a new trigger for when a super chat arrives. By the way, the super chat being, if you are on a live stream, then people on YouTube have the ability to send you a tip, basically. That's what a super chat is in case you weren't familiar. But that's just a new little functionality added into there for automation. Interesting to see where that goes in what sort of additional things get added into all of that sort of automation side of things. Now that the sort of the framework for it is there. So that's what that last one is that adds a Mac OS shortcut trigger. And the next one is slider controls can now be controlled with the arrow keys. Now, I know that this is something that people had asked for a finer level of adjustment. So if I come to this corner radius one here, you can see it's on 50, for example. Let's just change that to there. And then it's on 72. If I'm just sort of trying to grab that and get it exactly on a particular number. Sometimes it may be a little bit tricky to do that, to just get it positioned exactly where you want it. Well, now basically you can just take your fingers on the arrow keys. And as long as you are hovering over that particular slider, you'll be able to adjust it. So I'm just pressing the arrow key now on my keyboard to slide that left and right. And as I say, as long as you're hovering over it, it will adjust. So same there, if I go over to that one, I can just have that fine adjustment. So just a much nicer way of adjusting those things. And the final thing on here as well is includes NDI 5.5.4. So that's just an update to the NDI network video protocol. The other things that have been changed or rather updated are just some other little minor tweaks here and there. So all in all, I think it's an awesome update. I know that I'm gonna really enjoy some of these new sort of design features, these new design tools. And it's certainly gonna save me a lot of time with the things that I previously would have done in other software. That's all for this video, but don't forget to check out some of the other great e-com videos that are coming up in this playlist over on the right hand side. Thanks for watching. See you next time.